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Logan: Christian, thanks for joining us.
Christian: Thanks for having me, Logan.
Logan: So, you're from Milwaukee, suburbs of [00:01:00] Milwaukee, and you went to business school at Stanford
Christian: I did.
Logan: When you started in business school, the internet entrepreneurialism was super popular, right? And by the time you left, it wasn't.
Christian: Yeah.
Logan: How, so when you went to business school, were your plans ultimately to start a company?
What was your intent in going there?
Christian: It was. I had gone to Stanford as an undergrad and some point in that journey, rather than doing, I figured out that a good path for me was to go into the business track generally. And then I worked in industry for a few years. And so by the time I went back to business school, I was very focused on entrepreneurship, starting companies as a direction.
And I think everything changed when I enrolled in a legendary class. At the business school taught by
Logan: I've got them in my notes.
Christian: Irv Grosbeck.
Logan: I was going to come
Christian: Everyone who's met, Irv can probably still recount the one liners of advice he would give you as you struggled with [00:02:00] problems of whether you should really pursue entrepreneurship.
Logan: and maybe tell people his background.
Christian: Well, Irv, I, if I remember right, he was he was an incredibly successful entrepreneur. I believe he was one of the founders of Continental Cablevision.
Remember, right? Which I believe is. widely, widely credited with inventing what we now call the cable TV industry and I, in fact, I, I think it's possible that he had done an, a thesis when he was in college about how to deliver TV signals to remote locations. And so the birth of cable came up, that's my napkin map, understanding of his own.
Logan: He's done very well
Christian: And so now he's a storied investor and, counsel to entrepreneurs and this kind of thing. And he would teach these classes about entrepreneurship, and he couldn't help himself, but to encourage people to go in that direction as you were going through case studies. And so he was a great a great influence on me.
And so by the time I graduated, [00:03:00] having gone through IRB, there was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Logan: Was it always going to be internet or something related to technology?
Christian: Probably because I had, I mean, I had, I was always on the technology industry track. So yeah, yeah.
Logan: So there's a lot of talk oftentimes about how, people outside of individual fields are able to come up with new breakthroughs, right? Particularly young people that see things through a new lens from an avenue standpoint. What was your perspective on what industry to go after, how to find a company or an opportunity in the market?
Christian: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think some people, especially when they come out of MBA programs, like approach career that way MBA programs have a habit of producing these structured thinking data oriented, strategic thinking folks and, a subset of us aren’t. For me, that's not how the entrepreneurship journey came about.
For me, it was all oriented on people. And so when I was an undergrad at Stanford. [00:04:00] I had a friend named Manish Agarwala and he knew I was very entrepreneurship minded and he was very, he, he was an inventor and a great computer scientist. Originally, we were undergrads together and then we each went off and did our own things for a little bit.
Then Neesh returned to Stanford as a PhD student, as I was returning to Stanford as an MBA student. And so we were getting together socially and at one point he started talking to me, talking to me about an invention he'd been working on. That was a new kind of route mapping technology. And I saw some promise in it.
And so my first company was founded while I was still a student. And this would've been during the time when Irv was Irv was influencing me. And people were deciding what to do with their careers. And then we met, we, we met up with a third person named Chris Stolte, who was also working on his PhD and we formed a company and we called it Beeline.
And the business model for that company was to develop the technology. [00:05:00] patent it, find a partner, and ideally sell the technology to a company that could take it to the millions of users. And that's what we did. And so for me, the entrepreneurship journey came together with the meeting of people.
Logan: And so, so from there, you sold beeline to what ultimately was a business that sold AOL.
Christian: We sold it to a public company called Vicinity. Vicinity was then acquired by Microsoft.
Logan: Microsoft. Sorry. Sorry. Okay. So, but AOL was the other acquirer that you were
Christian: AOL was interested. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Logan: Got it. So then you're there and then you, end up going to a place that's been in the news of, of the last five years was a vestige of the original internet bubble, but you were a venture capitalist working at SoftBay.
Christian: yeah. And that's generous to say I was a venture capitalist, but at that time, so this is all, let's get our vintage straight. So this is all vintage 2000.
Logan: Yes.
Christian: Okay. So, so I graduated business school. You're true. I was your class of 2000, ?
Logan: So, so [00:06:00] this, so Beeline sold when?
Christian: so we founded it while I was in business school and they were, we were all students and then the whole company took, I think 18 months.
Logan: So you joined SoftBank after the internet bubble burst? Yeah.
Christian: well actually, so I had a classmate named Peter Hardian who was working in venture capital. He was, he was like you, Logan. He wanted to work in venture capital as a career. And he knew I was an entrepreneur. And then the day after Beeline sold, he called me and said, I know you're not going to do your next company tomorrow.
Why don't you come into one of these associate positions at a VC firm, hang out for a few years, contribute while you're figuring out what to do with your next venture. And that's what I did. So I was in VC for two years. I was not a partner, but I sure got to see what went on, especially during a turbulent time for the industry.
Logan: Masa around then?
Christian: he was, but you have to remember SoftBank Venture Capital was [00:07:00] the American VC investing arm really subsidiary. I don't know what they would call it. Of the Japanese corporate giant. And so it had other investors and was relatively independent. And so I, I never even met him.
Logan: What did you learn about venture capital while being there?
Christian: Oh, that would take a lot of reflection. I mean, I, let me start with the punchline, which is, for my career arc, it turned out that everything I had done before founding Tableau. Turned out to be really important to informing that journey for me. And seeing, I'll, I'll say the short version, seeing what goes on in the back rooms behind closed doors in the venture industry, what kinds of things go on there really informed the fundraising journey we would later go on.
Logan: Or lack thereof
Christian: And our proclivity to wanting to be [00:08:00] involved with the industry.
Logan: Were there specific things that kind of stood out or was it the decision making process or what, what like specifically?
Christian: I could reflect on that for a while. I'll just try to pick a few to be concise. So let me start a little bit philosophical. And so I was much younger, so I'm coming out of school. And so in my mind, especially having gone to Stanford in the middle of Silicon Valley, which is like minting all these great successes and has the culture of failure and all these Silicon Valley oriented things in my mind as a young person, I sort of saw, I thought, I thought of Sand Hill Road and venture capitalists, some sort of Oz where powerful people mint the next generation of entrepreneurs and guide them strategically on their journey to world success. ,
Logan: Then you meet them and you're like, wait, yeah, yeah,
Christian: [00:09:00] and so where I'm going with that, of course, is And part of this is just growing up it turns out the venture industry is no less likely to have partner infighting, bad personalities, stupid decision making, board dysfunction ego, insecurity. Is it, why, why would those things be any less in the venture industry than they are in any industry you can name?
Why would it be less?
Logan: maybe more
Christian: yeah, maybe you can make the case for more, right. But, and so part of that is just the disillusionment and life education that happens with growing up.
Logan: You're there for two years, roughly.
Christian: Yeah,
Logan: Is this mostly, trying to help businesses that were invested in, in the internet bubble? I mean, it's probably a pretty unusual time from 2001 to 2003.
Christian: it was a strange time because I sold beeline and then [00:10:00] joined this firm and then the, the dot bomb hit. So the dot bomb started, actually, no, no, it was already started. So the dot bomb, so you have the dot com, bubble. And then people generally mark the, the calendar date of the beginning of the, the crash as March of 2000, which was, I think the first big NASDAQ crash, and then it just kept going and going for three more years.
And so I'm joining BC in that slide down. And so I think now that I'm a little older, I can look back and say, Hey. Maybe some of the deeply skeptical opinions I have about venture and what they can do for companies was biased by the time I was observing it. I have now come to grips with that.
Logan: weren't wrong in all of it, but so you're there for two years, 2003, roughly you say, okay, I've, I've had enough of this. I want to go start, start a business. And so for you, and you alluded to this a little bit [00:11:00] earlier, but starting a company was about the people. And the mission more than the specifics of where, what problem exactly you were going to solve or how big it could get or the size of the market or anything like that.
Christian: New companies come up with all sorts of origin stories, to answer your question. Or let me use an analogy, like a friend of mine, Dave Leeds, who was a classmate and has become a successful entrepreneur was one of the few others who in my class, who after the dot bomb hit still wanted to be an entrepreneur.
There were about maybe a dozen of us and they decided to do this sort of systematic approach. Like I think you're describing. We're going to look across industries, look at their sizes, identify a variety of opportunities, conduct a research project on each, very MBA style.
Logan: Sure.
Christian: And that worked for them.
In fact, it worked for them twice. They were a group of people. Whereas I my journey was different. It was oriented on relationships and [00:12:00] people and wanting to work with others I respected and that kind of thing. Mm
Logan: So you're there and there's something called Project Polaris within Stanford. And somehow you, you get together with, Pat Hanrahan and a few other folks. Can you talk about like how you ultimately decided on, on this opportunity?
Christian: So the reason I told the beeline story is I mentioned that third name. So beeline was formed by myself and Manisha Agarwala. And then we ended up recruiting Chris Stolte to this three person team. And Chris Stolte and I, from that point became lifelong friends, friends, and colleagues. And so as the years were going by, Chris was continuing to work on his PhD.
I had graduated from business school and was working in venture. And we started teaming up again because we were both entrepreneurship oriented to talk about starting a company. Didn't take long to identify what Chris was working on as his PhD as a candidate. And that was the Player's Project.
Logan: And so, so how did the co [00:13:00] founding group come together?
Christian: Chris and I started meeting regularly and just turning over in our heads over and over and over again over like the course of a year. Whether or not Some of the elements of what he was working on in his PhD research had the potential to be commercialized into a successful business. And at some point in those conversations, so Chris and I came together first.
And then at some point in those conversations, we probably asked Pat's opinion or I forgot exactly how that moment happened.
Logan: Was Pat a student as well, or
Christian: no, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So Chris was working on his PhD and Pat Henry hand was his advisor. So Pat was a full professor and Chris was a PhD
Logan: And Pat, in a prior life, worked at Pixar as well, worked on Toy Story,
Christian: Pat is a storied inventor and great man. In fact, he he he won, I think, I think he won the Lifetime Achievement Award. and he just won he just won a Turing Award. Yeah. So Pat is, um. [00:14:00] One of the nation's great mathematicians and computer scientists and in his earlier career. He had been informative in The foundational technology in developing the foundational technology that Pixar relies on for filmmaking In fact, he has Academy Awards also for that work And so Pat had multiple graduate students working on all sorts of amazing things and so Chris was one of those.
And then when Pat came to learn we were working on maybe looking at commercialization possibilities and pursuing entrepreneurship, surprisingly, he expressed an interest and said, Hey, maybe I'd like to be involved too. And so that worked out great. And then you can imagine where this story goes.
So over the passage of more discussions, the three of us decided to form a company and we named that company Tableau. Yeah. Yeah.
Logan: The genesis or the, the kernel of the idea at the time was what,
Christian: Well, you have the origin. So if you look back at the entire origin of the Tableau arc, [00:15:00] it starts way, way, way back to its earliest inception with some inventions. And then later, there's an important moment when a company is formed and some business ambition is taken on. So I'll go back to the earlier of those two moments.
At Stanford, Chris and Pat were looking into making databases easier to use. And making visualization accessible to more people and they invented they invented some technology and some thinking, some informed thinking that orbited, orbited what had been coded. and it was it was a research project so they had a little kind of like prototype systems that were good for publication and whatnot.
And they invented, in my view, one absolutely amazing thing. We later called that thing VizQL, [00:16:00] Visual Query Language. That's not what, what it was called at the time. I would love to describe that invention, but I don't want the answer to be too long, but that's like, that was the earliest, earliest thing.
Chris Dolthe, Pat Hanrahan having the insight to develop a declarative language for data visualization.
Logan: if we look at the, the The history of, of business intelligence, quote unquote these were big clunky system sold to IT and the, the, the, what you got most right in the early days, was it the ease of use? Was it the, the prettiness of all the charts and all of that stuff? Like what was the, the atomic unit of, of product
Christian: a good question. In fact, there's so much in that question. Maybe I could, I just unpack that a little bit. What, what did that first invention do? Right. There, there was this moment of, well, that it's not a moment. It took years.
Logan: Yeah.
Christian: There was this period of invention by those [00:17:00] guys at Stanford and and some others who contributed and It did the, the, the, the technology they invented did three amazing things.
It's easiest to just start with what did it do? what I mean? And then we can talk about how that ended up turning
Logan: Yeah.
Christian: Where this story goes is we end up revolutionizing a 20 billion, 20 billion dollar industry. and that was not clear in those earliest days, but that was the way that mission it's a little more understandable to understand what was invented.
So. This technology did three amazing things. So the technology was a declarative language for data visualization. And that was a really important concept. The first thing it did is it enabled people to generate database queries just by building drag and drop pictures. Of what they wanted to see. [00:18:00] And so a user could sit there and drag over data elements onto a canvas as an example, if you've used Tableau, what I'm talking about now and database queries would be efficient.
Database queries would be automatically launched to a source system. And that source system could be basically theoretically from any vendor of any format of any vintage. Okay. And so it unlocked database query, which is a very difficult thing for human beings to do into this easy visual drag and drop experience.
That's the first thing it did. The second thing it did is that same language was architected in a way so as to express an infinite visualizations.
So in this vintage, all way back before Tableau, the way people in any profession outside of certain scientific circles would visualize data is they would use a [00:19:00] chart wizard. Many people still use chart wizards, but they've mostly been, been replaced. And charts, chart wizards had maybe 10 or 12 prefabricated templates that people at Microsoft would go code up, probably interns.
It was very low level technology. And you would sort of import data into a template, some that had been provided by the software system. And so you were sort of constrained into this little, little world that was not as full and elaborate as the thoughts you had in your head. And the VisQL language that was invented enabled people to express a much broader class of useful visualizations.
With very little effort, okay? The third thing the system did, and it's almost like a cherry on top kind of thing, is it turns out these guys were also very design oriented computer scientists. And they decided that the language [00:20:00] for generating visualizations that they were working on should also adhere to best practices in data visualization, like those promulgated, like, from people like Edward Tufte.
So there are a school of great thinkers who are around in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Bill Cleveland and Jock McKinley and, Edward Tufte is almost a household name. So many people have bought his books. And they have studied the proper and most responsible and most useful ways. To visualize information so that there isn't errors in, in interpretation.
And that presentations can be done efficiently and there isn't bias and all this kind of thing. And they built those principles into the language. And so you have this language that's doing three things simultaneously. And from there we had to decide, okay, what are we going to do with this? If we try to commercialize it.
Logan: So there's two different paths you can take in commercializing something out of academia. One, we [00:21:00] can call the some microsystem way, and one we can call the Google way. Can you talk about now you have this technology, it's in academia, it's within Stanford, and you need to figure out what to do with it, how to, how to get it out and commercialize
Christian: you're talking about like spin out logistics is that what you mean? Yeah. I mean, I've heard stories over many years. I think Sun is one where universities are open places where you're cultivating great minds from all over the world who have all sorts of different relationships with the university.
Some are professors, some are age young, some are students, some are part time, some are businessmen so universities by their nature have this. enormous ocean of intellectual property floating around at any given time. and so not surprisingly, there has been stories over the decades of people didn't work with the university at all if they saw a potential spin out opportunity and would just sort of just go form a company and claim the technology as, as theirs and it would depend on the case, [00:22:00] how you want to judge that.
It would depend on this elaborate set of circumstances about whether that was appropriate or not. , in our case the technology was a lot of the tech, a lot of that, that those, those first technologies were invented under, in part by grants that Stanford had won or Pat had won. And using Stanford infrastructure.
And so we thought it was just the right thing to do to work with the university to have a commercial spin out agreement. Stanford, as you can imagine, it being Stanford, has an office that does nothing but that. At least at that time, it was called the Office of Technology Licensing. And we worked with some great people there and came to a commercial agreement, I think like Google did.
And so Stanford became a shareholder and there were cash payments to and that kind of thing. But we had a great relationship with them.
Logan: Yeah, well, it worked out for them as well. So, so how do you end up in, we're in Seattle currently. How do you end up in Seattle, a group of Stanford grads working on this
Christian: Oh, well, when Chris and I first started talking about building a company, needless [00:23:00] to say, as young folks, we were also talking about what our life journeys were likely to look like. And, my wife and I really wanted to live in Seattle. We wanted to get out of the Bay Area at that time and, and move to the Pacific Northwest.
And so that was sort of the air in the air and our conversations with Chris. Do
Logan: you have family here or you're from Milwaukee? She's from Milwaukee, right?
Christian: question. Now we pretty much picked Seattle off of a
Logan: Really? Well,
Christian: Yeah, we had been here once and we've been here ever since. it's a wonderful place. And and then Chris, Chris was originally from Vancouver, Canada.
And so he was very amenable to that. And so we, we hatched that plan to form to, well, we formed the company in California technically, and then we were within our first year, we moved it up here.
Logan: so now you're commercializing it and you make a decision based on probably some prior experience that you're not going to raise venture capital. You're going to bootstrap it philosophically. Why'd you. Pick that path versus, maybe raising some money early on.
Christian: Each of us there were a lot of, [00:24:00] we had, we had a great journey among the three founders. I can't think of a single instance over that entire journey that we had to fight. And I think one reason for that is there were some, some values and some ways of looking at life that we all share. and we were fellow travelers and I think each of us for our own reason brought great skepticism to the idea of forming a creative, ambitious company, pursuing an ambitious goal over many, many years and immediately selling a huge stake to professional money people.
And you'd have to ask them what, where their skepticism came from. I don't even, not sure I completely understand it. Mine came from those two years in VC.
I just thought we should be careful about this one. You'd have to ask them their reasons. But all of us just had a healthy [00:25:00] skepticism and frankly even in pop culture, you could watch a movie and there'll be the character who says, I don't know how early you want to sell a big steak in your company.
It's like, be careful with that. It's like being married.
Logan: Yeah. Yeah.
Christian: a marriage. There's no like, oops, sorry, we're going to pay
Logan: There's legal recourse to get not married, which is divorce. I don't know how many, you can kick out board members, not very easily.
Logan: You were reticent to do that originally, but, then it required bootstrapping and figuring it out. So it was the commercial adoption of Tableau easy in the early days of getting people to actually buy it?
Christian: It's a good question. And we basically we just thought let's just set out. And at this time, cause this will glue back to your big strategic question you asked earlier. At this time, we don't know we can take over the entire business intelligence. , maybe there were some thoughts there maybe the other guy, maybe Chris and Pat saw that, saw that first.
You don't have to ask them, but as a group, I'll just say that thought was not clear. We set, we, we set out [00:26:00] with just the logical and fun thing to go after, which is, I think we can take this, these, these initial sort of prototype ideas and patents and turn them into a working system a working of an actual working software system.
It didn't do a lot, but what it did was extremely important, but it didn't do a lot and we just thought, I'll bet we could take a shot at turning this into a useful tool for analysts and they will keep their other tools, they will still hug their spreadsheets and have their other things, but boy, this looks like this could be added to the toolkit and be really useful for a large number of people.
And so that's what we went after. And there are, it turns out there are many great advantages to having a product that you can just go sell and get adopted by a single [00:27:00] person. , and that's a statement that might seem bigger than it seems because at this time, enterprise software is heavy, complicated, seven to eight figures comes with consulting teams in in all, in all industries.
CRM, security management, web conferencing, business intelligence, I mean, pick a vertical within the entire enterprise software industry. And virtually every one of them has the attributes I just shared. And so startup after startup would form with this idea that, wow, if we're going to have any hope to get adoption of our technology, we're going to need to, we're going to need to be talking to the top people in the company, like the CIO, the CFO, the CEO.
In order for them to consider an adoption of our giant, expensive, complicated platform. And that's what Enterprise Hopper was like when we start as entrepreneurs. [00:28:00] And so the idea that we have a product that could be adopted by a single person within that company was profound because we didn't have to start off with this big, expensive proposition for ourselves.
Needing to engage with the top people in the company over years before they spend a single dollar. You follow me?
Logan: Totally. Which is often why people need to raise capital is to hire expensive sales reps to go sell
Christian: Exactly. So the model we went after enabled us to bootstrap. And there's probably a yang yang there of, we probably also went after that model because we wanted to bootstrap.
Logan: Yeah Well, if you go look at
Christian: I don't know how to unpack
Logan: Well, if you go look at the companies that have been successful bootstrapping and in software and b2b Most of them are able to be bought by an individual or at a departmental level that they can get expensed through a credit card for the most part because It just enables that flywheel of inside sales to work a lot [00:29:00] better.
I'm curious. you're a student of technological Cycles and market adoption and all that stuff. What was in the water at that moment in time that enabled Tableau's success? Obviously, the technology worked very well. Obviously, there were things around inside sales and department level selling that happened then.
Was there anything that you look back on and it's like, no, this was the tectonic shift that was happening from a cycle
Christian: Yeah. We, we were part that's a really, that's a really intelligent question. You, you, you, you have your vintages of software history, right. Because the vintage we, we were in, we were part of a class of companies. And then there are some peers I'll mention who completely changed the, the, the thinking. Around what it would take to build an enterprise software company.
We were just part of that disruptive class that said there must be a better way. Now, other people could give different versions of the history. My version is. The people who [00:30:00] started all of this, really the first people who get the credit. Cause we were kind of one loop later, Webex and a little bit later, Salesforce.
Okay. And I think Salesforce likes to take credit. It's not really true. Quest software had a role. There were these early, early ones, at least in my, what I call early for my vintage Quest and Webex, Webex use their own tool to pioneer this way, this way of. Customer adoption. So for instance, who, like it would have been funny if you went, or if you went around to to Webex's top 500 customers, say in the year, 2003.
And you had asked any of the top decision makers at their customers, Citigroup, the FBI, University of Michigan, state government agencies, if you'd gone to [00:31:00] any, any one of them and said, is Webex one of your enterprise software platforms, they would have immediately said, Nope, that's a side tool people use for meetings.
But yet I could go to their finance departments and see you spend 2 million a year. You have a 300, 000 support contract. Your employees list this tool as being strategically important to their day crucially important to their monthly work product. , it is a piece of software you install.
It had a local install, why aren't you calling that enterprise software? If it's not enterprise software, what is it? And that, that, that, that was the duty. Web, WebEx was becoming one of the biggest enterprise software companies in the United States, and no one even knew it. Cause they could just go to people, inspired people who wanted to try it or use it in some small team.
They would run it on a credit card or expense it very quickly and the, and, and, and it's called landing. , this is where this [00:32:00] phrase land and expand account management would come. Only later did Webex come in with professional salespeople and account managers who would start to nurture those accounts up in in in adoption and success.
Logan: So if I were to, if I were to still let down, I mean, WebEx dogfooding, its own piece of software and the ability to sell video conference software remotely. And then I guess just the internet and people being more used to making transactions over the web and credit cards and all that, were those the two kind of enablers of the willingness to buy that
Christian: Yeah. As I see the history, yes, I'm sure they are too. We're building out a prior generation, but they are important. And then of course I do have to give Salesforce credit. So in what the, the Salesforce lore story that apparently Benioff likes to tell is there was a day he had a dream and if only enterprise grade CRM tools, this is year one Salesforce but they only did CRM customer relationship management He had a dream if only [00:33:00] enterprise grade, highly scalable, critically important CRM tools could be as easy to buy and use as amazon.com. And so that company march forward with this sensibility that enterprise software shouldn't be this heavy, complicated thing requiring consulting services and sales people shaking your hand in the lobbies. Four month pilots and professional services team and technical support. Can't, can't I just click the go button and start?
Can't I just run a credit card and pilot in an, in a group? And of course they just took over, took over CRM with this new kind of product, but also this new kind of customer adoption and selling model. And so needless to say, companies like us, this, this cohort of companies who helped really bring that into a worldwide revolution in our industry.
We're all inspired by those companies
Logan: I've heard you say the hardest part of decision making in business is [00:34:00] making a decision without a lot of resources. How does an abundance of
Christian: It's an interesting question
Logan: In this market environment, how does an abundance of capital pervert operational rigor of business?
Christian: one of your very first questions is what are the things you saw during those adventures?
Logan: Yeah.
Christian: And it's a couple of dozen
Logan: asking questions until you rip on venture capital appropriately. Just keep coming back to it.
Christian: and admittedly, I was probably not, not seeing the industry at its best, best couple of years. but one of the things I saw were small teams of people. With some disruptive ideas and some big ambitions entrepreneurs who had formed a company and were immediately, virtually immediately in the chronological timeline, given an enormous quantity of capital because of the dot com run up.
And so you'd have these companies and they're like seven or 70, or even 170 people, and they [00:35:00] have 80 million in the bank. Well, what happens to the culture of that company? When you grow up in a garden like that, the culture of decision making gets perverted because any problem can be solved with it by throwing enough money at it, right?
And so rather than people thinking creative, creatively doing less with more, having to prioritize in the brutal way that actually creates. Healthy startups grapes and vines the, the tough soil creates the great grapes, all that just gets flushed out. It's just flushed down the toilet because you can just start throwing money at everything.
And so within the company, you're starting to soil the way decisions get made and you're starting to soil the culture of the company with regard to how we think about problems. And so that's one, and I can keep going with other problems, but that's just like, that's a, that's a taste of it. Too much money to really, I think is, is [00:36:00] , never, never say never.
It just, it, it seems like it can be a corrupting force
Logan: Yeah, I think about the businesses that raised large sums of money before they found
Christian: product market fit. Yeah,
Logan: I can kind of only come up with Workday
Christian: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Logan: had done it once before,
Christian: Yeah. And then and anything can work some of the time I'm sure that does work sometimes. I'm not saying it doesn't, it just that, wow, I don't, I kind of wonder statistically, as you say, I don't, I don't think that's the winning strategy more often than not
Logan: There's something to appreciating the journey and the grind of being an entrepreneur. I think you uniquely appreciated kind of the, it wasn't a means to an end. It wasn't a means to buying a big beach house or a plane or something. I think you uniquely appreciated the journey. I've heard you reference the fact that Vincent van Gogh would never actually sign his works.
And yeah, you had, you had an interesting quote that failure and defeat are a necessary part of achievement and self fulfillment. Can you, can you speak a little bit about the beauty and grind of. Entrepreneurship or, or enjoying the [00:37:00] journey of, of building a company and not just the ends of the outcome or something like that.
Christian: Yeah, I guess , as you, as you put your eye on some ambitious goals and then start to accomplish them. Or almost accomplished nothing, as is often the case. , you kind of get over that peak and then immediately when you get to the top of that peak that you thought was going to be so amazing, you see the next horizon you see the next set of peaks and what I came to learn over this technology journey.
And I speak only from, from our journey, but I would think this would be in common, is the great satisfaction that comes with realizing, wait a second. We will never be finished with this work of art. And of course 20 years later, I, I can't wait to see what new features and what new customer capabilities Tableau launches in the next six months, because the data environment is changing.
Once again, AI is coming into the floor new, , [00:38:00] new geographic areas are leaning into data. And so you have a really, you have a wellspring of creative design and opportunity. that will never end. And in, in our context, we helped people see and understand data. That was our mission. And we believe that helping people do that is a generally positive force in the world.
And so in that creative journey of finding new horizons and building the next thing, we're helping them doing our small part to improve the world generally. And that's the, that's the great satisfaction.
Logan: Is there a point in the journey you look back with most nostalgia on?
Christian: I think the thing I am most nostalgic for is that there was a team of people who ended up coming together and solidifying who ran the company. it was myself and Chris Doltie and Pat Hanrahan. we ultimately, we ultimately found an amazing sales leader named Kelly Wright. We ultimately found an amazing marketing leader named Elisa Fink.[00:39:00]
We ultimately, actually early on, there was a great inventor and engineering manager named Andrew Beers. Thanks to our venture investors. We found a general counsel named Keenan Condor. Thanks to our venture investors. We found an HR leader named Brett Thompson. I'm sure there's someone missing an operations leader named Brian Smith.
I'll stop, but there's about if you look at the pyramid of a company, the company's really run by somewhere between, I think most tech companies and they're sort of. , at, at this sort of billion and less stage that, that's kind of my domain. Yeah, there's somewhere between five and 20 people who kind of run the company.
Like all all the big decisions, like someone in there, it has to be involved, what I mean? And so for the group of about 10 or eight or 10 that I just named, we came into a situation where we had the right people in the right roles. We had incredible group chemistry, a great sense of teamwork and mission.[00:40:00]
And that team of us was together in this journey for somewhere like eight to ten years without a single person turning over. And so that, that thrill of working in a team of extremely talented people with very low drama and very high ambition toward a goal that we thought was very important. I mean, that's, that's one of life's greatest journeys, I think.
Logan: So I was able to dig up the growth numbers from Tableau, and there were some blog posts way back when. So 2004, 800K in revenue, 2005, 2. 1, 2006, 3. 7, Clearly a very growing, fast startup. Not the... Triple, triple, double, double that we hear today. Yeah. In that journey, obviously you didn't raise outside capital until, what, 2006?
Christian: That sounds . [00:41:00] Lemme think about that. I'd have to think about that. Yeah. A few, a few years in, we raised, we do, we do end up raising a little bit of money and then a few, and then about four or five years after that we raised a little bit more and that was sort of the end,
Logan: But you, so you obviously did this profitably along the way. Yes. But, but did it feel like you had the tiger by the tail as those numbers were were going up? Or was it a slog? each step along the
Christian: No, not at all. In fact, this is probably the area I am most often called in on for advice to entrepreneurs, because it's something I can speak to. And I think people view me as I can just reassure people on a few things for whatever it's worth. here's maybe a way to put it. When you think about the technology industry you've got this venture capital, you've got these IPOs, you've got all these startups coming out, ?
All the headline grabbing technology companies, they're usually B2C companies. They are, they are these [00:42:00] once in a hundred years rocket ships. In fact, it's hard to pick up the paper even today and hear about any company other than Facebook, Google, Google, . Amazon, Microsoft it just, and now they're big.
So that's maybe the reason we hear about them now, but , these, these rocket ship things, YouTube, Groupon, and they, they just, they go from zero in revenue and customer adoption. To a hundred million in revenue and customer adoption in months, six months, 18 months, 21 months. And so I think the venture industry, the newspaper media circuit, entrepreneur people, young people students dreaming about going into technology, you, you get biased and you start to think, Oh, that's how new technology companies are created.
And the fact is those companies with those trajectories are a tiny percentage. Of all successful tech companies. I'm not even going to say [00:43:00] of all tech, of all, even of all the successful ones, turns out to be a very small percentage and in our arena, which is business software, so now we're over on the B2B side, it's virtually unheard of.
And so it's commonly the case. Well, I should actually answer your question, which is during those years of sort of etching out our next 30 or 50 percent growth, we were working so hard. There was just blood, sweat, and tears going in every year. we certainly had this feeling that something here is working.
But in, in those years you're describing, no one thought, wow, we're hot, we're inflecting.
Logan: Yeah.
Christian: we have a tiger by the tail. That was not really the sentiment. But we were perfectly happy. We were building a very good business. And we had our, we had our eye on long term principles and things we were chasing, and things we were not willing to sacrifice on.
And by pursuing those [00:44:00] along with some patients, we ended up creating a really big and important company. I think at least for our industry. And and I look back at all the fretting about whether we're growing fast enough. And I think there was probably just a lot of wasted time so I, so I would look to any of your companies, Logan, or any, any, any in the portfolio, if you want to ever call me, if you have someone in that situation I would just generally look at things.
I'm looking for something basic, which is, is it working? There's a big difference between is it working and is it not working? That's, that's important, right? But if it's working, meaning customer adoption is up and to the right, by a somewhat impressive percent, I don't know, 20%, 40%, 50%, that's, that's amazing.
Who here would say it's failing? , that's, that's great. The product is revving. If the team chemistry is good, if the capital burn is reasonable, It's [00:45:00] working. Can we all just relax and just be patient for five years to see what happens? Now, and I'm, and I'm biased by our story. , there are other stories that could contradict that account, but I'm I think it's an important one to keep in mind as you're building a company and software.
What led to that decision?
Christian: Okay. So a few years pass and we're, and we're bootstrapping and it starts to go very well. And we had meaning with our, both with our door to door knocking. Of trying to find these analyst heroes, just like Salesforce or Webex was doing, trying to find those passionate early adopters who might take a risk on a new technology to improve their life.
We were starting to get [00:46:00] hundreds of those. This is starting to feel like, Ooh, maybe, maybe we're not getting, maybe these aren't one off victories anymore.
Logan: Yeah Hyperion
Christian: Maybe there's like really something here in this market. so that feeling underneath something here is working and good started to really take root in us.
And equally importantly, we signed a distribution deal, not a customer deal, but a distribution deal with a big company in our industry that was Hyperion, which was a homerun for us. We didn't have to give up any intellectual property. We didn't have to give up any ability to sell to any other company or partner.
but we did get to have a, a, a license tied distribution
Logan: And it was like a eight figure deal or something. And so, so just for people's benefits, the business intelligence industry, you can sell it to the end customer, right. Or you can, Oh, we end
Christian: That's right.
Logan: and someone else can license it from you. Pay a lot of money and they paid you for the [00:47:00] visualization and all that.
Christian: Yeah. For for them, they just took it in as like, Oh yeah, well, it's like our original dream of like, Oh, well, this must be some interesting new tool to just add to it, the toolkit of an analyst that's just so useful, but there must be a way. And so they took a bit, there was a year sales cycle on that.
, it was more of the heavy, the heavy style selling, but, but not for an end customer, not Citigroup, but to an intermediary where we can get some leverage and that part of our strategy, I look back and I think, gosh. I'm glad we took that bet because , I could equally see that not working.
Logan: Yeah, sure.
Christian: But it did work out. We found the right people at the right time. And it turned into an eight figure deal for the company. And so now you've got a company I'm a few years in, we're all skeptical of taking professional money and selling control. We do have big ambitions. And like all entrepreneurs, we're thinking, well, there's some clock is ticking here on competitive threat.
They're at some point, if we're right about our thesis, there are going to be [00:48:00] competitors and they're probably going to be fierce. And so we realize raising some capital to be a little more, more ambitious. Probably would be a good idea and we were able to do it while following the principle, the principle we had about professional money and that principle was simple.
We will entertain taking in an external financial partner on our journey when it is clear we can do so while maintaining control of the company for its lifetime. It's a principle. It's not a spreadsheet with cost benefit. That's consequential decision making. Most business decision making is consequentialism pros, cons, swats, etc.
But there's a different mode of decision making that's based on principle. And on that one we just, we had, that was our principle. And so do how much time this is other advice to entrepreneurs considering bootstrapping? Do how much time? In our first two years [00:49:00] as a fledgling venture, we spent courting or presenting to venture capitalists.
Logan: I would guess zero.
Christian: Zero. Because that's the other thing you do when you choose not to bootstrap. You end up spending that's a very time consuming process better than anyone, ? And so we were, we were just able to be really efficient in the small part because we weren't doing activities like that.
And so to answer your question, you can, now you can see where this is all going. Two, two and a half years in, we arrive at a moment where we can, we can adhere to our principle. and get the benefit of capital that lets us, allows us to go after our, our ambitions faster.
Logan: How'd you go about picking NEA to work with?
Christian: Boy, is that a good question? I don't remember where the, where the original introductions came, but we got into conversations with I think about five firms pretty early, probably word of mouth relationships. I don't remember anymore, but there were about four or five firms. And we [00:50:00] started this process with each, which as I said, it turns out to be a little time consuming.
but we learned pretty fast, as you can imagine, that if you are able to fundraise on your terms, it goes pretty fast. And so it did not take, it did not take professional investors long to see a company with spirited founders, already cashflow positive, with some early passionate customers. And an eight figure contract with a distributor, no debt, no baggage, no founder inviting, and by the way, 20 billion market how long would it take you to think, Hmm, maybe we should give a term sheet.
Logan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, call me if that's what your company looks like. Yeah. okay. So it was pretty fast and then you ended up working with Scott Sandell and they led the, the A and the B and he ate
Christian: Yeah, and an important part of the bootstrapping story, and then you should try to get Scott's version, but we did go through it. And we the, the, the final stage in [00:51:00] fundraising is the final presentation to the partner, to the partnership. And the next day or two days later, we got a call and Scott and Forrest Baskett, who was also involved, said great work.
It's sort of a classic, a classic venture, venture moment great work. The partners are super excited. We'd like to put a lot of money in. And they either gave us a term sheet for 20 million or said they would give us a term sheet for 20. I forgot which. And we just immediately said, that's too much capital.
and so of the 15 or 20 they offered in writing, we said, we'll take five. And then , for the entrepreneurs listening, professional venture investors have a very savvy response to that moment. They do this for a living. You're doing it once. They do this all the time. They've seen this movie before.
And they say an investment that small would be very difficult for our fund. And there's a bunch of other dramatic speech that's inserted. And my advice to you out [00:52:00] there is generally thinking, I, generally speaking, I think that's just untrue. Great, great investors want to get involved and they know there's going to be subsequent fundraising opportunities and, and Scott, Scott, Scott is, Scott's an amazing investor, by the way, for all my early skepticism, it took a Scott Sandell to turn me around
Logan: Huh.
Christian: and say, wait, this is a class act.
This is someone who is at another level. And of course, I think when I gave that response, he immediately starts laughing. It says, okay, fine. We're in anyway.
Logan: Yeah. So you probably lowered your nominal valuation there. I would guess. I mean.
Christian: Yeah, we probably did. Although it's funny, we never even got there because I knew by principle, we're not taking that much. I mean, well, and also I was realistic. I know he's not going to double the valuation so there'd be some adjustment there, but so that worked out great. So they were in with five and then had a seat at the, had an easy seat at the table.
In fact, Scott got exact, now I think how savvy this person is, Scott and Forrest. So, so we, because we were bootstrapping [00:53:00] and cashflow positive, we never actually even used the five they gave us. Now that doesn't mean it wasn't valuable. Because you can't run a business on the edge of a knife.
, you can't be at like 50k in your bank account while you're telling Citigroup you're going to be around a long time. what I mean? So, although it's true, we actually, oh no, no, we used a little bit of the money, but we never, we never used the five. I think we used 1. 5 of it. And then we just started earning it back again.
but point being So, it took like four or five more years before we even thought of, of raising any more capital or bringing another investor in. And when we did, I think within a day of us mentioning the idea, Scott said something along the lines of, if you're interested, we'll just take the whole thing.
You can save all that fundraising time. You can work with someone you trust and so on. And if I remember the chronology right, that's what we did. I don't think another investor even came in at that time. And so it's got to the, to the VC strategy part of this conversation, that [00:54:00] commitment to just come in at a lower amount than they were visualizing worked out great for them
Logan: So, so one of the things you referenced there in the desire to raise capital was a desire to go quickly. And eventually if you recognize this market opportunity, someone else potentially would. But another thing I've heard you say is not to worry about your startup competitors that you guys were always focused on Microsoft or Google or whoever it was, and not necessarily XYZ competitor that was also a venture back.
How did you think about that and the competititors
Christian: Oh boy, I'm just one person's story, but I'll tell you we had so much more time allotted to us. Without a legitimate competitive threat than you would ever imagine coming out of business school or picturing some industry that's so notoriously cutthroat, you can't even think about it. And from other conversations I've had, I've come to learn this is [00:55:00] more common in business software than you would think.
And so keep in mind for your listeners here, my whole experience and expertise and story, it's, it's in the business software industry. I completely understand that over in B2C world or, or marketplace world, if you're building a marketplace that there, there appears to very much be this first one to scale one winner I, I get it.
And so I, I, this advice isn't, isn't applicable to that situation, but I will say I've said that a lot of business software companies, including ones in, in, in, in flight now. And probably if you're going into a sector of business technology. like we were, there are a bunch of big billion dollar dominant players, each who have somewhere between five and 15 percent of the market.
And so in our case, it was when we set out, when we set out, there was a billion billion dollar brand name, business objects, [00:56:00] billion dollar business name, Cognos billion dollar business name, Hyperion billion dollar business name, SAS enterprise billion dollar business name, Oracle discoverer slash OBI.
Billion dollar business called Microsoft Reporting Services. Billion dollar business called Crystal, which later this all consolidated. But at the time, these were all big. I mean, they were like, I think I counted them. There were 12 multi billion dollar brands who owned the market. And a few years in, we start to realize, maybe we could be more than a data analyst tool.
Maybe, we could disrupt that whole thing. And now to answer your question, you might think, well, 18 months in, you guys are going to try that. You can almost imagine giving someone that, someone in that, in that situation, some advice. Guys, if you're going to go for that, you need 50 million right now, because 18 months into your success, those guys are going to realize you're onto a [00:57:00] better way.
They're going to scramble their most elite engineers to create a competitive product. They're going to put it out with brand savvy and acumen and they're going to become a huge problem before for you competitively Before you even cracked 1 percent of the market you would think based on maybe business school study
Logan: Sure,
Christian: That's what's gonna happen Do how many years it took them to get their heads out of there and even realize?
We were on to a better way. I think it was five years before they even realized we were a problem And it was another five years before they were actually able to put together a legitimate product and by that time it was too late, it's too late, they missed 10 years, Microsoft and, and, and, and, and that, and that included titans like Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon, biggest companies in the world.
And so I I tend to be the person at the table saying it's [00:58:00] possible. We have more time than the scramble you're picturing in your head. Can we just focused on building the best product out there, having great customer service, building a handcrafted brand and, and winning and winning customers one at a time.
Is there any way we can just focus on that and not just get stuck in our own heads about what's going to happen competitively, ? So anyway, and, but again, I'm, I'm by, I'm biased by the way, our journey, our journey
Logan: Sure. We talked about this a little bit, but a number of people that you hired in the early days scaled all the way with you along the journey. Your first CFO, Tom Walker, took the company public. We talked about Kelly Wright, who I think she ultimately retired as CRO after joining early on. Can you talk about how you were able to get these people to scale with you as the company grew in the journey?
Christian: Oh my gosh, I just realized in my original list, I, I missed Tom Walker, didn't I? Oh my Lord. Yeah. He was, he was, he was one of the earliest and most of the, one of the most crucial and the longest lived by the way. So yeah. [00:59:00] Tab boy, Logan, that is a difficult question to answer. I, my best answer is that , I think that, It didn't happen accidentally there were some people who were better off taking other roles in other companies as we were growing up because they couldn't scale to that next level.
They weren't the right fit anymore. And so there were some changes. It was not as simple as magic wand, ta da, but once we settled into that team, I would say I would say each of us, myself included. Came into our own because none of, not one of us had done it before. So there's another there's another VC skepticism thing.
I learned from our vintage these days. I think VCs are much more sophisticated about this. But in our vintage, there was sort of this traditional philosophy of if we're going to back someone with big money, they better have done it before. They better have a team of seasoned professionals who've been [01:00:00] through the wars.
And maybe all I can tell you is that we built a multi billion dollar company from scratch and not one of us had done it before. Not one. And so rather than, rather than suggest I had some magic managerial moment that helped coach these people up, if I had one, that would be amazing. I think a better description is that we had a great team energy.
Each of us realized, actually, we sort of bonded around the fact that we were this new, new team, each trying to achieve something together that was important and we reinforced each other and encouraged each other and helped, helped each other through, through hard times. That's, that's honestly more what it felt like.
Logan: The folks that survived with the company or whatever, endured all the way through, were, were there any commonalities of the characteristics that you would draw on the types of people that were able to scale into those next roles along the way?
Christian: Oh, yeah. I mean, the first one, [01:01:00] I mean, that would take a long answer and more reflection than we have now, but I guess one that comes to mind is within it, within a company, you have your mission at the top. You have the company one rung down. You have your team one rung down from that, and you have you one rung down from that.
And so, may I suggest, when we go into meetings, or talk about subjects, we talk about things in that order. So, if there is a team member coming in, and it's all about me, me, me, I, I, I. If for no other reason, we're going to backburner that agenda item because it's not in order. And people love to be part of workplaces that have that worked out, that they have the hierarchy very clear in their heads.
We are about the mission. We are about the company. We are about us. We are about team. We didn't [01:02:00] invent this. This is widespread and great workplaces in all sorts of industries. And all of those people had that to an exemplary level that just reinforced everyone else to have even more of it so that's and some of the, and some of the cases that didn't work out very clearly did not have that.
Logan: You purposely made the decision not to hire from other business intelligence companies or people in your space. What was the rationale behind that? And when can domain expertise be a negative thing in building a company?
Christian: Oh, wow, that's a good question. Yeah, I mean, early on, we, we were we're finding our way and everything and initially so let's say you're listening to this and you have a small company and you're finally at the time when, Oh, maybe we could add like a professional salesperson and whatever you call them, customer adoption, sales, evangelism, business development, whatever you call it, the people who are going to go out and try to encourage.
Education and adoption and sale. Okay. Again, my domain is business software. So [01:03:00] those are that, that, that tends to apply. And , you might think, okay, like if you're in our situation, you might think, well, sheesh, I guess we're going to take over the BI industry now, or at least be a positive contributor to it.
Let's go get some sales reps from the big, powerful billion dollar brands I just rattled off. They know what they're doing.
Logan: They have a Rolodex of customers they can
Christian: They know, they have to know customers. They sort of know the lingo of the industry and all that stuff. And we tried that, and there's examples of everything once in a while that can work, but mostly it was a disaster.
They were so schooled in the old way of talking to customers, in the old ways the technology worked, in the old ways of company culture that they never really deeply understood there was a whole new way of thinking about the industry. Whereas, if we hired people who had worked for other disruptor companies, right?
In other business software segments [01:04:00] generally they would just immediately fold into the dough, just go running because they've done it before. So for instance, when we were able to hire people from Salesforce, who themselves can remember when Salesforce started, they were just like us. I rattled off our brands we were against, they had the same thing.
Siebel, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and they're all just racked up, . And they came in with this disruptive product and disruptive way of, driving customer adoption. And a salesperson would come in and within 24 hours completely understand what we're trying to do. And now they just had to learn the domain of the industry, .
And so there are examples of us hiring great early people from both. I don't want to overplay it, but. We started to develop this philosophy that, what since there are limited recruiting hours in the day, why don't we go ahead and just target people who have experience in these other disruptor software companies?
And that worked out fantastic. Yeah.
Logan: On the topic of [01:05:00] sales, so we touched on earlier how you guys really pioneered in part, the departmental level sale. how'd you go about getting this flywheel going? Was it, was it inside sales initially that really got it going and finding that business analyst that would champion you internally, or how'd you go about building the flywheel?
Christian: Yeah. So this is where a lot of the dimensions of a company come together. So you've got, you've got a few things coming on. One, we can see that there's a sea change coming in the way business software gets sold and adopted because of the names I mentioned. And common sensibilities as you're watching the world change with the internet, right?
Secondly, like we're trying to bootstrap we're trying to be a capital efficient enterprise. Like we can't afford 12 field sales reps all planted in like NFL cities. Each making 350, 000 a year. And every three of whom needs, it needs a manager costing 410, 000. This is not, we didn't even map that [01:06:00] one out.
Like we can't afford it? and so you've got that influence and then you've got one more influence Logan, which is in our industry. It turns out the people most interested in being an earlier, early adopter of a technology like we had these inspired people here and there they were, we discovered this took about 18 months to really figure out they were scattered like grain seeds.
It would have been people trying to do the classic bowling pin market bowling pin marketing would have been very frustrated with us because they weren't in one group. They weren't anyone. They were just scattered like grain seed. They just generally tended to be kind of a. A quantitatively leaning person within their group, but their group name and industry name and division name could be anything under the sun.
So if you were to deploy an expensive field sale, a customer adoption force, like where would you put them? ? So you've got these three influences here [01:07:00] and they conspire to say. Let's build a really tight, high performance inside sales engine that tries to land these initial customer seeds in a way that's very helpful to the customer, very efficient for the customer, and also capital efficient for us.
And this is at a time in our vintage where inside sales meant something different than it meant now. So the statement I'm making is a little stronger than it sounds. At that time, it was more common that inside salespeople didn't actually sell. Like in the year 2000, if you said, I'm an inside sales person.
if people who knew the industry, you weren't actually, you weren't actually selling. You were almost always in support of the person who was selling. There was usually someone in the field or at a partner location who was doing, who actually owned the customer relationship and you were their junior support person.
And again, a Webex Tableau and a box and a Splunk and a bunch of us, we started to [01:08:00] flip that and say, actually, no, there's no, there's nothing second class. about an inside salesperson. You can have a quota that's almost as big. You can have autonomy that's, that's nearly as big. You can have , the thrill of having a direct customer relationship and getting into direct demonstration and technical problem solving issues with customers that people in that career really like to work on.
And and, and it, and it worked so we had to grow that. You saw our revenue growth. So we, we never had. We never had to decide to go hire like a hundred at once. Well, we did, but that came later but, but, but in this period we were able to feel our way there and add people as we felt we could make them productive in this new customer adoption model.
Logan: You were, always a company that spent a lot on R and D and even going back and reading the S1 or the stuff around the IPO, something that you guys really prided yourself on. How did you think about the trade off of a dollar of revenue comes in the door [01:09:00] and how to balance that between sales and, and customer support, but then also research and development?
Christian: Oh, that's a good question. Well, in our, in our case, once, once we flipped sort of expanded our strategy to saying we can make a world class data analysis tool. which, which we did continue to do, but once we had that big step in ambition, a few years in to say, actually, let's go try to revolutionize this 20 billion business intelligence, business intelligence industry.
Once we made that change, the amount of work we had to do on the product side to make that. A reality, as opposed to something you wave your hands and say you do was overwhelming. And so to us, it was almost kind of easy, like, as long as we have cash available, let's pour it into invention and building this magical future for customers that we see that's probably 10 years out and it turned out [01:10:00] it was many years out before it really came into the fore.
and then the second constraint, cause you're asking a savvy question. You're asking, you're all, you're also asking, yeah, but why that versus some other trade offs you, what trade off were you making? And I would say during the period you're talking about, like 1 million to say 50 million in revenue during that period the feel was that we were awareness constrained.
And so just putting in new salespeople and giving them 600, 000 annual quotas. And saying, by the way, half of your compensation is at risk because it's a performance based job when really there wasn't the company awareness there to justify it. Keep in mind, we're working all from the inside, , you just, you find your way in these, in these constraints, every company that's there for us that that just didn't feel good.
It didn't even feel it didn't feel respectful to the salespeople being hired. And so it wasn't quite as stressful for us to say, oh, okay. [01:11:00] Rather than five more inside salespeople who work these five zip codes where we have no leads. , well, why don't we just go ahead and make the product better?
, so both of those things are going on.
Logan: Interesting. I've heard you say that successful software companies come in three acts, zero to a hundred, a hundred to a billion, and then a billion plus. What? What shifts the most between act one and act two, zero to a hundred, then a hundred to a billion?
Christian: Well, let me, let me, let me get, get my visualization straight in my own head. So we had a year where our sales goal was about a hundred thousand dollars. I think it was that, that I think that second year bootstrapping. And so the founder I was doing all the selling basically and the, and the other guys.
so we had this hundred thousand dollar sales goal and then we, we reached it. And then a few years later, we have a million dollar sales goal. That's a 10 X some years later, we have a 10 million annual sales goal. That's a 10 X. Few years later, we have a hundred million dollar [01:12:00] annual sales goal.
That's a 10 X. Few years later, we have a billion dollar annual sales goal. So you've got, I don't know, four or five 10 X's there. Right. And so I feel that. , things change pretty profoundly in, in each of those 10 Xs so that's such a broad canvas question. I'd almost have to turn it around.
Like, are you thinking people dimension? Are you thinking market? Are you thinking finance? Yeah. Yeah.
Logan: what I was, I was thinking, but, just operationally, I guess, what the biggest shift was as you start. Scaling in that way.
Christian: , in that road, in that road to say 25 million, if you're listening to this and thinking we don't have, we don't seem to have all the organs we need, like, wouldn't it be great if we had like a pancreas and a gallbladder and a stomach wouldn't it be amazing if, when this kind of problem comes [01:13:00] in, we had like a.
An organ that does that, we never felt like we had all the organs we needed so I would say that's probably true through at least 25 million, maybe 50 million. You're just not a fully functional body. , it's just, you've got, you've got heart, brain and stomach. It's like, ah, what about all these other things?
And so you end up with these highly flexible sweeper positions. Who are picking up problems, being flexible, not caring about their job title, taking on more responsibility and so on prioritizing and very efficient startup ways. And it's, it feels like you're just never on top of it. And so hopefully I'll answer this in like an inspiring way for sure.
By a hundred million. But it happens for us. It happened before that. I just have to figure out the number. By a hundred million, you feel, wow, we have a functioning organism and it starts to feel really thrilling. You [01:14:00] know, when this kind of opportunity emerges or this kind of problem comes in, or this kind of new horizon needs to be explored, or this kind of side project comes on, there's always just a place for it.
you have your you, you have your reporting structure pyramids pretty well established by that time. There's no more uncomfortable conversations with why you're getting a boss the culture is bought in that, Oh wow, we need to scale and grow and think bigger than ourselves. And then it becomes much easier and much more fun.
But I wish I could say it was by five or 10 million that you felt we felt that no way, no way. It was many years after that. And that's why startup people instead of, so I'll always look like their hair's on
Logan: Yeah. one of your investors define your culture as smart and humble. I don't know if that was something you guys said, internally. It was like one of the prescriptive cultural values, but how did you [01:15:00] think about establishing the Tableau culture?
Christian: Our CMO, Elisa Fink, coined that term. She was once trying to recruit someone and they said, well, what's the culture of Tableau like? And she said, well, it's humble smart. And so she invented that. But so take one of our founders, Pat Hanrahan. Pat is a storied inventor. He was older than than Chris and I.
by I think maybe 10 years and very accomplished, brilliant person or by the, by the time all of us met him already had, I think two Academy Awards 10 year professor, all of it. And if you were to meet Pat at a party, he would be cooking bratwurst on a grill wearing a flannel. , there's just no, there's just no, no arrogance you would never even realize you're talking to someone that you you're talking to someone very smart.
You wouldn't really know. [01:16:00] There's just, there's no error. There's no air about it. , I've never, never seen Pat put out his credentials or his status or his title as accomplishments in any. In any, but the most humble way and so I'd have to reflect more on the answer to your question, but that's like a really specific visualization.
And so like I think some set of the company had that spirit themselves just by virtue of their own life journey. And then others were inspired by people like Pat who had it and it just kind of carried through
Logan: Where did you learn the most about hiring people over the course of the Tableau journey?
Christian: do you mean at what stage or what,
Logan: Just in general, interview, favorite interview questions, just things that you, in an interview process and bringing people on board.
Christian: I'll give you, I'll, I'll give you advice you might not be expecting. I'll tell you a story. So there was, there's a good friend we used to have dinner with a lot during the [01:17:00] hockey stick period of Tableau. And he was a researcher at the university of Washington in, in brain science. And he just came from a completely different world.
Like I had gone to business school and building this company and we've got all these staff members and money that has to be raised. And , he's applying for grants, I think manages one person did a PhD just completely different roles, but we're friends, ? And so every once in a while we would ask each other, well, we would ask each other about each other's world.
It was just fun to learn what that world was like for him as he's building his career. And he would ask me and I remember one time he, he said, Oh, how's Tableau? And I'm like, well, we're, we're like 600 people now. And he's like, Weren't you like 380 people last, last year at this time? I said, yeah, it's, it's crazy.
And he just goes, and he's a psych, he was a, he was a trained as a psychologist. [01:18:00] And he said, how could you possibly hire, how could you possibly hire so many people in such a short amount of time? Like how do you approach that interview process? ? And I said, well, I don't know if we have any magical formula.
Some things are traditional. We have resumes and interviews, ? I said, but , so far in, if there's one thing that seems to be like a really reliable indicator of whether someone's going to succeed in the job, it's that, and he puts his hand up and he goes, stop, let me guess. And he goes, you have them perform a task directly applicable to the job they're about to take.
And I go. How did ? I mean, I wasn't going to word it that way, but yeah, that's the answer. And he goes, Oh, this is well established after 20 years of research in academia. It's the only [01:19:00] finding, according to him, that paper after paper shows because people have all these weird voodoo beliefs. About interview, how firms are handshake when I want to have a beer with them there's like really but there's some science.
It's a studied subject. And it turns out if you look for statistical significance, this is one of the only things. So our version of that, this started with engineer engineers. In fact, I think Microsoft started this in the, in the 90s, that this thing started in engineering departments that if you wanted to interview at a company like Microsoft, there was a moment in your process.
Where you had to go to the whiteboard and code like we're past where you went to college and what beer you like. Okay. Like go do a bubble sort, you have to go do it, ? So and so that, that has now pervaded technology industry. I think virtually every tech company. At least until recently has been doing some version of this.
So you're performing a task directly applicable to the job that's at hand. And then, so as [01:20:00] Tableau started to grow during these high volume hiring moments, we started to think, how do we apply that to other departments? Cause it's like a really good idea. In a business software company like ours that did direct sales, that's our context, you end up hiring a lot of people in sales.
marketing, customer support, and these functions. That's where the big volume of payroll goes. Okay. At scale. And and we started to make some policies around our interview process. One of which was if you want to, if you want to land a position as a professional sales or customer support person at Tableau, As part of your interview process, you need to demonstrate and sell our product to us. No one in the business, business intelligence industry was doing that in part because the products were so complicated that was an impossible to ask. Okay, but, but in our new, everyone can use a paradigm, this actually was a workable model. And so you would have people nervously come into Tableau's [01:21:00] office or, or, or they would write, you could, the good ones were writing questions in advance.
They were prepping, they were trying to get, they, they were, they were watching YouTube training videos. Which, which is also great for their selection of us because by virtue of preparing, they're also figuring out, is this the right company for me? what I mean? And that ended up being just a fabulous tool for figuring out whether someone was going to be good at it.
So I can tell you about other departments too, but that's, that's, I don't know, that's probably
Logan: that's
Christian: all the learning I could pass around.
Logan: you were one of the first companies, well, you set up a, it was pretty active community of folks using the product, a lot of evangelists there. And you, you guys did creative things like put your tutorials on YouTube for onboarding and stuff like that. How did you sort of, were these just necessities of other of invention?
And so you, you, you needed to do it or do you recognize that there were different ways of actually. Lighting these spires and sort of building these circular flywheels.
Christian: I mean, I think I think [01:22:00] founders liked, or, and, and probably BC board members do, . Yeah. We sort of like to tell stories where we look back and say, there I was I had the lightning strike insight on how it was all going to go down. that wasn't true for us. We, on so many things, we had some really good founding sensibilities and then we sort of found our way.
Okay. So to answer that question, we knew we had this sensibility that there was a new kind of enterprise software selling and customer adoption model. That was going to be an unstoppable wave in all the categories, right? Sales Salesforce at CRM, we did BI BI, but you can go find a Tableau and every one of them now this, this, this was, this was, this was going to be the new way business technology gets adopted and sold.
And so we had that sensibility and we were very into it. We're very curious about it. We would hire people who were, who came from other disruptors. Everything I said, we're, we had the right sensibility and then we would try things. [01:23:00] That would seem to be kind of like in the purest version of this philosophy.
Right. And usually when we tried one, it would work and it would just embolden us. Right. And so we would try the next one and then we got really confident. But we just turned the dial. We just took that dial and turned it to 10. We're like, okay, we're confident now. Here's what I mean. When we came into the BI industry the products were sold by professional field salespeople.
They came with expensive training packages. So you might sign your invoice for say business objects, enterprise deployment. And right it would say soft, the license cost, and it would say 890, 000 for one department. And then the next line down, training package, 50, 000. Then it would say professional services package, often through a partner 890, 000.
It would often match the license cos, just boom, [01:24:00] boom, boom, expense, expense, expense, expense. And customers were paying it because that's, that was the available solutions. And we came in and we're like, okay new idea. Our software does not require an in person visit at all
Hmm. How about free? We're going to put all of our training for free on YouTube. Just turn it to 10. We're going to have unlimited free downloads of our trial. Turn it a 10. We're going to give all students in the world access for free. Because all these companies had student interns come in and out. Free.
We're going to give all teachers, anyone in academia, who works in a teaching or student position, free. We are going to have no minimum purchase, right? Like even, even some of the savvier competitors who started to get easier to use, they'd say, okay, fine, we've come out with [01:25:00] business objects, light or whatever they're sort of, I'm worried about Tableau move was, and it would say minimum purchase, 50, 000 which was less than 890, good job. But we just turned every dial to 10. We made a free reader, Tableau reader, just like the Adobe reader, free, unlimited. And Citigroup would go download 400, 000 readers free, what I mean? And I can keep going, but we just did every dial. And so we, we had this idea that B2C selling sensibilities are going to take over the B2B industry.
And again, we were followers in that we were, we did not invent that, but we were like, we were all in once we started to sort of learn about it. And then we started to pioneer some things ourselves. And so we just turned it all to 10. And that's when the flywheel went crazy and it just worked and it became a grassroots fire and inspired people all over companies, just like WebEx would [01:26:00] start adopting and telling their friends and presenting Tableau and meetings.
And everyone would say, Oh, my God, what did you use for that presentation? And it would just start to go viral is a little too strong a sense. I think it word it gets overused, but customer adoption really started to take off. Yeah.
Logan: At some point along the way, you actually moved to London to help set up Tableau HQ over there. And one of the things I heard you say was something to the effect of you need to bend overboard to empower people when they work in a non headquartered country or area. Why'd you move over? Why was that an important decision
Christian: a good question. Yeah and in fact, it helps me answer one of your earlier questions more intelligently because you were sort of teasing out, like, what are the big things that change as you go up this 1 million, 10 million, 50 million, a hundred million billion what, what, what are the things, what are the big things to change?
One thing that I think just most of the business technology companies face on that road that really [01:27:00] changes is in the early years. Assuming you're a a US company and these days you're, you're probably Silicon Valley, Seattle, San Diego, Austin like if you're one from, of these, these centers that keep producing these amazing disruptive companies.
Really all that matters in the early days is the us , I mean, the idea of. You're trying to hire your first 10 people or get your first product market fit or land your first investor, but yet Germany is really important to you. Like this is unlikely.
Logan: Yeah. Yeah.
Christian: So a big thing that changes is once you have product market fit Once the flywheel starts to go at some velocity once you feel reasonably capitalized you sort of got the basics down You're gonna see this huge Spotlight come on your strategic dashboard Maybe because it just occurred to you because of a customer conversation.
Maybe it's because of [01:28:00] venture. This is a great example where venture investors add great value. They've seen all this before. Maybe it's because a venture investor introduced the topic to you. But if you stay us focused, you will wind up with 40 percent of the market you could have had or 30, depending on how you measure most of the opportunity or at least half of it, to be fair, is not within our shores.
In my domain is business technology. So that's what I'm talking about within business software stuff. And so if you're gonna get serious about it, you have to make a whole, you have to have a whole new kind of thinking. Every policy you roll out, you have to be thinking, oh wait, how would this work there?
And it's never simple. And then you've got 14 different countries to start and then all the different languages and now you're thinking about entities and boards and the whole thing becomes much more Sophisticated. but I think I've lost my train of thought at this point.
Logan: Moving over to London.
Christian: Oh yeah, so, right during that period, a few years in, [01:29:00] it occurred to me that maybe a really good move to go get that right would be to go move to one of our other offices really walk the walk.
So, and then on the personal side that, that like worked out for me and was attractive to our family, it wasn't any great stress. So I just happened to be in a point where. That was a thing we can go pull off. And so we did that. And London was our headquarters for all the EMEA sales. And so working directly with those leaders there, meeting customers there, bringing some attention to that area, having more empathy with their issues than you could possibly have sitting in your San Jose office or from your Seattle office it just goes up.
It does. And so it ended up being a positive thing. Yeah.
Logan: So Tableau, ultimately acquired by Salesforce for a little under 16 billion in 2018.
Christian: Yes,
Logan: you went public what year? 13. And the business was doing roughly a hundred million.
Christian: at the time of going public, when we went [01:30:00] public, our trailing, I want to say was one 12 or just slightly over a hundred. I
Logan: Yeah. Growing roughly a hundred percent or
Christian: Oh, not quite a hundred, maybe 70. Yeah.
Logan: it. But growing super fast and all that. The journey in between there was not necessarily a linear path, in the public markets. can you talk a little bit about what it was like being a public company CEO, like what you learned from that experience, between IPO and ultimate sale to Salesforce?
Christian: Well, the first thing so keep in mind, this is a group, none of us had ever done it before. So it was a really fun journey. What once we felt like the company was ready for that kind of thing. So keep in mind this is like, this is year 10 of the company. We started in oh three we're not even considering going public until 2011.
We don't do it till 13 this is like 10 years in. So for us, I think sometimes companies can both get, [01:31:00] get a lot of anxiety about and struggle with IPO stuff because it's one of these so much capital, so fast situations that, well, how did you think it was going to go? and that I think can be common in BDC and I don't want to judge that because that's me, but that's just the way it has to be.
but in our context there, there's, there's a longer road to victory probably if you're a business software company. And so by the time we're getting there thinking about it this, this, this management team is very established, we're well capitalized. We have a great customer reputation.
We have good forecasts about the future and that kind of thing. And so it, it, it. it felt kind of easy in a way, to go public. and there were elements of it that were sort of delightful that went better than I thought. , for instance, I, I went into the process with some healthy skepticism about Wall Street firms and the influence they would have and support they would need and all this kind of thing, [01:32:00] because those are the parties you interface with initially.
and in more cases than I thought, we met investors who believed or not, I know it's hard to believe, but. They were more like a venture capitalist than I would have guessed and so maybe that's what where your earlier career was yourself, but I expected something more mercenary and less in touch with growth company needs and culture.
whereas the venture industry to their great credit, like they've got that figured out, like that first 10 year journey, they know all about the quirkiness and the culture and the patients and all that stuff for good VCs. and there, there were more of those folks willing to buy IPO stock.
And to remain shareholders during the whole early years as a public company that I thought that I thought there were so there, I guess my message is there are some benevolent forces out there and some of those are a great pleasure to work with. Also, they just become your own. They become new colleagues so that I think I think of that is very positive.
And then for a company [01:33:00] culture and for there were the rewards of the visibility it gave the company. I have a lot of positive thoughts on that. I mean, an IPO for us in our context, Of business software, it can put your brand on the map. It is true in a way that no amount of marketing spend could get you let's just say, let's just say you were to decide, okay, instead of selling 10 percent of the company to public investors, we're going to go take 50 million or whatever you think the appropriate amount, a hundred million dollars.
And we're just going to go, we're going to go buy the same awareness and just skip the event. , my question is great. What are you going to do? And you'd come up with some stuff. I'm sure you would, but okay. The Superbowl ads over now, they're winning 30 million. , it's just like, I don't know.
And if there's, there's, there's an awareness and [01:34:00] credibility with business buyers with, I'm a, they can't think of where our customer is. I'm not trying to get a, a, a teen on a phone app in Iowa. , we're trying to get these. Fortune 2000 companies to trust our company and adopt us and hear about us and think about us as a premier provider of solutions and so boy, the IPO did that, that worked.
I mean, it worked. It was amazing. We saw a jump in awareness and credibility that could never, maybe you could manufacture it with money. I wouldn't know how to do it. Yeah.
Logan: I think in a successful company's journey, you all, there was one day that was very volatile from a stock standpoint, right? February 2016.
Christian: Right. Right.
Logan: I think, was it 50 percent in a single day
Christian: think so. 40 or 50. Yeah.
Logan: Can, can you, can you tell that story and like what the managing a company through that is like for employees and morale and
Christian: Yeah. Well, [01:35:00] yeah. Well, so it came. So that was it. That was, that was on a, on a call where we, we had beat our number.
Logan: and just guided down. Guided down a little bit. Then there was a
Christian: it down? I don't think we did. I think it's more that sometimes so this is, this is on the dark side of IPOs. There's an element of the public markets.
You IPO process. Sure.
Logan: Who comes in
Christian: much stock we're going to sell and all this stuff, . Yeah. Yeah. So, but. But then there are elements that just become reasonably outside of your control. So for instance, you just get this huge speculation stuff that goes on. All sorts of funds with their computational model, or even home investors who are just placing these bets that are not tethered to the guidance you've been giving.
They're just not, they're untethered, what I mean? And so it turned out there was more of that going on in the market than we understood. , we, we did not announce that earnings we, we, we, we either meet or slightly be, but , presumably it [01:36:00] was not, I, I'd have to go back and look at, at my notes, but it was clearly not as much as people were expecting.
It's one of those. and so we had a much bigger than expected stock price drop and it was rough. I would say initially. Initially, it wasn't so bad because we had such a strong company culture. And again, by the time we're going public, we've been around for 10 years. This isn't a fly by night thing.
So there was great trust by customers and the company and the longevity. The company was extremely well capitalized. That's another thing we had going for us. The company was very well capitalized, like there was no investor worry that the company's going away or customer worry as well. and so you give reassuring talks and a lot of the people you've hired, keep in mind, they've all been through it before like the modern technology employee now that the industry is so big, like most people, most of your top people in your companies, they've seen this before.
It happens to everyone it's happening to a company today. [01:37:00] , it's just a routine part of being a public company. And so it wasn't so bad. I will say though, that I think when we look back on it, we, we did see, we saw attrition go up our employee attrition. I think there's by the time you're at this scale of employees by this time, I think we're.
Over 2000 people. And so this is part of the scale stuff. We could come back to like things start to change. Now you have so many people there aren't, there isn't necessarily as high a portion of people who are absolutely in love with the company and the workplace as when you were, say 500. , inevitably in the statistics that ratio goes up.
And so I think there were a, a, a number of people who were just sort of freaked out or worried about their options being underwater and not willing to wait the long term for it to come around as it did. what I mean? Yeah. And so I, I remember our, our most devastating thing was that attrition went up and that was that, that, and that was rough.
That that's when we started thinking, oh man, [01:38:00] this big public journey is not all, not all roses. Yeah.
Logan: It's a, yeah, it's a, I mean, a crazy day. I'm sure I remember where I was. LinkedIn announced earnings the same day. It sort of
Christian: Oh yeah, LinkedIn had a similar story. Yeah, yeah, it did. I remember that.
Logan: market was frozen for like a month after, cause it pulled down all
Christian: yeah, and of course, funny part is, which I which I, which I, which I would've said at the time is for all those investors who did not overreact and ignored the speculators and just hung onto the stock.
How did they do?
Logan: Yeah. What, what was the, do you remember what the market cap went down to its low
Christian: I don't have the fresh numbers, but let me think. Let's just say the stock went from something like a hundred to something like 60. Whatever it is, let's just say you held at 60. Well, if you track that stock all the way through, I think at its peak post acquisition, it was like 300. And
Logan: Well, within two, two and a half
Christian: at that time you would have been holding Salesforce stock is all this good, but , it was [01:39:00] a bottom line for investors.
I I'm presumably public investor, but you would use this as a case. The long, the long, the long funds probably should use Tableau as a case study, which is if you believed in the business and you believed in the cult following and you believed in the management team. And it was well capitalized. There was no cash crunch, what I mean?
Like, why don't we just hold for like five years? This thing's going to turn around and I don't know how long it took, but from a stock perspective, but it was, it was a great outcome for investors.
Logan: At some point along the way, you made the decision not to continue to operate as CEO. What were the inputs into that?
Christian: No, I'm glad you asked because presumably for some of your listeners, this will be relevant at some point in their journey. the exact, so there came a time when two of us, Chris, my founder, Crystal, the, the, the, the two main, main, Chris and I were work, we were equal owners of the company, me, Chris, and Bad Bud.
Pat was a little more distant by that time. So Chris and I were the main daily [01:40:00] operators of the company. and there came a time when we both, we, through conversations we were having as friends and colleagues that we both decided, I think I might be done with this job, not with the company. We wanted to go forever, but like we, we held jobs, CEO and CDO.
And we decided we didn't. We weren't too excited about doing those jobs anymore. And the anxiety we had in our stomach about, Oh my gosh, where would you find someone? Can you turn over all these stories? Cause I'm sort of a student of technology like you are. And in my head, I think of all the founder exit stories and how poorly they seem to go, they all seem to end with the founder is back two years later.
Logan: Yeah.
Christian: They all seem to have that arc it never seems to go well. And there were two people who set me straight on that because I, I mean, this was Chris and I, we, we, we went to the board and we said, [01:41:00] we would like to move on in our, in our positions. We would just like to make a plan for it. And there was some, some, I think some new and some were shocked.
And then over the following weeks, we just made a plan and there were two people, one board member, actually two, two board members in particular, and the certain, the person who ran the search firm, who we used. Those three did so much to bring my anxiety down. Turns out the cliche story you're picturing of founding CEO retires, company becomes a mess.
Founding CEO comes back is not the only story. If you actually look, there's quite a few examples to the contrary. And so that gave us a lot of confidence. one of the board members had seen it successfully before himself. , and it went great and so there's sort of like a pep talk there With and with likewise for Chris the founding inventor and person who runs all of engineering, Same anxiety same worry [01:42:00] about how could this person be replaced given the context and their experience and all that stuff and so we launched I hired a search firm this person who was influential and We ran a process we did likewise for Chris Chris was in a position where there was an obvious internal candidate, and so that's, that one was easier.
That one had more, more to do about the internal culture and workforce dynamics. So that one went pretty straight, straightforward, and Chris turned things over to Andrew Beers, and then we did a search. We did, we didn't have an obvious external candidate. So that was part of the stress, . And we, we, we literally did it.
We did a search.
Logan: When you're doing the searches, is it confidential or do you announce it?
Christian: Well, yeah. Well, how did we do it? We did it. We did it confidential in part because we were open minded to either having a president who reported to me and we just changed things around a little bit, or we just get a full replacement when we did this search, [01:43:00] we went into it. We were all open to both paths, just depending on what the talent was and who was available.
And then as it turns out , we had a, we had a great list of exciting candidates because , there, it turns out, actually, this is another founding message. Turns out there's a class of executive out there. I didn't even really know about, they view a billion dollar technology company as a startup.
And I'm like, what are you talking about? This is sort of the end. There are people out there. I'm not one that they, they come into billion dollar tech companies and say, wow, where could we take this startup? ? And so one of these is Adam Slitsky. And there were other people too, but Adam was the, Adam won the, won the job and he did, he was great.
Logan: What's it, what was the, you mentioned the anxiety of maybe everything you built going away. Were there other, [01:44:00] anxieties or concerns about making this transition or is that the, the, the main one?
Christian: the cliche story is what is one anxiety and it it does indeed happen.
Logan: Yeah.
Christian: a second was, remember I told you we had that great gelled management team. , most of them were still there. And so that would be like early moments of shakeup of that core team. what I mean? And so there was a lot of anxiety about how we could manage that.
I don't know. That's about it. I mean, now I'm sort of sure about the whole thing. I don't, I don't even remember all
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. Other stuff.
Christian: Yeah.
Logan: what about the decision to sell? So you got a very nice offer from, from Salesforce. was that, did you, did you all, I mean, most companies end up sold at some point, regardless of how big they, they got. But when did you start thinking about it? How did the conversations play out?
Christian: yeah, it's funny because Tableau had been approached with an [01:45:00] acquisition tone in the air, four or five times
Logan: all different parties.
Christian: by all different parties. And in every case, we bounced it immediately. So you, you never even get to what the offer would be cause you're just like, and we're not, we're not, I don't, I don't want to go through that process.
what I mean? especially before you're public. We just never felt it was the right time for the company. And so, so some years passed, the company is growing. And , now, as I like to say, it's like we had the elementary school, we had middle school, we had high school, we had college after five years of being public, like now even college is done now it's like truly like, this is an adult company, ?
and so things change and one thing that had changed is and for me, you'd have to ask every board member, because this is a board decision to sell, for me. I thought the competitive [01:46:00] dynamic looking forward was going to be different and harder than it had been. For all of, for, for, for all of the evangelism I did about how, if you're disruptive and true and patient, things could go better than you think.
You might have a more competitive time than you think. The fact is that steamroller will get you.
Logan: When Microsoft wakes up and puts all their eggs in the basket, right. Uh.
Christian: Yeah, and, and not just them. Also, if you just look at the whole industry, the cloud compute, the cloud, the cloud compute wave is coming. and, and, and, and, and by that, I mean, More power was being shifted to the new big platform titans. Like when we started the big platform, titans were Oracle, Microsoft IBM. I know it's like the, in the new wave, turns out Microsoft figured it out, but obviously it's, it's Amazon. It's Google it's a [01:47:00] Salesforce, whoever I'm forgetting in, in business tech stuff and I, for one started to feel that like there's going to be more bundling. There's going to be more cloud attached.
There's going to be more enterprise deals in these big fortune 500 purchasing agreements that get signed and that it could be, it now looks moral in our best interest to be teamed up with one of them in a way I wouldn't have early or myself, I wouldn't have earlier considered as seriously. And so when Salesforce knocked, that was interesting and then it happens that Salesforce also is.
World renowned for its great culture, world renowned for its agility. It had a business model we were admiring, as I said, all the way up, about what the new model of business software looks like. And so, we got into conversations and wanted to hear what they had to say. And then, they did a [01:48:00] nice persuasion job on on everyone and it's worked out.
Logan: so I think you're a student of technological cycles, as we've alluded to earlier, like what, as you, as you zoom out on these different trends or different things, businesses, you've studied along the way. Are there any salient points of advice or anything that you found particularly interesting? The one that comes to mind is about halfway through Tableau's journey.
Someone handed me innovators dilemma. And a few years ago, I actually, that was about five years ago. I think online, there was a big debate online within some tech blog. Forgot which one about whether innovators dilemma is true or false or credible. Or cause this is like I think he was a Harvard professor, right?
Yeah, yeah, Christiansen. I read that book, and I just could not believe that someone decades before, or a decade before we were even founded, wrote a script about what was about to happen to [01:49:00] us. So, so we and I'm sure there's great points on both sides of this debate, but we are a textbook example. of innovators dilemma because, Christiansen doesn't just say something.
Sometimes new things come around and replace old things. It's this very specific five step process on how young no name disruptors. Take over extremely powerful industry incumbents and I won't take you through all of it, but, but one of the five stages is that after a little bit of market traction, the big incumbent players in the industry will look at the young upstart to the extent they've even, even notice it and say That, that product only does one thing and the, the pattern is that a new technology comes along.
It did. Of course it [01:50:00] doesn't do everything the big incumbent products do, but it does one thing much, much better. And the big incumbents right in his formula will write that one thing off as sort of a sideshow. That's not that important. And the phases go on until all the big incumbents are if not eliminated, they're, they're much suppressed in their prior glory.
Let's put it that way. And the new incumbent has taken over. and for us we started with a little, a little one dot old product after we had formed the company that did nothing but make drag and drop. that did nothing but make ad hoc analysis of databases and spreadsheets easier. That's it.
And the visualizations were better. , that was just, that was all it did. And the business software to all the engineering departments off there, out there how long it [01:51:00] takes, you probably have some sense of like how long it takes you to go fill in all of this other stuff that a sophisticated buyer would need.
To deploy your products at scale, but you do not need any of that stuff to make enough inroads to be important and to establish a base to grow off of. And we're just, we're, we're a perfect example. and so I hope, I hope that gives some inspiration to those who have a product that does 1 thing really well and gives them the ambition to stick with it for 10 years and fill out the rest of it.
That's, that's great advice. Now, uh. Presumably you, you are no longer, spending your time focused on, B2B software quite as much. You're, you have new endeavors that you're spending your time on. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing today? Yeah, I'm on second career. So my wife and I have formed a foundation called the Washington Neurodiversity Project.
So I am working in a completely [01:52:00] different domain now. And our mission is to improve employment outcomes and career pathways. For neurodivergent thinkers in short people who, who traditionally have had medical diagnoses like autism or autism adjacent or severe ADHD or Tourette's and so on. , we, we've had these, we've had these medical labels for things, which I think in some cases are useful.
but they're also a source of identity and greatness. For a large portion of the population, and there are changes we can make if things go well to make our workplaces and our society better equipped to include and get the best of people who are wired a little differently than is, than is considered neurotypical.
So that's what we're working on. And that's why I don't have a savvy comment on the latest AI. I'm working, I'm working in a different space right now. What, what does that look [01:53:00] like on a daily basis? Like how do you sort of spend your time? Yeah, that's, that's a great question. So just in the last few months, we've hired our first couple of staff people to work with us.
And in our case, we've, we've made an ecosystem map of Washington state that describes all of the support services. and influencers and evangelists out there who have a role in helping young people move from say a high school or college stage to in a very satisfied career setting and as a foundation.
So it's a foundation. So we're, we're like, we're a force in the ecosystem. we are there to try to give support. To to those places in the ecosystem that could be shored up, we're trying to import some ideas that are working in other geographies around the world. And of course, we'll soon be putting out calls of invitation for innovators who want to try to improve the situation.
So that's the kind of role a foundation can have in a social problem. And so that's what we're [01:54:00] taking on. Super exciting. Yeah. Thanks for asking. Yeah, no, that's very cool. Well, Christian, thanks for doing this. Yeah. Thank you. This was a fun conversation. It was good to talk about Tableau again. Yeah.