Thought Leaders in Big Data: Frank Bien, CEO of Looker (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s look at your big picture. Bring it up to industry level and tell me more about what trends you are seeing from your vantage point in the Big Data world.

Frank Bien: My entry into data has only been during this Big Data trend – right after 9/11 when Web 2.0 was happening. In 2003, I was working in big column stores. My view is coming from that side. What I say might be surprising. We’ve stored lots of data but there’s been very little value. Organizations have spent millions of dollars, and collectively billions of dollars, in storing just a massive set of information and data. The value at the other side has been really elusive. I think the big trend moving forward is to finally crack into this data and move it beyond data science experiments into the hands of business people who can make better decisions. We believe in Looker that involves the data team. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 1)

Continuing with our Bootstrapping Using Services theme, we bring you a story from London.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some back story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Ajay Patel: I was born in London about 42 years ago. I’ve lived here all my life. My origins are actually Indian. My father is from India and my mother was born in Fiji, but she’s of Indian descent.

Sramana Mitra: What about school? I imagine you went to school in London.

>>>

Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Just to get the facts straight, you have a bunch of Fortune 50 companies starting to adopt the solution. You did the seed round yourself. What about the venture round? At what point in that adoption cycle did that venture round come in? I’m not talking about post-IPO. I’m talking about the pre-IPO venture round.

Louis Tetu: We did two because we were fairly capital intensive. When I look at the amounts invested today, it’s still low. We raised a total of $36 million. That was back in 2000 to 2001. We raised a $10 million in 2000 and $25.5 million in 2001 with Bain Capital. The fact is that because we were selling subscriptions, from a pure financial perspective, we were financing customers. In addition to that, we had to build a server infrastructure which was also, at that time, very capital intensive. It was a double whammy from a cash consumption perspective that required quite a bit of money. In 2001, the $25 million round of capital with a software firm that only did $2.8 million in trailing revenue was pretty significant.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Frank Bien, CEO of Looker (Part 3)

Frank Bien: They saw, of course, that people who were booking hotels were also referring customers because they had a great service. What they also saw was that people who are not using the service were referring the most number of customers. In a lot of organizations, when they see something like that, the thinking goes to fraud. In HotelTonight’s case, since they had Looker, they could drill in. In our environment, you constantly have this ability to drill-in to data.

They were able to infer that the people who were referring customers were flight attendants or bartenders. >>>

Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the case of HP as the anchor tenant, were they paying you?

Louis Tetu: They were in exchange for significant development capacity and applications suited to their needs. Of course, we had the framework for that. As I said, we went to them with a concept of digital competence profile. That was a significant value proposition to large companies, which is evidenced by the fact that by 2004, Taleo had 40% of the Fortune 500 as customers. Those companies deal with a lot of people and did that in very antiquated ways just by reading résumés and writing job descriptions. We thought there was a better way to perform the match as well as manage that supply chain. There was quite a bit of science behind it.

Sramana Mitra: In that early phase when you got HP as your anchor tenant and got Taleo off the ground, did you also put in some seed capital or did you raise venture capital at that point?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Frank Bien, CEO of Looker (Part 2)

Frank Bien: We’ve found that organizations have now stored lots of data, but trying to layer on the traditional BI tools hasn’t really worked. I think as we look across our customers, that’s a constant theme.

A great customer story would be one of our earlier customers like HotelTonight who are doing same day hotel bookings. They’re really disrupting the hotel booking industry in a big way. The way they have to do that is oriented towards data—understanding how customers are traveling and where inventory will be required. In a place like HotelTonight, getting departmental views was not good enough. What they had to do was have information across the entire organization and that information had to be very reliable.

>>>

Building Large Scale Enterprise Software Companies: Louis Tetu, Founder of Taleo, CEO of Coveo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Baan?

Louis Tetu: I stayed at Baan until 1998. The dynamics of Baan at that time, without going into too much detail, had changed quite a bit. Several of us left. Several started other companies. I was 34 years old. I was doing some investments in multiple technology companies. When you’re 34 years old and you’re basically technically retired, there are not that many people to play with on Wednesday mornings. You realize that the DNA of entrepreneurship is something you enjoy. The world of investing, albeit interesting, does not have the same DNA as the world of entrepreneurship and building organizations. We soon wanted to get back in the game.

Sramana Mitra: What was your next step?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Frank Bien, CEO of Looker (Part 1)

How far are we from software making decisions based on Big Data rather than human data scientists having to make those decisions? Let’s see what Frank Bien, CEO of Looker, has to say.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing Looker and yourself. Tell us what you do. What’s the company all about?

Frank Bien: I’m the CEO of Looker. Looker is a new kind of data analytics and business intelligence solution that really provides end users a new level of exploration capabilities on top of very large and complex sets of data.

Sramana Mitra: What kinds of customers are you going after?
>>>