How Bigpanda CEO Patrick Salyer grew Bigpanda to $80.4M revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

founded back in 2012 in Tel Aviv now with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv 60 folks full-time about half and half between product and engineering and then market and sales they raised thirty five million dollars have you know 20 of the fortune 500 customers but less than 500 total so between 20 and 500 customers average kind of contract value you know really hitting that million dollar mark as they help try and help these IT guys in these war room understand which alerts are important and which ones are simply noise this is episode 708 coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from blake smith who breaks down how he's got 17,000 people using his app to safely manage their wardrobe but first here's today's episode this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs - our number one our number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have on now it's $40,000 per Tov I haven't experienced kids have bent on global domination we just bloke are a hundred thousand units ol mark and I'm your host Nathan Laska hello everybody my guest today is a soft Resnick he's a founder and CEO of big panda an algorithmic IT operations platform that turns IT alert noise into insight unified fragmented operations enables digital enterprises to attain dramatically higher service levels part of founding the company he was an investor with Sequoia Capital where he focused on early-stage companies across enterprise software SAS and the internet sectors that's off are you ready to take it to the top I am I am thanks for having me Sequoia sounds like a sweet gig why do you jump at it out and launch big panda oh it's a good question sometimes I still ask myself that and the hardest is I ask myself why do they leave this golden cage you know I think the queues at Sequoia and it was an opportunity of a lifetime I had the the privilege to work with you know some incredibly talented entrepreneurs and credibly Talent partners but but I was young and I felt at the time boys started there at age 29 and I learned a ton yeah the one of those kind of pivotal moments in my career that you know a fork in the road and you look back and this was definitely one of those Forks in the road but after a few years a I kinda I got the entrepreneur bug and I'd been around a lot of entrepreneurs and seeing them through the good times the bad times and and I kind of wanted to get a sense for that myself and I also had a sense that having not started a company before I was kind of telling people how to drive a car but I'd never driven a car myself and so I really wanted to kind of eat my own dog food and and and that was a lot of the impetus to leave did you miss out on any deals at Sequoia because the entrepreneur was like listen I got a term sheet from the guy of Bessemer and he's built his own company before so sorry isawful I gotta go with him I heard a partner I was kind of a principal there so helping a lot of deals at the time so I personally didn't have a lot of that and you know Sequoia is a tough place to turn down but it really wasn't from a perspective of winning deals it was more for perspective of personal career growth and how does so just people that aren't familiar with how BC works you have kind of analysts and then principles and then managing directors is that kind of how was it Sequoia every form is different sequoias pretty flat but you know different firms have the kind of regimented you're an analyst and then you're an associate every firm is a little different and so how is Sequoia in pretty flat you know there's a it's a pretty flat organization with the partners do the majority of their own kind of sourcing and deal flow and due diligence and so are you and your other principal would you get piqued interest in a certain sector and go research the heck out of that sector then kind of pick a champion to go after or did you just bet on people you brought people related deals to to the other partners sure I mean I don't want to talk too much about kind of Sequoias way yeah because you know a lot of this is proprietor um it's a combination for me personally the combination of both so you definitely want to be armed with a thesis because theses are not out of the plural of thesis about where you think those opportunities across the market where you think there's vacuums that are that are right to be filled but I've never had you're not the one it's creating our companies you also have to you know it's a combination I have pieces of weathers opportunities in the market coupled with where they're aspiring entrepreneurs that are doing amazing things and do I want to partner with them so it's a little bit of both we're going to jump into big panda here in a second which is your current venture which seems like it's on a tear will dive into it but first last question about Sequoia what you d which dealer entrepreneur where you are most proud of discovering or bringing to Sequoia that's kind of like asking which is your baby love the best yeah I'll pass on that no a lot of a lot of good ones that are very proud to have been part of and some still very very good friends and colleagues sort of any of them are listening he's giving all of you Congrats but just name drawing that was really interesting for you right they just didn't contact it it did well what was there didn't expect that it did well I say probably a one that just comes to mind but I don't know if it's specially the one one of my favorites uh we invested out of Israel and company called snap to which did a very interesting company that did it back in the day when not everyone and their mother had a smartphone particularly in developing nations was able to do a lot of porting of you know mobile applications to what was called feature phones at the time so imagine folks in developing countries that don't necessarily have 4G connections and fancy touchscreen phones and they want to be able to use apps like Facebook and snap to and in Twitter and LinkedIn as well this is just a really really good job of bringing kind of modern mobile connectivity and apps to the developing world we're bought by Facebook and now are really part of the charge of leading what Facebook is doing around bringing that kind of mobile connectivity to the developing world so snaps you there you have it guys let's jump into big panda walk us through what the company does so essentially what we do at a very high level is automate the ability of human beings and IT operations to keep up with a data center that's radically evolved so think of the folks in IT operations so the world spends over a trillion dollars a year in IT operations and in very very broad buckets you can think of that in three very very big buckets folks who build and scale software folks who build and scale infrastructure and then folks in what's called service operations that actually have to of all that software and all that infrastructure running those can be called network operations engineers what's called the NOC they can be called DevOps engineers they can be called site reliability engineers a very very big chunk of all that IT expand is towards engineers that actually have to keep the lights on and if you think of what's been happening in the data center around hey I've got to keep this software and this infrastructure running but that software and that infrastructure has radically transformed over the last 15 years so think of if I'm a large enterprise one of years ago I was buying the majority of my stuff from a handful of large vendor I was buying it from IBM and from Oracle and from BMC and CA and maybe HP and that gave me the lion's share of my systems my monitoring tools up and down by stack and so from a from the perspective the folks actually have to keep the lights on it had just a handful of tools you had data centers that were comprised of you know several hundreds and several thousand servers in your basement and things moved really really slowly and so you know that let me ask this to different can you tell a story about a custom pote obviously I'm sure you have NDA's on some of your customers is there a specific customer you can name and actually tell me how they're using big panda sure let me talk about let me not name a fortune 50 company who's a customer of ours very large networking company came to us and said hey 20 years ago all we sold was networked machines and routers and switches and so forth but today we're services company we've got lots of staffs offering to lots of different companies and we have to make sure that those SAS offerings I give a give the kind of SLA that we've promised to our companies actually guys is a service level agreement so this level agreement so if I promised some large multinational bank that I'm going to have 9th I'm going to be up available 99.999% of the time well I better better do that and to actually keep that stuff running I have to keep track of the same company has to keep track of hundreds of applications that are running on tens of thousands of servers and and VMs virtual machines in 24 different global clouds I've got teams of engineers in the Ukraine and in San Jose California and in India and they're using 15 different monitoring tools to figure out what the heck's going on imagine you're the poor Schmo that's sitting in kind of this war room coming to work with 15 different monitoring tools and you've got 70 thousand different events that...