How data.world CEO Brett Hurt grew data.world to $45.2M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

guys Brett hurt his fourth company core metrics launched in 1999 he left in 2005 after the company broke 30 million bucks in revenue and in 2010 the company sold for 300 million dollars to IBM that was his first sort of big cash day but he left actually earlier in 2005 and launched with his one of his friends Brandt bizarre voice which ended up growing to 100 million bucks in Revenue spending just 13 million dollars to get there and a billion dollar IPO very Capital efficient obviously bizarre voice taken private in 2018 by Marlin and other stuff has happened since then but now Brett's focus is data.world competing with calibra really a large-scale widespreading data platform very opposite of the capital efficiency of his earlier companies he had to spend why not spend but raise over 53 million dollars of capital before his first dollar of Revenue at data world but now scaling team of 150 50 Engineers focused on efficiency and scaling in a good way he's written about his success and his book The entrepreneur's Essentials which I encourage all of you guys to check out hey folks my guest today is Brett hurt he's the CEO of data.world the Enterprise data catalog for the modern data stack he's also the co-founder of hurt family Investments Brett has co-founded and led bizarre Voice through an IPO as well as core metrics which is acquired by IBM he is a Henry clown fellow and his book is called the entrepreneur's essentials all right ready to take us to the top yeah let's go for it so take us back to bizarre voice first people always go man you know oh Brady started his first company it does well he ipo's it but you've got you know do you have any stories before that were things crashing burned while bizarre voice was actually my fifth company it was definitely the best outcome to date but I think dated out world is much more ambitious and it's incredibly exciting the path we're on with this company um but bizarre voice really popularized customer reviews all over the world it really brought that voice of the customer into websites Walmart and the Home Depot and Best Buy and many others all over the world used it as of today it's in over 20 000 enter or over 20 000 customers rather and over 40 International languages and it's run by a really good friend of mine Keith Nealon and it's it's amazingly scaled company at this point um but yeah that was an incredible journey we were actually rated the number one company to work for in Austin when we're small than medium then large a lot of the insights in my book come from bizarre voice and we've applied them to data.world by the way all proceeds uh to the entrepreneurs Essentials go to supporting female so I don't make a dime on this and also gave away the book for free online at the entrepreneursessentials.com um so guys if you're driving if you're driving and listening the cover is a green cover if you're looking it up on Amazon the entrepreneurs essential so you can look up and we'll certainly link to that in the show notes and promote this and we send it out but but that that's great um give us the give us the on bizarre voice just give us some of the Snippets real quick so like what year did you launch the business so bizarre voice um I launched it with Brant Barton in 2005 and to put that in a historical context there were only three retailers who had customer reviews at the time um in the entire United States and um we launched I think two years before the iPhone Facebook was closed to the public there was no such thing as Snapchat or Instagram or Tick Tock um so there's this entire social wave that was about to come and that really accelerated the business at bizarre voice because Facebook came along and said to all the brands and all the retailers you need to be social you need to be social you need to be social and of course they had invented the world's best ad targeting engine up until um when Apple changed their roles and and really broke that that uh that engine pretty profoundly um but you know here we were in the right time right place and I always say that entrepreneurship is a combination of a lot of grit and a lot of luck and anybody that says there's no luck in it they're absolutely wrong there's a tremendous amount of luck needed to become a successful entrepreneur I mean I was hoping you would mentioned that Salesforce ipo'd in 2006 so you could also argue where you were one of the original sort of SAS models and eventually one of the original Enterprise sasma also do you agree with that I would actually I would actually go back to core metrics my fourth business for that I got to see Mark benioff present when Salesforce was 80 people um when I was raising money for core metrics this is back in 1999 the term SAS didn't exist you launched in 1999 yes wow okay that was core metrics um and the term sassden exists the term ASP application service provider didn't exist I saw benioff speaking at Stanford talking about the end of software and I thought he was brilliant and I was out there trying to raise money for core metrics talking to BCS about clients and you know mainframes and dumb Terminals and clients and servers and like anything to get them to kind of grock what a centralized multi-tenant kind of SAS model would be but those terms again didn't exist back then um and I was like look I'm going to be able to upgrade it for our customers all the time and and they were like but there's already two public companies that one's worth a billion one's worth two billion and they're on Prem and it seems like everybody's going to want their data on-prem and I was like but I'm going to be able to release software so much faster than them and I've talked with almost all of their customers and they're all hating on them um that most of them haven't deployed the ones that have told me that it took 12 to 18 months you're going to be able to deploy this in weeks and the rest is history I mean core metrics just blew past those companies really disrupted them and and we can we can quantify this though too I mean I love the story but we can put real numbers behind this it's funny I mean I'm looking here at your profile I mean you you launched that series a or you closed series a in 1999 not to date you at all but 1999 that's right that's right you're also one of the early uses that I see I haven't seen many earlier than this of debt financing to fund a SAS company so you can preserve your Equity as you go into a series being onwards um you ended up I think raising what was a total raised at core metrics oh gosh I would need to think about that I think it was I think it was close to 80 million oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and are you able to share back in 08 this is crazy timing right remember guys without doing the financial markets I think you close your series then it was for 60 million do you remember what that valuation was no that that's...