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 actually incorrect um that that was uh I was already at bizarre voice at the time so I got core metrics to a point where I felt very very confident that it was going to be successful and then I just felt like the timing for bizarre voice was too compelling and I wanted to move on to my next project what year was that Brett that was 2005. so I remained the board of um for metrics for a period of time and loved you know loved the company loved the people there um and then it exited to IBM for around 300 million dollars in 2010 and that was my first significant exit um but it was two years before bizarre voice went public and bizarre voice was over a billion dollar IPO and one of the top five IPOs of 2012. um so it was a it was it was it was good liquidity from core metrics but then bizarre voice was really the entrepreneurial dream come true this is incredible so do you remember you said you left in core Matrix quote when you felt it was comfortable Quantified in terms of Revenue do you remember AR in 2005 um I think it was around 30 million uh at that point and do you remember what it scaled to five years later in 2010 before the acquisition I don't okay yeah okay so you basically also that takes a lot of discipline I mean this thing it's growing it's 30 million AR you go man I'm just feeling so compelled by this bizarre voice thing did you have trusted lieutenants at coremetrics maybe co-founders then that sort of gave you extra you know Comfort to leave yeah actually I left with Brent Barton who became my co-founder and it was it was a little bit of an awkward scenario because Brandt um approached me at coremetrics and said hey I'm gonna go start another company at some point and I'm wondering if you'd be on my board of directors and Brant was absolutely amazing on our client services team he led um really one of the most difficult parts of the SAS model which is to make sure that you're doing a great job of servicing your customers I always say you have to constantly be re-earning their trust as a SAS company because it's a recurring Revenue business so you've got to stress that last ass software as a service and really make sure you're providing great service so anyways I was I was I was fascinated with how um great Brant was at his job and when he first said this to me I thought well gee I don't want to lose him but then I thought I'm a real hypocrite if I don't meet with him about this and then when I met with him he said hey would you like like to brainstorm with me too I could really use a brainstorming partner and we brainstormed and we came up with bizarre voice and then I realized or I really felt deep in my bones at the market timing for that was so compelling and that it was such a big vision and it could be a bigger company than core metrics that I thought to myself I've got to do this but I I trust me I would not have left for metrics had it not been in a good State and the reason I say that is for metrics had gone through a lot of trauma we launched in 1999 um you know what happened next yeah we had 100.com customers we were ringing the the bell all the time winning new customers and 97 of our customers went out of business in the.com Crash and so I had a huge amount of scar tissue we had let go of two-thirds of the people um you know I literally I lived in San Francisco at the time we're in Austin now and I would tell my wife I literally feel like I'm being punched in the God but ultimately I got the company back on a good track alongside a great team and we built you know we've signed Walmart and built back up into a big company we became rated the number one in Industry by Forester research who is the most important research firm in that particular industry for retail and that was back in the days of Kate delhagen and and a bunch of other amazing people that worked there um and so once it got to a point where I was like okay there's just it's undeniably going to be successful now I will tell you that I wish that the CEO um that took it Forward didn't sell it so early but you know it had gone through some trauma I mean honestly it could have been an IPO just a couple of years later um but I guess that he and and the board felt like that was a compelling offer but they they kind of Miss like the hockey stick that was coming in SAS just a just a couple of years later so the multiple wasn't as great as it could have been and um it it really changed IBM I mean it became IBM's core analytics stack but it could have been so much more Yep hey I want to move forward here and another minute on both our voice and then spend the rest of time on your new company data world or Draw excited about uh on bizarre voice though you so Brandon you are getting together one question I always get from listeners is Nathan I've got a great co-founder but we haven't had the tough Equity conversation and they always end up just saying 50 50 which I go man was it really lazy they just didn't have a tough conversation so they said 50 50. how did you guys do that did you and Brett just split it 50 50 or how did you have that conversation you and Brent sorry did you just send it or how'd you do that yeah so we um that was the toughest conversation we ever had actually um because there's a lot of romance in starting a company together and you know I truly love Brant today he's one of my best friends um but I would not do a 50 50 deal I I knew what kind of value I had to the business and I served on the board of directors of shop.org I had you know a tremendous Network out there and I had tremendous know-how I mean for metrics was my fourth business and it was a successful business and so I um I negotiated with them I won't tell you where we ended up but we did not end up at 50 50 but I ended up with um a much bigger Equity stake but at the end of the day Brandt did incredibly well financially and it was also a dream come true for him and one thing I'm particularly proud of is by the time bizarre voice went public like two things one is we had only raised 23 million and we had over 100 million run rate with 13 million left in the bank y combinator said it was one of the top five most Capital efficient SAS businesses of all time you were out north of 100 million bucks in ARR in 2012 when you ipo'd yes wow 13 million of capital use over a six year period that's incredible it was a good burn multiple yeah that was a good burn multiple and then the second thing is that um we you know you know those uh firms that gauge how you're doing on giving equity and kind of how generous you are we were the second most generous SAS company um by that time 2012 out of all SAS companies had gone public before in terms of how generous we were with Equity to all of our employees and so how big was the example at IPO yeah we had a big one and and the thing that I love about that is that how big though right was it I think it was like 20 ish percent that we have given to employees and um and the thing that's amazing about that is that um it led to over 60 companies started by former bizarre voice people like that's how big of an exit it was and how much wealth it created and I'm a capitalist and that ripple effect um Capital you know capitalist impact is very real in terms of what happens with non-profits what happens with people starting their own businesses the type of know-how they get to create great cultures um you know as I mentioned bizarre voice was the top rated company dated out world is rated in the top three companies to work foreign data world you you launched I believe in what 20 2015. yeah we launched in uh what we founded in 2015 and we launched uh data.world it's dated Dot World by the way um I always pronounced to that um but we launched uh on July 11th of 2016 on slurpee day which we didn't really expect it was going to be on 7-Eleven um but uh that turns out that was slurpee day um but you know that was a that was a great launch and we've now become the world's largest collaborative data Community um for open data sets and then we have a for-profit division of the company which is focused on the data catalog industry and we've been a great disrupter there in a very similar way by the way to core metrics if you go all the way back to 99 um because we're we're competing here primarily against Elation and calibra which are both primarily on-prem most of the revenue comes from on-prem and they come out with a couple of releases a year we come out with over a thousand product releases a year literally released software two to three times a day a that's the pace of innovation here at data.world that's incredible tell me how many years it took you to break a million dollar run right at data world at data.world um we didn't even make a dollar of Revenue until we had raised over 50 million dollars and um we didn't break a dollar of Revenue until 2018 and the reason why is it's a very different business than bizarre voice it's a very wide surface area if you understand the data catalog space it's basically a library for all of your internal data assets so it sits on top of snowflake and data bricks and Oracle and netizen all other systems both modern and old and it sits on top of Microsoft power bi and Tableau and looker and Google data studio and a bunch of others um you know Domo and a bunch of other older bi systems so we have over 95 Integrations and the surface area of what we're doing is really wide and we also have to be incredibly secure like you can imagine the CSO process that we go through with customers we have a lot of cyber security customers on our platform a lot lot of companies you would have heard of that are that are truly big and we're in every Market vertical now we're in universities government agencies you know local state we're in um a lot of Corporations you know from technology companies to financial services to health care to um to you know travel and Retail and on and on and on so Brett just to pull this forward one of the things I want to get for our listeners here is they're all trying to manage dilution right as they scale they want to go hit a home run but they also don't want to dilute you did a great job obviously you already talked about it at prior companies this one's a little bit different in terms of the broader reach but help me understand your series B was a 26 million series B I believe in 2020. most folks in this series be there selling 10 of the company where are you sort of in that same range so we're we're about 50 50 owned right now between investors and internally um we've raised um over 132 million today the last round we raised was from Goldman Sachs that was a 50 million dollar round they put in 40 million of that 50 million and we were over subscribed on the remaining what was the post money on that are you comfortable sharing yeah I can't share that on a podcast most of the major wire and all the others try to get that all the time yeah most folks I mean look at you can sort of predict I mean most folks are doing series C especially in early 2022 I mean you're selling somewhere between five and you know 10 15 of the company is it can you say you're sort of in that same range well we we closed on our series C in 2022. yep so we did it after the crazy multiples which turned out to be a huge blessing because there's a lot of companies that raised at like 100x AR multiples and that's a crushingly high multiple to live up to and so a lot of those companies are getting recapped we're not in a recap situation so you were more like 20 30X something in that range I I don't feel comfortable this goes in but but we were we were we were in a very normal type of range well hey bro you got to teach my audience they don't know to normal range but I also want to respect your privacy can you give a range you're comfortable with so there's a concrete takeaway for the audience but what still protects what you're trying to protect we were we were way way way south of 100x AR okay waste okay that's great so moving forward to today just help me understand pricing model what's the average customer paying you per year for this data platform you've built so I don't I don't discuss average selling price um that would give a lot of good competitive Intel but I can tell you the way we charge is we charge on a platform basis and then we charge um users above that so when we upsell customers we're typically upselling on the number of users and we're actually becoming the most deployed data tool of all time at our customers how do you measure that well one of the largest service firms in the world has 85 percent of their employees using data.world there's nothing that's ever taken off like that for them um you know another company which is do you know if they've tried others though I mean that's sort of a I mean it's saying you have 85 penetration in one of your customers well yeah but what I mean what about someone who tested calibra and tested you yeah so that was one where they failed with Cleburn they never got okay there we go they never got over 12 users and with us they're at 31 000 users okay that makes more sense talking about your supporting all this infrastructure perspective as we wrap up here last two minutes what's your total team size today and how much engineering power do you have there yeah so we're about 150 people today and our engineering team is getting a lot more efficient right now because of generative AI like all engineering teams are um so we're all in on that and we're also all in on it from a product standpoint because our platform is built on what's called a Knowledge Graph and that three-dimensionalizes data Google search is actually built on a Knowledge Graph and Facebook social engine is built on a knowledge graph and a large part of Amazon so we've got the perfect technology base actually for generative AI but we're also using it very heavily internally and you know a lot of our team is engineering at this point um like how many of the 150. yeah it's it's uh it's it's around a third of our company for this okay that's right and when you say you have like 31 000 members at that one company I just want to make sure these are not like free because you're just giving away that's easy these are people they're paying for these seats this is paid yeah so when you say in the Press you have 1.6 million members these are not just free users floating around these are paid seats on the platform okay so there's two two sides of it it's not 1.6 million um what I said earlier is it's 2.1 million down the free side um and then we don't disclose how many are on the paid side but we have two parts of the business we're B Corporation one part is a free utility to leverage open data sets from all over the web and collaborate on those for free and contribute to the public body of knowledge about cancer and climate change and poverty and nutrition all of these important things that part of the business has trained the paid part which is the data catalog of business and the way you can think about it is that the the first part of the business is essentially like a like a free data catalog for open data in the second part of the business is a data catalog just for a company just for their private data and that's where all of those Integrations and everything else come into play yeah sorry just to be clear on April 5th 2022 usable TechCrunch quote he claims the data.world now has more than 1.6 million members across customers including the associated price and paying on random house that's where I got that number from my question is I want to make sure when we're saying members are these paid seats are these people contributing to your learning model that might be free those are people contributing to the learning model yeah that's just dated because that's a whole TechCrunch article but yeah that's that's now over 2.1 million oh wow impressive Okay cool so they're all contributing to your learning model and then you've got uh companies like this one with 31 000 seats where they're all paying for each each of those seats yes that's right you've taken companies to 100 million bucks in Revenue a couple of times you're not going to share this but my best estimate on your Revenue today with 150 employees most VC back companies do between 100 and 200 000 bucks in Revenue per employee which would put you at like 20 million bucks ish in ARR how many years do you think it'll take you to break 100 million bucks in Revenue with this idea yeah that's not something I'm going to disclose you're like a VC um this is like if you're if you're gonna write me 100 million dollar check then I'll disclose some of these things well look there's a lot of funders that want to learn from you um and no one can understand it so I'm always going to ask the question um right uh and so so I guess I mean what can you share anything about how you take an idea from where you are today to north of 100 million bucks since you've done this so many times it's it's all in my book um the entrepreneurs Essentials um I I talk about specifically how to build the sales team how to do it in a capital efficient way how to structure your culture how to hire um how to ultimately come up with the right business model so everything about that is in our book are there numbers in the book there are numbers in the book for companies that have either sold or gone public yeah speaking my language but on that note let's wrap up with the famous five number one your favorite book besides your own I love Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker because it's so data driven and really makes you optimistic for the future and takes chapter by chapter issues like inequality or food or energy or anything you're worried about and shows you the no BS data throughout human history to show you that the world is actually progressing in a really beautiful way overall versus the fear-mongering that goes on pretty constantly out there and under the radar CEO or founder that really impresses you that you're following um I think Ross burdorf is incredible we're investors in his company they recently closed around at 1.7 billion and um they're disrupting Legal Zoom and he's he it's an interesting story because it's first time in the COC you have to say the company Brett it's Zen business Zen business in business yeah I cut you off go ahead okay yeah yeah so I mean you know he he's it's his first time in the CEO seat he was the C2 of homewave before it's been a real joy to Mentor him and really just awesome to see how well that company's doing and they're also a proud beat for you know when we became a b Corp in Austin um there were six companies that followed up and made that move and I know they did because I talked with their CEOs about it when we made that move and they asked me why are we doing this and and uh I really believe that's the next stage of capitalism capitalism 2.0 and guys if you want to learn from Ross you can find his interview he did on this show which a lot of good data 2019 each year they broke four million in Revenue 2020 he shared they broke 15 20 21 they're over 45 million bucks in Revenue as they're displacing large folks like LegalZoom doing a capital efficient way their series B was a 56 Million Dollar Round on 256 post which he shared about and then the one that that Brad just mentioned was a series c 200 million at 1.7 post money a really really great story there from Ross Brand number number three what's your favorite online tool for building data World beside besides your own or when you own equity in um I I've got to say that uh it is becoming very quickly GitHub co-pilot just because you know the way it leverages open ai's codex and the way it's lifting all of our productivity on the engineering side which is as you know a very high cost uh part of any business and it's turning our Engineers into super super power so I love that technology number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night I get seven to eight that's great situation married single kids married for 27 years um and my wife is my investing partner we've invested in over 130 startups in the past 12 years we're in 40 BC funds as well so we have our own family office um as you mentioned at the at the top and we have two kids our daughter is 18 and she's going off to Tulane University in the fall that was her dream school and our son is 13 we have his bar mitzvah in Israel this year in June which we can't wait for oh that's awesome very cool friend how old are you I'm 51. last question take us home here something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh gosh um well I'll stick with the I'll stick with the kid theme for a second um I took this path of being an entrepreneur and when I graduated from the warden school um I made zero dollars for a long time and it took a long time to gain wealth on the entrepreneurial path but I knew it was what I was going to do my wife and I talked a lot about it before we got married um and because of that we waited for a long time to have kids we didn't have our first child until we didn't get pregnant until we were 32 and I would have gotten started earlier um all things considered and you know they say that you live with no regrets in Life or some people say that I think that's BS I think there's lots of regrets in life and that's one where I would have just said to myself hey believe believe in your in yourself more believe in...