How Looker CEO Ben Porterfield grew Looker to $80M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2017.

hello everybody my guest today is frank bien and with over 20 years experience growing and leading technology companies he's built his career on nurturing strong corporate culture and highly efficient teams before looker he was SVP of strategy for storage vendor versatile which was acquired by VMware and VP of strategic alliances at big data pioneer greenplum leading their acquisition by EMC which is obviously not called pivotal he led product marketing and strategy at early scale-out data warehousing company census and was VP of solution sales at Open Text earlier in his career he had executive roles at Dell and the Federal Reserve Frank are you ready to take us to the top let's go all right so tell us about look or obviously there's people understand anything from the bio it's a data play but what are you doing how do you make money yeah you know I mean a lot of people are talking about data I think what lookers trying to do is finally deliver on this promise of creating data cultures and you know I mean that sounds you know big and and wild and everything but really it's about getting every person in an organization to use data to make better decisions it's what everybody's been talking about for 20 years and no one's really been super successful doing why because it's a hard technical problem you know I mean you know you know data you know comes from lots of different places that are very messy you have to clean it up you have to present it to people in the right ways you have to make sure that it's not siloed there were really big you know technical problems that had to be solved over the last 20 years that that even make it reasonable to put data into the hands of the average user and give me a sense of how people are paying for this is it kind of pay-as-you-go per API integration or is it SAS model what's your model yeah I mean we're a SAS company you know we're a subscription model so we pay or we collect you know based on a number of users plus a platform fee it's a pretty traditional SAS model and can even a general sense of the the size of customer people paying ten bucks a month 100 a month a million a month yeah I mean our average customers you know the low-end would be about thirty thousand dollars a year and the high end would be a million I mean so it really runs the gamut so you're very much in the kind of high-touch enterprise space yeah yeah I think we did really well and lots of you know 50-person in under tech companies and then that grew you know grew to companies like uber and Facebook and things like that but but we serve anyone who has a need to access a lot of data and give me the backstory here what year was year one so this we're about six years old the company was founded by a guy named Lloyd Tabb a genius and sort of the tech industry a lot of people know him and he was at a company called Borland way back in the day and he saw mosaic which was he on the first web browser and he quit and he formed a company called commerce tools and and really was one of the first people in Netscape and and helped build that stuff out and he connected with a guy named Mark Randolph he was obviously the founder of Netflix he was a with read at Netflix the original CEO and they got together you know really looking at this data problem and I joined a couple months later and off we went so you were I mean you were there right from beginning and in 2011 yeah I was probably about eight nine months in okay and you know obviously don't be offended here but why they need you oh you know I think you know Lloyd knew what he was good at and Mark knew what he was gonna be good at marks on the board still and you know they wanted someone to come in and help you know run it from a business side okay interesting so 2011 you launched this thing with these partners naughty bootstrap to raise capital yeah we definitely raise capital I think the first year was all about the original customers really capital efficient and once we had a repeatable business model and the ability to go out and sell repeatably to customers we raised money and we've raised about 180 million so far yep so okay 180 million bucks raised founded in 2011 what have you grown your customer base to today yeah so we're about 1200 customers maybe 1300 now somewhere in there but you know work we're growing really nicely yep what do you say really nice thing are you talking about 50 percent year-over-year 20 percent a hundred percent you know we don't go specific but more than 50 that's for sure that's pretty I mean I assume with a hundred eighty million raise you're you're not going from $1 to $2 of ARR yeah that's impressive growth it besides your company you're at yep yep no we're we're really seeing this this you know there hasn't been a breakout vendor in a long time in data I mean tableau might have been the last one and you know I think I think what we're seeing is we're seeing that kind of trajectory where we're a real SAS company on that trajectory in this data space yeah now I mean we can do a little bit of back in napkin math you just mentioned kind of minimum contract by using a 30 K annually range and if you have 12 on our customers it's fair to say you guys are well past the 36 million dollar err our mark at this point correct mm-hmm yeah absolutely but below 100 still yeah I would that's that's a good range okay good big enough where it doesn't hurt you competitively but still gives you enough credit to say listen to this guy who knows what the hell he's doing yeah I mean we're about 400 people now you know we have eight offices worldwide and you know we're really capital efficient whereas headquarters in Santa Cruz California oh I'm envious I'm envious you're not up being affected by the wildfires are you no no we have that you know the Sonoma stuff was what's up this way and there were a couple fires down here but no not too much okay so we under kind of understand teamwinter so know what you're doing tell me more about the economics of this space because it is competitive I mean there's a lot of people vying for kind of this data space how are you acquiring customers yeah you know it's interesting I think a lot of people have been talking about how you get data into the hands of users but if you really think about all the technologies they really grew up around the limitations of the database so you had lots of things to take load off of the database you had ETL you know data prep visualization had all these little pieces and what was ready and what was needed in the world of data was one platform that kind of swept all that stuff together and did it in a different way and that's what we do I mean architectural e we're very different we run on the big fast cloud databases and the Hadoop stuff and all those kind of things that people talk about but really you know we provide this full platform that allows people to kind of do everything but literally I mean literally how are you acquiring folks do you use some of your team there's an outbound sales strategy there's a product marketing what do you tribute acquisition - oh sure yeah I mean so you know we we believe really in focus so we originally focused on a lot of e-commerce kinds of companies really saturated that market moved out from there and it's sort of the bigger you know the bigger you know fortune 2000 kinds of things we're about 80% inside sales so it's an inside sales SAS motion and then you know we're doing more and more enterprise sales as well and what do you like to keep I can as you're scaling of us you've raised capital so you have crater an ATM that works you should you know how to put money and get money out what are you trying to keep your kind of money velocity at when you want to get your CAC back how quickly they're due back yeah I can hear me you know my question about about about payback period how quickly do you like to eat your money back yeah I mean so you know we look at you know sort of those SAS models we would look a little bit like a Marketo looked originally or something like that but if it's more than 18 months you know we start to worry got it fair to say you got you're kind of between 12 and 18 yeah yeah that would be and how do you decide when to get more aggressive there or more conservative you know what I think if you look at a lot of SAS companies you know growing too fast can be a problem the wheels come flying off the bus it's not just that simple unit Union economics but there's a lot of other things and how fast you can scale and grow a business we're a data company we look at this you know a hundred ways from Sunday I mean maintain a lot of metrics not just about ourselves but about other companies that we really look at and and would like to be and and you know that's that's how we drive it so so you know we grow as fast as we need to grow that we can do that successfully without jeopardizing the success of the customer and can you tell me a story since you are a data company I bet you have some kind of unique data points you look at the maybe other SAS platforms don't actually look at tell me about one of those unique metrics you know though so if you think about SAS the the big thing is really that it's subscription and the customer can quit if it's not...