How Mozart Data Reached Almost 40 Customers and Under $1M ARR in Under Two Years (Interview with CEO Peter Fishman)

Introduction and What Mozart Data Does

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Peter Fishman. He has over a decade of experience running data and data adjacent teams at companies like Microsoft, Yammer, Opendoor, Platom, and Ease. He realized that building the same type of modern data stacks at each company, which was obviously a pain in the butt, was the opportunity that he's building today. Mozart Data, they launched in 2020. It makes it easy for anyone to set up a modern data stack without a

00:19data engineer in under an hour. That's a big promise. Peter, are ready to take us to the top?

Peter Fishman

00:23>> Let's do it.

Defining the Modern Data Stack

Nathan Latka

00:24What what does a modern data stack look like today?

Peter Fishman

00:27>> A lot of folks know the individual piece of a modern data stack. But what a modern data stack is is it's centralizing your data without sort of requiring a lot of data engineers.

Nathan Latka

00:39Give it a face, though. Name a couple tools today that people would, like, stick in a data stack.

Peter Fishman

00:43>> Well, I would like to think Mozart Data is the tool that people No.

Nathan Latka

00:46Besides your own. Come on.

Peter Fishman

00:47>> But but beyond that, people know EL tools like Fivetran and Stitch. People are certainly familiar with data warehouse options, the the biggest and and and baddest being Snowflake, but also Google BigQuery or or Amazon Redshift.

01:06>> And then people also think now about transform, and they think a bit in many different flavors in terms of observability, data governance, a lot of BI tooling, a lot of reverse ETL. So really, it's about taking data from the silos in which it gets generated and turning it into something useful at the end, which is generally a chart that people will then take action on or sending it back into a system that that people use out

01:37>> in the field and operationalize.

Nathan Latka

01:39And, Peter, when folks are signing up for this and paying you, what are they I mean, me a sort

Peter Fishman

01:42>> of a sweet spot.

Nathan Latka

01:43Are they paying on average per month to use your technology?

Pricing and ACV

Peter Fishman

01:46>> Sure. So, you know, our ACV is around $20,000, but the median is around a thousand dollars a month. Okay. So people are, you know, people are essentially, you know, from that getting data infrastructure. So data infrastructure can be, you know, ten years ago, would take a number of data engineers and a very big check to one of the big tech companies to get started. Today, you know, not just with our tool, but with many tools, you

02:16>> swipe a credit card and you're off to the races, you know, for as little as, say, dollars.

Nathan Latka

02:22Yep. Okay. Very cool. So you guys got going on this in what year?

Founding Story and Y Combinator

Peter Fishman

02:26>> We're a pandemic company. So we started in April 2020.

Nathan Latka

02:29Alright. 2020. And have you guys raised or you decided to, bootstrap?

Seed Fundraising Approach

Peter Fishman

02:34>> So we did Y Combinator that summer and then raised the seed round after Y Combinator.

Nathan Latka

02:41And what are they doing these days? Is what is it? 1 a 100 and 160 k for 7%, something like that?

Peter Fishman

02:46>> So in our class, you got the the rich price of 150 k for 7%, and now I believe it's a 125 k. So our our our company had, you know, had an implied higher cap. But then and then subsequently, we raised a a variety of of money through other safe notes.

Nathan Latka

03:06I think you'd raised 4,000,000 in a more traditional seed after that. Is that accurate?

Peter Fishman

03:11>> It ended up being actually 6 through kind of a a seat extension.

Nathan Latka

03:17And what was non you said nontraditional. What was nontraditional about how you did it?

Peter Fishman

03:23>> In insofar as that it was in in steps. So typically when you think about like an extension or a bridge, you're talking about a company that's on its, like, sadly, like its last legs and trying to figure out a way to get to that next round. When we did it, we did it a little bit opportunistically just because I think the market for, you know, data tooling is, you know, certainly the investor market for data tools

03:46>> is really hot.

Nathan Latka

03:48I'd argue it's very advantageous to always have an open round. That means anytime you meet someone you think can help you and they say, I'd love to put money, and you can say, yes. The docs are ready. The thing's thing. They just boom. Boom. Sign the docs, and you can get them in. Versus if you're closed, you gotta spin up a whole new process. It's a lot. You say wait till our series a, right, and then

04:03you lose them.

Peter Fishman

04:04>> Right. Sure. The difference between, you know, raising, like, on on a signature versus, you know, if you're raising a price round, you know, there's an official close date, there's, you know, lining up, you know, all of the terms and all the, like not just the not just of the term sheet, but of all of the sort of legalese that goes back and forth about edge cases. So, you know, obviously, if you're an entrepreneur, you get into

04:29>> the business not to argue about sort of the edge cases of what happens when you fail. You instead only really wanna think about, you know, how to make your business better and, you know, how to get that capital efficiently.

Nathan Latka

04:41That's right. Now most folks in their seed round these days are selling between sort of 10 and 20% of the business. Were you guys sort of in that same range?

Peter Fishman

04:47>> Yeah. I think I think you, you know, you you have to sell a meaningful chunk of your company and your efforts over over the coming years, you know, when you're raising and you don't have too much to show for it. The short version is you can bootstrap a company, and that's always impressive. But then you can also take, you know, the gas fuel and try to try to capitalize on a market opportunity that you see. So,

05:11>> yeah, we were we were selling what feels like, in in hindsight, a large chunk of our company. I don't know.

Nathan Latka

05:16Yeah. Yeah. You're talking like six on, like, a 35 or 40 pre, something like that.

Peter Fishman

05:21>> Yeah. I think and then, you valuations change rapidly at the early stage, so a hint of traction is really incredibly valuable. So it is the case that, I think, you can think about preproduct and the team raising on your resume and your network, and then thinking about having a product and being able to go into a pitch meeting just with a demo as opposed to a deck. In fact,

05:50>> we didn't really raise with a with a deck just because, you know, I think now people really are most interested in seeing what it is that the product does. Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

06:00A 100%. Yep. Yep. Yep. So talk to me about the traction. Do you remember how you got your first customer? Tell us that story.

Peter Fishman

06:05>> I mean, you always you always remember your first dollar. So Yep.

Nathan Latka

06:09Tell tell me.

Peter Fishman

06:10>> So my so first off, I'll say that my cofounder and I, this is our second time doing a company together. So ten years ago, we started a hot sauce company together. And I don't remember really just our first sale, but I remember our first sale to somebody that didn't have one of our last names.

Nathan Latka

06:25Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Fishman

06:26>> That was a really special moment for us. Now in the data space, you don't really sell to you know, I don't sell to my parents.

06:34>> So, you know, our first customers, unsurprisingly, came from our network. It was folks that wanted to not just use, you know, our product as a modern data stack, but actually really have the high touch experience of working

Nathan Latka

06:47Who was it, though, Peter? Can you name them? Are they is are they okay being public?

Peter Fishman

06:50>> Yeah. I mean, we we talk about these companies all the time. So in at the end of Y Combinator, we we made three sales, and we left Y Combinator with three sales. So that was Tempo and and Rippling were sort of the the two largest, and then Gaia GPS was was another sale. So we made three sales during Y Combinator, so one per month. So actually not that impressive, but, like, you can think of it as

07:16>> infinity percent growth. But, yeah, those those three, like, you know, we sent out the invoices at the same time. So, technically, I think the first Stripe payment came from I I believe the answer is tempo, but I'm but oh, now I'm embarrassed. I bragged about remembering the first dollar. In in reality, it's just, you know, an electronic transaction, so I didn't actually receive that fistful of cash.

Nathan Latka

07:38Fair. Fair. Fair. Fair. Okay. Fast forward to today. How many customers are working with now?

Current Customer Count

Peter Fishman

07:42>> Yeah. We're working with a few dozen, almost 40 customers. And, you know, obviously, that spans a variety of sizes and stages and and and industries. We're not specific to b to b or b to c.

Nathan Latka

07:56Mhmm. Peter, 40 customers at that ARPU earlier, the median, you caught it up a grand. It means you guys doing about $40,000 a month right now in revenue?

Peter Fishman

08:03>> Well, I think it would be it would be a little bit more than that. Right? So so we are doing a little bit better than that. Haven't hit the magical 7 figures of ARR. But

Revenue and ARR Progress

Nathan Latka

08:12Come on. You've got you've got ten days left. Can you break $83k a month? Give him ten more days?

Peter Fishman

08:17>> I like to think of it by the way, I I take the challenge on very seriously, but I like to think of the opportunity as our our our, you know, fiscal year end in January 31. So so give me give me forty one days, and we'll see we'll see if we can make it.

Nathan Latka

08:32Okay. Cool. So you you maybe your average in it is not a thousand bucks a month. It's maybe more like, you know, $1,500 a month, and you're more like 60 or $70k in total.

Peter Fishman

08:39>> I think you quoted you quoted the median.

Nathan Latka

08:41So just

Peter Fishman

08:41>> like in many things in stats, we're definitely a case where, you know, you have some companies that are 6 figure companies, so the average looks a lot higher than the the median. We really do aim to service the small company that's just trying to get started in their data journey, but then we hope to service them as they become unicorns, decacorns, etcetera. We have a number of companies that have become unicorns while they've been Mozart customers.

09:06>> We like to call that causality in practice.

Nathan Latka

09:08Of course. 100%. Yeah. Exactly. That's the only reason they're a unicorn now.

Peter Fishman

09:14>> I'll go with maybe. Maybe. In me is like, maybe.

Nathan Latka

09:18Yeah. And, Peter, help us understand growth rate. If you're on $60, $70 grand a month today, where were you a year ago? You remember?

Peter Fishman

09:23>> Sure. You know, in general, we've been growing 10% month over month, which is basically a seven month double time. So, you know, when when you're in YC

Nathan Latka

09:31Hold on, Peter. You gotta make this simple for my honest. You were doing about 20 a month a year ago.

Peter Fishman

09:34>> Yeah. You know, we left YC with only 20 k, but, like, yeah. So if you kinda think about us as having done, you know, over over, you know, a number of doubles in the last in the last year, you know, we had fewer than 200 k at, you know, at the sort of Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:50If you double if you doubled your revenue from a year ago twice, you went from 15 k to maybe 30 k, then 30 doubled up to north of 60 at this point. I think that probably is on on track.

Peter Fishman

09:57>> That's about right.

Nathan Latka

09:58Yeah. Okay. Cool. Tell me more about the team. How many folks today?

Team Size and Structure

Peter Fishman

10:01>> We are 22 people.

Nathan Latka

10:03Wow. How many engineers?

Peter Fishman

10:05>> We're basically 12 technicals.

Nathan Latka

10:0812. Okay. What do the other 10 do?

Peter Fishman

10:11>> We do sales and marketing.

10:15>> I think a big part of SaaS,

10:18>> don't call it sales and marketing, we call it GTM. So and then on top of it, we have a lot of customer support, so folks that are that are helping teams get up and running. One of our business models is is is similar. I call it the, like, superhuman, where we love to give people a push in the back. So superhuman, in order to use essentially their email interface, you know, they they make you get on

10:40>> a fifteen minute call with them so they can explain a lot of their functionality. We like to do the same. We think that really the hardest challenge in data is just getting started. So having sort of an expert by your side to make that that start happen, we think, is really valuable to our company. So a lot of our motion is not just about, like, new ARR, but actually expansion ARR as companies really get their their

11:03>> data systems going. Yep.

Nathan Latka

11:04We do How many CSM reps do you have today?

Customer Success and Sales Team

Peter Fishman

11:07>> We have we have zero that have that title, but we have we have three folks that kind of have, like, data analytics experience.

Nathan Latka

11:16Okay. And how many are sale like, full time sales reps today with a quota at the company?

Peter Fishman

11:20>> So we have a sales team of five.

Nathan Latka

11:22They all carry quota?

Peter Fishman

11:24>> So we have one AE and one head of sales that that basically are closers.

Nathan Latka

11:29Interesting. Okay. Very cool. Yeah. And and then obviously, net dollar retention is critical as you scale. A 150, 200% is like would be world class. The only way to get there though is if you set up your pricing tied very closely to a, you know, a high value utility metric. What is that metric for you?

Usage-Based Pricing and NDR

Peter Fishman

11:43>> So we didn't wanna reinvent the wheel on pricing. At the end of the day, we charge very similar to many companies in the data space, which is based on compute and based on rows. So this is sort of the the new language of data tooling, and, you know, we didn't invent that wheel. So so it is the case that compute is a really good proxy for, you know, value created. So if you're essentially using your data

12:08>> warehouse, presumably, you're getting some value out of it, and that's a that's a pretty common metric. That's that's largely how that is how Snowflake charges.

Famous Five: Books, CEOs, and Tools

Nathan Latka

12:18Yep. Snowflake, obviously, a lot of people point to them and say, you know what? They don't even feel like SaaS. It's almost pure utility based, almost like a gas bill, and that's why they have NDR that's through the roof. Anyways, great story here, Peter. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book.

Peter Fishman

12:30>> Moneyball. I'm a quantitative person.

Nathan Latka

12:32Of course.

Peter Fishman

12:33>> It inspired really my career.

Nathan Latka

12:35Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Peter Fishman

12:38>> Yeah. I think in general, I'm always there are many CEOs that I look up to, but I love the Stewart Butterfield example of the pivot into the tool that they were using and the great success that they had after that. And I had worked in essentially the enterprise space that that was about I I worked at Yammer for a number of years.

13:01>> Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

13:02Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Mozart?

Peter Fishman

13:06>> Well, my favorite tool is we use Mozart.

Nathan Latka

13:09So Besides your own?

Peter Fishman

13:10>> Well, it's I don't know. It's a I don't know if that's a cop out, but I also love Mode. I I don't wanna say I'm too partial to any BI tool, but that was something that really it was Mode came out of tool that I had built with

Nathan Latka

13:26Well, Derek from Mode was on the show recently. That's also X Yammer. Yammer Yammer execs were the first checks into that business. Or did you write a check?

Peter Fishman

13:33>> I was I was the first check. I don't know if gonna say if were to David Sachs or if he gave it to me. But That's hysterical. So, you know, so I will I, you know, of course, I'll, you know I have to I say we love all BI tools. Many of them are downstream partners, but I I will say that I take a lot of pride in seeing the way that Mode has come along as

13:54>> really incredibly

Nathan Latka

13:55No. Derek gave you guys a ton of credit. I mean, I he we spent probably three or four minutes when I interviewed him, and he was saying how excited he was that his ex Yammer team basically backed him early on. He came on the show and talked to us. You know, they broke $19,000,000 run rate last year, just past $40,000,000 run rate. The growth rate he has is incredible.

Peter Fishman

14:11>> And it's an an amazing tool. I think it's it's an amazing way to do ad hoc analysis, and real practitioners really understand and respect that.

Nathan Latka

14:19Why didn't you join Mode instead of launching Mozart?

Peter Fishman

14:23>> Well so so it was a very tough day for me. Both Derek, Josh, and Ben, the three cofounders, walked into my one on one with Derek and explained that we're not gonna have the one on one, that they were leaving in in a handful of weeks to go start Mode. I said, oh, man. What am I doing? But I I actually really loved the the challenges that I that I had at Microsoft at the time and

14:47>> and and spent my time on a number of different Microsoft products. Got to touch, you know, billions of users have that larger company experience.

Nathan Latka

14:56Your options did pretty well.

Peter Fishman

14:57>> I hear I

14:58>> don't know what you're talking about.

Nathan Latka

15:00Yeah. Okay.

15:01Alright. Mode's your favorite tool. Okay. Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Peter Fishman

15:05>> I'm a five or six hour person. It's not because I'm, like, grinding the midnight oil as a startup founder, but because I've always sort of been able to oddly exist off of five or six hours of sleep.

Nathan Latka

15:16And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Peter Fishman

15:19>> I recently got engaged. My partner works across the street, not in tech, but as a news reporter.

Nathan Latka

15:27So cool. Okay. So any kids or no?

Peter Fishman

15:29>> We have no kids.

Nathan Latka

15:30And how old are you, Peter?

Peter Fishman

15:32>> I am 41.

Advice for Younger Self

Nathan Latka

15:3341. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Peter Fishman

15:39>> Well, I mean, there are many there are many things. Like, I wanna kind of, like, go back and, like, in, like, back to the future two style bet on every, like, subsequent Super Bowl or or winning. But, you know, in general, I would say, you know, it's kind of okay, the ups and downs of a career. So sort of having kind of that perspective on sort of nonlinear progress being a reality of life and careers. And,

16:02>> you know, it's not about sort of getting there kind of first or fastest, but sort of enjoying the ride in a cliched way.

Nathan Latka

16:09Guys, there you have it. Messy data to analysis ready very quickly. They launched in 2020. They're called a COVID company. About $15,000 a month in revenue a year ago, $70,000 a month. Not reinventing the wheel here. Charge on compute and number of rows, 40 customers to date, did about a $6,000,000 seed round at, call it, a 30 to 40, maybe $50,000,000 valuation when they did that. But team at 22 today scaling quick, 12 engineers, five on the

16:32sales team scaling nicely. Peter, thank you for taking us to the top.

Peter Fishman

16:35>> Thanks so much.

Nathan Latka

16:37One more thing before you go. Have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM Central.

17:03Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big fundraise,

17:25a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up

17:47for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

18:06got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.