How Snaplogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon grew Snaplogic to $364M revenue and 750 customers in 2023.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or 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 I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka when I do webinar interviews or I give big speeches to thousands of people all over the world I usually will talk about data and sometimes show my dashboards like my SAS dashboard as I'm growing my SAS company the top inbox or my website dashboard which shows how I take Impressions to convert them into email leads and convert them into customers for Nathan la.com the funny thing is guys I build these dashboards with myself no developer and it's basically free and I use one tool to do it you can see the tool at Nathan la.com analytics I'll tell you more later in the show this is episode 16 52 and coming up tomorrow morning we have Maria on she invests $120 million into Financial technology companies if you're a female and you want to see more female Founders and smart women in our world you don't want to miss Maria her company's put through 39 graduates so far and accepting 6 to8 new per year with the New York partnership fund good morning everybody my guest this morning is grav Dylan he's an early investor in a company called Snap logic he joined us CEO in 2009 when he saw the potential to transform how companies integrate applications data and devices for digital business he spearheaded snap logic's rapid growth and overseas its strategy products and operations he was previously the co-founder and CEO of Informatica gra are you ready to take us to the top I'm on it all right let's let's have some fun so first things first I want to understand the trans transition from Informatica to snap logic so what happened at Attica why' you leave Yeah so basically look I uh built that my I would wouldn't say I we in particular my co-founder and I built that up from a garage we had a $75,000 SBA Grant um that we used and then raised Venture Capital to build that into a market leader in the data warehousing and ETL space how much total did you raise we raised $13.5 million got it those were different times it was uh the world for the internet um and it was uh it was uh just um just a uh wonderful time for two for me as a 27y old chief executive uh but it was a lot of working Sundays you know it was 12 odd years of working Sundays took it public uh in 1999 uh was uh then ran it for another 5 years couple of busts 99 bust the 2003 bust 911 and it was 11 12 years is is a long time it's time to go and I think also fundamentally uh this is getting long- winded here but my strategy was to go build new products and you know in a in that kind of public environment there wasn't an appetite for risk there was more of an appetite to harvest earnings per share and so on so it you know it was time for me to move on uh in hindsight I was probably crisp year or two before I did move on be a capitalist a cold-hearted capitalist with me for a second you personally wanting to get your own wealth out of Informatica you deserved it you worked hard to build it how did you extract money for yourself from this did you sell your shares back how' you do that yeah so look I am not a coldhearted capitalist I'm a company builder for me wealth is a byproduct and uh you know it's uh it's just who I am you build something great there's enough for everybody so how did we do it so first of all when when I did the IPO I was able to sell some of my shares at after the IPO in a secondary which is a very good way there was no lock uh no because in the secondary process you registered with the SEC for a secondary sale of shares and some of those Shares are sold to uh uh the some of the proceeds go to the company and some of the proceeds go back to the selling shareholders which were some venture capitalist I took a portion of my uh my shareholding and sold it but it's an open in public view there's a book you build a book uh thanks to uh Charles Phillips and some of the people in Morgan Stanley some of frankot tron's Team here in uh Silicon Valley we did a $480 million secondary of most of the proceeds went to the company but what was what was the primary what you raise in the initial public offering you know I think it was less than 100 it's so uh yeah and so and that's the way to do it that's our Tablo did which which shares some Finance board members with my old company and so on really the secondary was four times as much as the initial huh yeah if you do well that's the right way to do it interesting uh look because the IPO you're also trying to build a brand for yourself nobody knows you as a company or as an executive so if you do a modest IPO you're going to price it so there's wealth uh for the new buyers and as they do well they get a sense you do a couple good quarters and you have the right momentum and then uh they're very much more confident of buying a bigger chunk and at that point you can price it more efficiently instead of trying to do it all in one go and I I certainly feel that was good policy so take us through the exit here how when did you what year did you leave the business in and then how did you get involved with SNAP logic yeah so I left in July 2004 um and for one year I did nothing uh I had certain bucket list items I wanted to learn a language so I learned Spanish I wanted to uh travel in certain parts of the world want to spend some time with my parents before they got too old I did that and uh I also wanted to win the bet that many of my friends made with me that I wouldn't last more than six months so I basically left the country and moov to Argentina I'm like win this I got to get out silicon you you had no internet connection so you were going to win that bet no matter what I was going to win that bat by moving far far away and uh and so I did anyway so uh so how did I get here so basically what I did after Informatica as you can imagine after the time off came back to the valley and then boom it begins right you know someone who knows someone who has an idea and uh many ideas came up I joined a couple of boards I was on a board with then what became our investors in recent horowits I was on a board with them couple other not sort of pro bono type of board things people had helped me and it was time to help others and from that uh I was in a board meeting and you know it became pretty clear that this uh business internet we called it I'm ashamed to admit about 10 odd years ago uh which we now called cloud computing is going to be a big deal you know uh people aren't just going to buy books on the web they're going to balance their books on the web and uh and as that became clear it became clear to me that there was an opportunity for integration 20 no scre up sorry I was going to take you through so 2009 you joined officially kind of a CEO when was the company launch though how long had it been around before you joined yeah so the company actually I put the capital into I would say a science project in about 2006 from my pro bono work on various boards uh and I said to these guys the first couple five six people I wrote him a check and said guys if there's a business here prove it to me and if it is we'll go get the capital for it what was the risk you took what was the check size the initial check was a million dollars okay got it and and was still The Honorable amount to launch something with sure was that part of an Angel round uh no it was I would say well how do we do it you know we structured that as convertible debt because i' been negotia with myself how do I set the valuation that's got to be one of the first first convertible notes really obviously everyone does them now yeah it was a very early one y and I had very good advice from uh my attorneys at Morrison and Forester who had also been attorneys for me at Informatica and at Bea and other companies and they're fantastic guys and they said look how would you set the valuation I'm like that's true why don't you do a convertible note and uh convert that at the first outside money that comes in and in the meantime your Capital goes in as debt and then you convert and that's exactly what we did got and then fast forward to today and then we'll go back to more of the story how much Capital total have you guys raised you know we've raised 136 million okay um and uh it's been in successive rounds uh initially Venture within rent Horowitz and then ignition uh who've done very well with Splunk and they understand machine data from that investment and fabulous return and then most recently we brought in V truvian Partners who are a global growth Equity Firm uh headquartered in London opening an office in Silicon Valley so they led the most recent round and that was the $40 million Series F in December that's correct and what is the okay so now...