How Talend CEO Christal Bemont grew Talend to $140M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is Mike - can he joined Talend as CEO recently but before that was CEO of rapid7 a security software stir up that provides one of the leading security assessment platforms he joined rapid7 in 2008 and grew the company by 10x in just four and a half years rapid7 was consistently one of the fastest growing companies in Boston and was recognized as the best place to work by the Boston Business Journal right Mike are you ready to take it to the top you bet for a good morning thanks for joining so tell us about talent what's the business model and what do you guys do so talent is the software company that's all about helping companies take advantage of their data right we started out years ago because companies have an enormous amount of data that they simply can't use because it's in the wrong place it's in the wrong format it's dirty its inconsistent and until you solve those problems you can't use your data so that's what we saw and what's the revenue model is it pure SAS yes it is pure subscription okay and take us more here give us the back story what our company so we get a sense of the kinds of customers using you are we talking customers paying on average you know 10 bucks a month 10 grand a month 10 million a year what do you guys generally apply in customers tend to be spending let me see fifty to sixty thousand dollars per year on average that's just that's helpful okay good it's a fifty grand a year and then give us more the back story here so it said you join the company where you want how did the initial founders bring you in and were they seducing you or you seducing them they were seducing me so the initial founders started the company in France there are two French entrepreneurs and they've grew the company from zero to fifty million dollars in revenue in one years of us cheese they started the company in 2005 and I came in in 2013 so over eight years they grow from zero to fifty million and we're really looking for someone to take it to the next level and then ultimately take it public and so they in the board were looking to bring me in got it so 2013 you join are doing about 50 million bucks and a our our update us today we're yet in terms of total customers using the platform we have over 1500 customers using the platform right now and business has been growing over 40 percent a year for the last couple of years and you know right now analysts are estimating that we'll get between 145 to 150 million in revenue in this calendar year are we gonna be your last gunner yeah I was gonna say if I take 1,500 customers today times and ACB of call it 50 grand at a minimum you get about 6.2 million bucks a month currently or about 75 million bucks in air our today is that accurate generally no that's actually way low okay what's wrong my customer count number or is your ARPU - you're at your ACB's - low Oh what's going on is there's a couple of things that the deal size I cited is actually an upfront deal size and then customers add you know we have a hundred and twenty percent net expansion rate every year so customer the total size that a customer grows over time above the initial deal size that's thing number one thing number two is I said over 1,500 and so the number is over 1,500 is not exactly 1,500 got it okay so where are you at today you said your analysts are predicting you'll break 100 million this year or you've already passed 100 million we did 100 million in revenue in 2060 in the earth that we went public got it okay said in 2017 last year analysts estimated will do between 145 to 150 we haven't released their earnings report for q4 so I can't be any more precise than that got it okay good but generally speaking still healthy 40 percent year-over-year growth that's right okay yeah route 40 percent yeah let me ask you question a lot of people they say once you make a man or woman wealthy it's very hard to motivate them or once you make them rich it's hard to stay motivated you took the company public you made it to the top of the hill with still motivating you well I tell you what we're just getting started you know we are right now a pimple on the tail of the flea on the dog I mean we're such a small part of an enormous market that you know for us the opportunity is not to take a company public but to really be the leader in an enormous market right where the people spend 16 billion dollars of the year solving the kind of problems that we solve and for us that you know rounding to 150 million we are such a small part of that business right now that we have a lot of room to grow in coming years how do you look at actually yesterday we had billion from data stacks now maybe obviously raise significant capital you could argue the hundred nine million they did in 2014 was essentially going public but how do you look at a company like that in terms of either partnering with them or you know preventing them from eroding your market share or you know how do you view a company like that so they're they're basically one of the number of partners and so anyone that has a database technology data stacks clearly being one or a data processing technology like you know all of the big you know public cloud companies have both databases and data processing technologies our friends over data bricks have sparked all of those players are partners of ours and we leverage all of them because our customers want to use the best frosting technologists in the world the best eight of technologies in the world and so we help them take advantage of all of that technology and you know for us we're kind of a Switzerland in between all of that if acquisitions to drive growth became a key part of your strategy is data stacks too big for you guys to acquire most definitely and also a little anti strategy because once we were to you know really be a a database technology company ourselves we'd be competing with a whole bunch of our partners right which would be a little hard for us position wise that'd be hard for us to play yeah for us when we think about acquisitions we've done a few we just did one a couple months ago most of what we target tend to be relatively smaller companies how's that all right well we just did one that had zero revenue yeah that's you can't you can't give a much smaller than that yeah yeah they had about fifteen or twenty people and that's really kind of directly in the target wheelhouse for us and you know for us you know zero or a couple of million dollars in revenue but most importantly a great team and great technology that you know either deepen some technology that we already are building or broadens us into new markets that we are currently serving that's exactly for us wheelhouse of what we're looking for growing the business through acquiring revenue is a historically a much riskier game to play at an early stage neither were trying away from that right now name two markets you're really interested in right now whether you're gonna build it yourself or you know acquire somethin or whatever card two main markets that were not already in but I can certainly name some of the markets that we've been building into in the last couple years that were not yet the leader in but were on the path yeah name two yeah so one of them would be the self-service data integration market and that's a market where companies are rather than using data engineers you know developer kind of people to solve their data integration problems to blend data together to clean it up and so on allowing anyone who's just a data analyst to do it themselves or if you're comfortable using Excel and a tool like tableau then here's a way for you to solve that same kind of data integration problem in a much much simpler approach bad B one another approach is data governance one of the problems that every customer has is figuring out what happens you know what happened to the data along the way right for this data in this financial report where did this particular field come from and what happened to it along the way and then by the way if I were to change this field in this database what's impacted right which other databases which other field which other downstream things get touched so those kind of impact analysis and so called lineage of where does something come from those are real important problems for companies to solve as they become more and more data-driven this is analogous to the tomato and Walmart where you want to track the embodied energy in the carbon footprint where was grown in China shipped to the US and you want understand all the things that factor that whole supply chain right very cool walk me through more of the story what incentivized you to join right walk me through that the reason is we have a lot of listeners that might be at the same stage call it 10 20 30 40 maybe even 50 million in air are there looking to bring in a CEO how should they approach that for me it was a no-brainer so what I was looking for was a big market where I like the competitive set up a company that had a great team and a unique competitive Stan market in every company that's looking to bringing in a CEO is going to have problems and so the questions were what would the problems the company had and the ones that I felt comfortable I could solve it right in my wheelhouse and you know for talent and we had it was a 16 billion dollar market it was dominated by the the big legacy incumbents Hill High gems and...