How Y42 CEO Hung Dang grew Y42 to $13.7M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is hongdong he's the founder of y42 started his career though on the live event business and in 2014 he co-founded party like gatsby a global event series hosting more than a hundred thousand guests driven by thin margins he needed great data infrastructure that ultimately ended up uh ended up with him building a tool called mitra intelligence which ended up being acquired by a german fortune 100 company there he realized a massive need which has helped him build his current company y42 an easy and scalable data platform hong you're ready to take us to the top cool nathan i'm such a big fan thanks for having me on this podcast very excited you bet what does y 42 stand for you know i'd be very pragmatic 42 is the answer to everything in the universe if you have read the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy uh why is you know like why why like why 42 and i'm being very pragmatic here hey it's a three-letter.com domain okay it's uh that's unbeatable so you cannot beat us in seo i know i lose a lot of romance when i say that to the nerds out there that follow us because of the name but that's the reality oh my god i love this okay this is great so so tell me a little bit more about who's using this tool is is it really the marketing team that knows does not know how to code or is it really like data engineers that want to do their work faster um so our go-to-market is very simple we acquire companies that hire their first data engineer data analyst the first data person so to say and this data person doesn't want to stitch together five or six different tools like integration orchestration visualization uh transformation whatsoever and so they want to go with an all-in-one tool and this is why we are the very natural choice for any company that starts out with a data journey uh at the same time so the only math that we really have to solve is uh how do we let them outgrow us um that's the whole business model uh fun fact uh like you said in the beginning i actually built this tool with smes in mind so i was running the entire data pipeline for this german fortune 100 company that acquired us and i analyzed you know the data and i had to build that infrastructure for other people to consume and so i feel in the event industry you have a lot of data so you have like huge amount of people you know we were analyzing all the events from ed sheeran justin bieber the biggest festival whatsoever and there are hundreds of thousands of people producing billions of data points but the people who were consuming this data were not the most sophisticated and so this is why we had to build something very easy and scalable but also in a setup of you know a rather big company but somehow you know it works out very well for startups this value proposition and this is how we went to market however we see a very increasing interest from smes which yeah would be harder for us to close as a young startup and which is why we didn't focus until this point but uh i think moving forward sme will play a very big role within our go to market as well let's circle back to that in a second but first your current customers i mean what are they paying you on average per month to use the technology all in one yeah um so 10 to 30 k is the annual contract value um so it's somewhere in the middle the average would be around 20k okay around 20k that's great and then take me back to how you got this going now are you a soul founder yes i'm a solo founder so i want to dig here a little bit because everyone always tells you like yo you need co-founders you need balance but i think you had a bit of a financial win when you sold amitri did you pour basically all of those winnings back into y42 and that's why you own 100 on day one um yes something along this line but you know i um i grew up in vietnam actually and i i came to germany when i was eight so um i actually grew up you know not very wealthy and so i uh i wanted to take a lot of the money that i made and give it to my family and my parents that was very important to me so and whatever was you know kind of left uh of course you're all in i went back into uh y42 i still you know at my previous company i built a data solution very niche just for the event industry um and this time i wanted to go all in and say hey i can build it globally i can make this you know i can uh yeah build a company in europe a data stack that the world has not yet seen and so that's why i came back into the game and to be fair you know when when i say it came in with little money i could have done it for a long time by myself and this is why i started out with hey i'm the solo founder i'm gonna dictate how it goes i don't really need pc money and i'm gonna build it you know from a clean slate it doesn't matter how long it takes me but i'm gonna build this tool that solves the problem first principle and i don't wanna stitch together six different tools to solve that you know problem and basically you know like battling complexity with complexity so really how do i solve it clean slate i could have spent like two three years building it right but would have been a bad choice because we need customer feedback along the way and this is why uh yeah sorry to i extended the question a bit uh to sum it up i am the solo founder it has massive advantage uh but don't do that if you don't have the benefit of you know having some uh you know let's say success before that people are actually drawn to you and say hey i will join you on this mission because they've seen that no i had a level of success before and doing that way i'm capable of having roughly 10 to 20 people that you know have a small share in the company but they are very strong they're as strong as you know an old co-founder that i would have so i feel like at the price of one co-founder i have roughly 20 co-founders so that's effective you're talking about your employee stock option pool what did you set that up is like everything like 10 20 how big did you make that uh actually very big um so it's like a split right now deducting all the dilution through you know the the seed and the series a round um i think the effective split is 60 40 right now uh without 60 for me for the for the employees without calculating the vsa pool which has not been distributed yet so it would be a rather 50 50 split it's on a fully diluted basis yeah yeah yeah no i love this i love the model i love that it's a sole founder you can make decisions you can play a long-term game because you had your own success how old are you i'm 30 by now i love this okay so 30 years old can i ask how much of your own money you put into the business um it's gonna be in the six figures range uh okay okay so we're doing a hundred thousand and a million bucks um your parents and your family are happy when you sold metrics you gave a bunch back to the or mitra it sounds like you gave a bunch back to them huh yeah exactly what did your did your mom buy anything interesting when you gave her a bunch of money um yeah i mean so we are from vietnam like i said so yeah we we did buy a property uh there in in vietnam i was i was curious we were gonna say like you know she bought you know a chicken farm or some really random thing but okay property that's pretty normal anyways you're all in on the business um you're you're scaling when did you when did you write the first line of code for the business um first line of code early 2020 2020. okay and you wrote the initial code right i mean you wrote the mbp yeah roughly 50 of the front end code that you would see was written by me yep okay i know it's not the case anymore it's getting less and less but uh yeah it used to be written a lot by me and when did you get your first customer do you remember who it was can you tell that story uh yes um it was an smb actually finally i just said we don't chase after smes but it was one because we came in with a strong recommendation from one of our business ages also a very close friend of mine uh as a fun fact he's the prince of austria technically speaking uh coming from the house of uh habsburg which you know i know you in the us you don't know that but it's the most influential uh yeah yeah uh aristocrat family that ever existed in europe uh is this this la la la family farmer no no it's not rafa it's uh yeah it's it's it's it's uh an angel of ours he's a very good friend of mine and he did everything he could you know he was driving us around introducing to all the smes and they really need a data solution right and so we we came to this company called philo they're making eight fig uh they're making uh over a billion in revenue you know like that's how big they are and um they they don't have the data solution yet and they look at hours it's like wow it's so easy and so simple uh and this was in in uh september to be fair it took us six months...