How data.world Raised $132M Total and Built a Team of 150 to Disrupt the Enterprise Data Catalog Market (Interview with CEO and Co-founder Brett Hurt)

Intro: Brett Hurt's Background and Prior Companies

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, Brett Hurt, his fourth company, Coremetrics launched in 1999. He left in 2005 after the company broke $30,000,000 in revenue. And in 2010, the company sold for $300,000,000 to IBM. That was his first sort of big cash day, but he left actually earlier in 2005 and launched with his one of his friends, Brandt, Bizarre Voice, which ended up growing to a $100,000,000 in revenue, spending just $13,000,000 to get there and a billion dollar IPO, very capital

00:24efficient. Obviously, Bizarre Boy is taken private in 2018 by Marlin and other stuff has happened since then. But now Brett's focus is data dot world. Competing with Calibre, really a large scale, widespreading data platform, very opposite of the capital efficiency of his earlier companies. He had to spend, well not spend, but raise over $53,000,000 of capital before his first dollar of revenue at Data World, but now scaling team of 150, 50 engineers focused on efficiency and

00:49scaling in a good way. He's written about his success and his book, The Entrepreneur's Essentials, which I encourage all of you guys to check out. Hey, folks, my guest today is Brett Hurt. He's the CEO of data. World, the enterprise data catalog for the modern data stack. He's also the co founder of Hurt Family Investments. Brett has co founded and led Bizarre Voice through an IPO as well as Coremetrics, which was acquired by IBM. He is

01:12a Henry Clown Fellow and his book is called The Entrepreneur's Essentials. Alright, Brett, you ready to take us to the top?

Brett Hurt

01:17>> Yeah, let's go for So

Nathan Latka

01:19take us back to Bizarre Voice first. People always go, man, you know, oh, he started his first company. It does well. He IPOs it, but you've got, you know,

Brett Hurt

01:27>> do you have any stories before that where things crash and burn? Well, Bizarre Voice was actually my fifth company. It was definitely the best outcome to date, but I think data. World is much more ambitious and it's incredibly exciting, the path we're on with this company. But Bazaar Voice really popularized customer reviews all over the world. It really brought that voice of the customer into websites, Walmart and the Home Depot and Best Buy, and many others

Bazaar Voice: Origins and Market Timing

Brett Hurt

01:54>> all over the world used it. As of today, it's in over 20,000 customers, rather, in over 40 international languages. And it's run by a really good friend of mine, Keith Neelan. And it's it's amazingly scaled company at this point. But, yeah, that was an incredible journey. We were actually rated the number one company to work for in Austin when we were small, then medium, then large. A lot of the insights in my book come from Bizarre

02:22>> Voice, and we've applied them to data. World. By the way, all proceeds to The Entrepreneurs Essentials go to supporting female entrepreneurs, I don't make a dime on this. And also gave away the book for free online at the entrepreneursessentials.com. So Hey, guys, if you're driving,

Nathan Latka

02:39if you're driving and listening, the cover is a green cover, if you're looking it up on Amazon, the Entrepreneur's Essentials, can look up and we'll certainly link to that in the show notes and promote this and we send it Brett, that's great. Give us the give us the on Bizarre Voice, just give us some of the snippets real quick. So like what year did you launch the business?

Brett Hurt

02:56>> So Bizarre Voice, I launched it with Brandt Barden in 2005. And to put that in a historical context, there were only three retailers who had customer reviews at the time in the entire United States. And we

03:14>> launched, I think, two years before the iPhone. Facebook was closed to the public. There was no such thing as Snapchat or Instagram or TikTok. So there's this entire social wave that was about to come, and that really accelerated the business at Bizarre Voice because Facebook came along and said to all the brands and all the retailers, you need to be social. You need to be social. You need to be social. And, of course, they had invented

03:39>> the world's best ad targeting engine up until when Apple changed their roles and and really broke that that engine pretty profoundly. But here we were in the right time, right place. And I always say that entrepreneurship is a combination of a lot of grit and a lot of luck. And anybody that says there's no luck in it, they're absolutely wrong. There's a tremendous amount of luck needed to become a successful entrepreneur.

Nathan Latka

04:04I mean, I was hoping you had mentioned that Salesforce IPO ed in 2006. So you could also argue where you were one of the original sort of SaaS models and eventually one of the original enterprise SaaS models. Would you agree

Brett Hurt

04:13>> with that? I would actually I would actually go back to core metrics, my fourth business for that. I got to see Mark Benioff present when Salesforce was 80 people. When I was raising money for core metrics, this is back in 1999, the term SaaS didn't exist.

Nathan Latka

04:28You launched in 1999?

Brett Hurt

04:30>> Yes. Wow. That was Coremetrics. And the term SaaS didn't exist. The term ASP, application service provider, didn't exist. I saw Benioff speaking at Stanford talking about the end of software, and I thought he was brilliant. And I was out there trying to raise money for core metrics, talking to VCs about clients and mainframes and dumb terminals and clients and servers and anything to get them to kind of grok what a centralized multi tenant SaaS model would

05:02>> be. But those terms, again, didn't exist back then. And I was like, look, I'm going be able to upgrade it for our customers all the time. And they were like, but there's already two public companies that one's worth 1,000,000,000, one's worth 2,000,000,000, and they're on prem and it seems like everybody's going to want their data on prem. And I was like, but I'm going to be able to release software so much faster than them. And I've

05:24>> talked with almost all of their customers and they're all hating on them. Most of them haven't deployed, the ones that have told me that it took twelve to eighteen months. You're gonna be able to deploy this in weeks. And the rest is history. I mean, Coremetrics just blew past those companies, really disrupted them and

Nathan Latka

05:42and was one We can we can quantify this, though, too. I mean, I love the story, but we can put real numbers behind this. It's funny. I mean, I'm looking here at your profile. I mean, you you launched this series a or you closed series a in 1999, not to date you at all, but 1999.

Brett Hurt

05:54>> That's right. That's

Nathan Latka

05:55right. You're also one of the early uses that I see. I haven't seen many earlier than this of debt financing to fund a SaaS company so you can preserve your equity as you go into a series b and onwards. You ended up, I think, raising what was the total raised at Coremetrics?

Brett Hurt

06:09>> Oh, gosh. I would need to think about that. I I think it was I think it was close to 80,000,000.

Nathan Latka

06:15Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

06:38your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

07:03get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity And red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is

07:25not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're

07:50going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but

08:12if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into

08:38the interview. And are you able to share back in o eight? This is crazy timing, right? Remember, guys, when I was in 2008, the financial markets, I think you closed your Series E then it was for 60,000,000. Do you remember what that valuation was?

Brett Hurt

08:50>> No, that that's actually incorrect. Okay. That that was I was already at Bizarre Voice at the time. So I got Coremetrics to a point where I felt very, very confident that it was going to be successful. And then I just felt like the timing for Bizarre Voice was too compelling, and I wanted to move on to my next project.

Nathan Latka

09:10What year was that, Brett?

Coremetrics: Early SaaS Model and IBM Acquisition

Brett Hurt

09:12>> That was 2005. So I remained on board of Coremetrics for a period of time and loved the company, loved the people there. And then it exited to IBM for around $300,000,000 in 2010. And that was my first significant exit, but it was two years before Bizarre Voice went public. And Bizarre Voice was over a billion dollar IPO and one of the top five IPOs of 2012. So it was a it was it was it was good

09:44>> liquidity from Coremetrics, but then Bizarre Voice was really the entrepreneurial dream come true.

Nathan Latka

09:49This is incredible. So do you remember, you said you left in Coremetrics quote when you felt it was comfortable. Quantify that in terms of revenue. Do you remember ARR in 2005?

Brett Hurt

09:57>> I think it was around 30,000,000 ARR at that point.

Nathan Latka

10:02And do remember what it scaled to five years later in 2010 before the acquisition?

Brett Hurt

10:06>> I don't. No. I don't.

Nathan Latka

10:08Okay. So you basically, I'd also that takes a lot of discipline. I mean, this thing, you it's growing and it's 30,000,000 ARR. You go, man. I'm just feeling so compelled by this bizarre voice thing. Did you have trusted lieutenants at Coremetrics, maybe co founders, then that sort of gave you extra, you know, comfort to leave?

Brett Hurt

10:23>> Yeah. Actually, I left with Brandt Barden, who became my cofounder. And it was it was a little bit of an awkward scenario because Brandt approached me at Coremetrics and said, hey. I'm gonna go start another company at some point, and I'm wondering if you'd be on my board of directors. And Brandt was absolutely amazing on our client services team. He led really one of the most difficult parts of the SaaS model, which is to make sure

10:50>> that you're doing a great job of servicing your customers. I always say you have to constantly be re earning their trust as a SaaS company because it's a recurring revenue business. So you've got to stress that last S, software as a service, and really make sure you're providing great service. So anyways, I was fascinated with how great Brent was at his job. And when he first said this to me, I thought, well, gee, I don't want

11:15>> to lose him. But then I thought, I'm a real hypocrite if I don't meet with him about this. And then when I met with him, he said, hey, would you like to brainstorm with me too? I could really use a brainstorming partner. And we brainstormed and we came up with Bizarre Boys. And then I realized or I really felt deep in my bones that the market timing for that was so compelling and that it was such

11:39>> a big vision and it could be a bigger company than Coremetrics that I thought to myself, I've gotta do this. But I I trust me, I would not have left Coremetrics had it not been in a good state. And the reason I say that is Coremetrics had gone through a lot of trauma. We launched in 1999. You know what happened next. We had 100.com customers. We were ringing the bell all the time, winning new customers,

12:06>> and ninety seven of our customers went out of business in the.comcrash. And so I had a huge amount of scar tissue. We had to let go two thirds of the people. I I lived in San Francisco at the time, we're in Austin now, and I would tell my wife, I literally feel like I'm being punched in the gut. But ultimately, I got the company back on a good track alongside a great team. And we've signed

12:32>> Walmart and built back up into a big company. We became rated the number one in the industry by Forrester Research, who was the most important research firm in that particular industry for retail. And that was back in the days of Kate Delhaagen and a bunch of other amazing people that worked there. And so once it got to a point where I was like, okay, there's just it's undeniably going to be successful. Now I will tell you

12:57>> that I wish that the CEO that took it forward didn't sell it so early, but it had gone through some trauma. I mean, honestly, it could have been an IPO just a couple of years later, but I guess that he and the board felt like that was a compelling offer. But they kind of missed the hockey stick that was coming in SaaS just a couple of years later. So the multiple wasn't as great as it could

13:24>> have been. And really changed IBM. I mean, it became IBM's core analytics stack, but it could have been so much more.

Nathan Latka

13:33Yep. Hey, I wanna move forward here. I have another minute on Bazaar Voice and then spend the rest of time on your new company, Data World, which we're all excited about. On Bazaar Voice, though, you so, Brent and you are getting together. One question I always get from listeners is, Nathan, I've got a great co founder, but we haven't had the tough equity conversation. They And always end up just saying fiftyfifty, which I go, man, was

13:51it really lazy? They just didn't wanna have the tough conversations. So they said fiftyfifty. How did you guys do that? Did you and Brett just split it fiftyfifty? Or how'd you have that conversation? You and Brent, sorry. Did you just split it? Or how'd you do that?

Brett Hurt

14:01>> Yeah. So we that was the toughest conversation we ever had, actually. Because there's a lot of romance in starting a company together. And, you know, I I truly love Brent today. He's one of my best friends. But I would not do a fiftyfifty deal. I knew what kind of value I had to the business. And I served on the board of directors of shop.org. I had a tremendous network out there, and I had tremendous know how.

14:30>> I mean, Fortmetrics was my fourth business, and it was a successful business. And so I negotiated with them. I won't tell you where we ended up, but we did not end up at fiftyfifty, but I ended up with a much bigger equity stake. But at the end of the day, Brent did incredibly well financially, and it was also a dream come true for him. And one thing I'm particularly proud of is by the time Bazaar Voice

Bazaar Voice Capital Efficiency and IPO

Brett Hurt

14:54>> went public, like two things. One is we had only raised 23,000,000, and we had over 100,000,000 run rate with 13,000,000 left in the bank. Y Combinator said it was one of the top five most capital efficient SaaS businesses of all time.

Nathan Latka

15:07So just to be clear, you were at north of $100,000,000 in ARR in 2012 when you IPO ed?

Brett Hurt

15:11>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

15:12Wow. That's I mean, it's incredible.

Brett Hurt

15:13>> With only 13,000,000 of capital use over a

Nathan Latka

15:15six year period. That's incredible.

Brett Hurt

15:17>> It was a good burn multiple. Yeah, that was a good burn multiple. And then the second thing is that we you know, you know, those firms that gauge how you're doing on giving equity and kind of how generous you are? We were the second most generous SaaS company by that time, twenty twelve, out of all SaaS companies that had gone public before in terms of how generous we were with equity to all of our employees. And

15:44>> so How big was

Nathan Latka

15:45the ESOP pool at IPO?

Brett Hurt

15:46>> Yeah, we had

15:47>> a big one. And and the thing that I love about that is that

Nathan Latka

15:51How big though, Brett, was it?

Brett Hurt

15:53>> I think it was like 20 ish percent given to employees. And and the thing that's amazing about that is that it led to over 60 companies started by former Bizarre Boys people. That's how big of an exit it was and how much wealth it created. And I'm a capitalist, and that ripple effect,

16:15>> capitalist impact is very real in terms of what happens with nonprofits, what happens with people starting their own businesses, the type of know how they get to create great cultures. You know, as I mentioned, Bazaar Voice was the top rated company. Data. World is rated in the top three companies to work for in Austin.

Nathan Latka

16:31Let's get into that, Brett. Data World, you launched, I believe, what, 2015?

data.world: Founding Story and Launch

Brett Hurt

16:37>> Yeah, we launched in well, we founded in 2015, and we launched data. World. It's data. World, by the way. I always pronounce the dot. But we launched on 07/11/2016 on Slurpee Day, which we didn't really expect it was gonna be on 07/11, but that turns out that was Slurpee Day. But that a great launch, and we've now become the world's largest collaborative data community for open datasets. And then we have a for profit division of the

Competing Against Alation and Collibra

Brett Hurt

17:09>> company, which is focused on the data catalog industry, and we've been a great disruptor there in a very similar way, by the way, to core metrics. If you

Nathan Latka

17:16go all the way back

Brett Hurt

17:17>> to '99, because we're con we're competing here primarily against Alation and Calibre, which are both primarily on prem. Most of the revenue comes from on prem, and they come out with a couple of releases a year. We come out with over 1,000 product releases a year, literally release software two to three times a day. That's the pace of innovation here at data. World.

Nathan Latka

17:41That's incredible. Tell me how many years it took you to break a million dollar run rate at Data World.

Revenue Timeline: No Revenue Until 2018

Brett Hurt

17:46>> At data dot world, we didn't even make a dollar of revenue until we had raised over $50,000,000. And we didn't break a dollar of revenue until 2018. And the reason why is it's a very different business than Bazaar Voice. It's a very wide surface area. If you understand the data catalog space, it's basically a library for all of your internal data assets. So it sits on top of Snowflake and Databricks and Oracle and Netizen and other

18:17>> systems, both modern and old. And it sits on top of Microsoft Power BI and Tableau and Looker and Google Data Studio and a bunch of others, Domo and a bunch of other older BI systems. So we have over 95 integrations. And the surface area of what we're doing is really wide, and we also have to be incredibly secure. Like you can imagine the CISO process that we go through with customers. We have a lot of cybersecurity

18:44>> customers on our platform, a lot of companies you would have heard of that are truly big. And we're in every market vertical now. We're in universities, government agencies, local, state. We're in a lot of corporations, from technology companies to financial services to healthcare, to travel and retail and on and on and on.

Nathan Latka

19:07So Brett, just to pull this forward, one of the themes I want get for our here is they're all trying to manage dilution, right, as they scale. They wanna go hit a home run, but they also don't wanna dilute. You did a great job, obviously. You already talked about it at prior companies. This one's a little bit different in terms of the broad reach, but help help me understand your series b was a 26,000,000 series b,

19:22I believe, in 2020. Most folks in this Series B, they're selling 10% of the company. Were you sort of in that same range?

Brett Hurt

19:29>> So we're about fiftyfifty owned right now between investors and internally. And we've raised over 132,000,000 to date. The last round we raised was from Goldman Sachs. That was a $50,000,000 round. They put in 40,000,000 of that 50,000,000, and we were oversubscribed on the remaining 10. What was

Funding: $132M Raised, Goldman Sachs Series C

Nathan Latka

19:49the post money on that? Are you comfortable sharing?

Brett Hurt

19:51>> Yeah. I can't share that on a podcast. Okay. So Interwire and all the others try to get that all the time.

Nathan Latka

19:57Yeah, most folks, I mean, look, if you can sort of predict, mean, most folks are doing Series C, especially in early twenty twenty two. I mean, you're selling somewhere between five and you know, 1015% of the company, is it can you say you're sort of in that same range?

Brett Hurt

20:08>> Well, we closed on our Series C in 2022. Yep. So we did it after the crazy multiples, which turned out to be a huge blessing, because there's a lot of companies that raised at like 100x AR multiples, and that's a crushingly high multiple to live up to. And so a lot of those companies are getting recapped. We're not in a recap situation.

Nathan Latka

20:31So you're more like 20x, 30x, something in that range?

Brett Hurt

20:34>> I don't feel comfortable disclosing. But but we were we were we were in a very normal type of range.

Nathan Latka

20:40Well, Brett, you got to teach my audience because they don't know the normal range, I also want to respect your privacy. Can you give a range you're comfortable with? So there's a concrete takeaway for the audience, but what still protects what you're trying

Brett Hurt

20:48>> to protect? We were we were way, way, way south of 100x AR.

Nathan Latka

20:53Okay, ways. Okay, that's great. So moving forward to today, just help me understand pricing model. What's the average customer paying you per year for this data platform you've built?

Brett Hurt

21:03>> So I don't discuss average selling price. That would give a lot of good competitive intel. But I can tell you the way we charge is we charge on a platform basis, and then we charge users above that. So when we upsell customers, we're typically upselling on the number of users, and we're actually becoming the most deployed data tool of all time at our customers.

Nathan Latka

21:25How do you measure that?

Brett Hurt

21:27>> Well, one of the largest service firms in the world has 85% of their employees using data. World. There's nothing that's ever taken off like that for them. You know, another company

Pricing Model and Enterprise Deployment

Nathan Latka

21:41which is Do you know if they've tried others, though? I mean, that's sort of a I mean, saying you have 85% penetration in one of your customers. Well, yeah. But what if I mean, what about someone who tested Calibra and tested you? Yeah. So that was one

Brett Hurt

21:52>> where they failed with Calibra and they never got

Nathan Latka

21:54Okay.

21:54There we go.

Brett Hurt

21:55>> They never got over 12 users. And with us, they're at 31,000 users.

Nathan Latka

22:02Okay, that makes more sense. Talk to me about your supporting on this from an infrastructure perspective as we wrap up here last two minutes. What's your total team size today? And how much engineering power do you have there?

Team Size and Engineering Efficiency

Brett Hurt

22:10>> Yeah. So we're about a 150 people today. And our engineering team is getting a lot more efficient right now because of generative AI, like all engineering teams are. So we're all in on that. And we're also all in on it from a product standpoint because our platform is built on what's called a knowledge graph, and that three-dimensionalizes data. Google search is actually built on a knowledge graph, and Facebook social engine is built on a knowledge graph,

22:38>> and a large part of Amazon. So we've got the perfect technology base actually for generative AI, but we're also using it very heavily internally. And, you know, a lot of our team is engineering at this point.

Nathan Latka

22:53Like how many of the one fifty?

Brett Hurt

22:55>> Yeah, it's it's a it's it's around a third.

Nathan Latka

22:57Okay. That's right.

22:59And when you say you have like 31,000 members at that one company, I just want to make sure these are not like free, you're just giving away. That's easy. These are they're paying for these seats.

Brett Hurt

23:08>> This is paid. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

23:09So when you say in the press, have 1,600,000 members. These are not just free users floating around. These are paid seats on the platform.

Brett Hurt

23:15>> Okay. So there's two two sides of it. It's not 1,600,000. What I said earlier is it's 2,100,000 down the free side. And then we don't disclose how many are on the paid side. But we have two parts of the business. We're a B corporation. One part is a free utility to leverage open data sets from all over the web and collaborate on those for free and contribute to the public body of knowledge about cancer and climate

Open Data Community vs. Paid Enterprise Catalog

Brett Hurt

23:41>> change and poverty and nutrition and all of these important things. That part of the business is trained, the paid part, which is the data catalog business. And the way you can think about it is that the the first part of the business is essentially like a like a free data catalog for open data. And the second part of the business is a data catalog just for a company, just for their private data.

Nathan Latka

24:04And that's where

Brett Hurt

24:05>> all of those integrations and everything else come into play.

Nathan Latka

24:07Yeah. Sorry. Just to be clear, on 04/05/2022, used old TechCrunch quote. He claims the data. World now has more than 1,600,000 members across customers, including the associated price and Penguin Random House. That's where I got that number from. My question is I wanna make sure when we're saying members, are these paid seats? Are these people contributing to your learning model that might be free?

Brett Hurt

24:23>> Those are people contributing to the learning model. Yeah, that's just dated because that's an old TechCrunch article. But yeah, that's that's now over 2,100,000.

Nathan Latka

24:30Oh, wow, impressive. Okay, cool. So they're all contributing to your learning model. And then you've got companies like this one with 31,000 seats, where they're all paying for each each of those seats.

24:40>> That's

24:40You've taken companies to 100,000,000 in revenue a couple of times, you're not going to share this, but my best estimate on your revenue to say with 150 employees, most VC backed do between 100 and $200,000 in revenue per employee, which would put you at like $20,000,000 ish in ARR. How many years do you think it'll take you to break $100,000,000 in revenue with this idea?

Brett Hurt

24:58>> Yeah, that's not something I'm gonna disclose. You're like a VC. This is like, if you're if you're gonna write me a 100,000,000 check, then I'll disclose

Nathan Latka

25:05some of these things. Well, look, there's a lot of founders that want to learn from you. And no one

Brett Hurt

25:09>> can understand that I get.

Nathan Latka

25:10So I'm always gonna ask the question. Right. And so so I guess, I mean, what it can you share anything about how you take an idea from where you are to north of a $100,000,000 since you've done this

Brett Hurt

25:20>> so many times? It's it's all in my book, The Entrepreneur's Essentials. I I talk about specifically how to build the sales team, how to do it in a capital efficient way, how to structure your culture, how to hire, how to ultimately come up with the right business model. So everything about that is in our book.

Nathan Latka

25:39Are there numbers in the book?

Brett Hurt

25:41>> There are numbers in the book for companies that have either sold or gone public. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

25:45You're speaking my language, Brett. On that note, let's wrap with a famous five. Number one, your

Brett Hurt

25:48>> favorite book besides your own. I love Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, because it's so data driven and really makes you optimistic for the future and takes chapter by chapter issues like inequality or food or energy or anything you're worried about and shows you the no BS data throughout human history to show you that the world is actually progressing in a really beautiful way overall versus the fear mongering that goes on pretty constantly out there.

Nathan Latka

26:17And under the radar CEO or Founder that really impresses you that you're following?

Brett Hurt

26:23>> I think Ross Burghorf is incredible. We're investors in his company. They recently closed around at 1,700,000,000, and they're disrupting LegalZoom. And he's he it's an interesting story because it's his first time in the COC

Nathan Latka

26:38You have to say the company, Brett. We it's Zen Business. Zen Business.

Brett Hurt

26:41>> Zen Business. Yeah.

26:44I cut you off.

26:44>> Go ahead. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, you know, he he's it's his first time in the CEO seat. He was the CTO of Homeway before. It's been a real joy to mentor him and really just awesome to see how well that company is doing. And they're also a proud B Corp. When we became a B Corp in Austin, there were six companies that followed us and made that move. And I know they did because I

27:05>> talked with their CEOs about it when we made that move and they asked me, why are we doing this? And I I really believe that's the next stage of capitalism, capitalism2.o.

Nathan Latka

27:15And guys, if you wanna learn from Ross, you can find his interview he did on the show, which a lot of good data. 2019, he shared they broke 4,000,000 revenue 2020, he shared they broke fifteen twenty twenty one, they grew to over $45,000,000 in revenue as they're displacing large folks like LegalZoom doing in a capital efficient way. Their Series B was a $56,000,000 round on two fifty six post, which he shared about. And then the one

27:36that that Brett just mentioned was a Series C 200,000,000 at 1.7 post money, really, really great story there from Ross. Brett, number three, number three, what's your favorite online tool for building data world besides besides your own or one you own equity in?

Favorite Tools: GitHub Copilot and Generative AI

Brett Hurt

27:53>> I I've gotta say that it is becoming very quickly GitHub Copilot just because, you know, the way it leverages OpenAI's codex and the way it's lifting all of our productivity on the engineering side, which is, as you know, a very high cost part of any business. And it's turning our engineers into super superpower. So I love that technology.

Nathan Latka

28:17Number four, how many hours of sleep are

28:18you getting every night?

Brett Hurt

28:19>> I get seven to eight.

Nathan Latka

28:20That's great. And situation married single kids?

Brett Hurt

28:23>> Married for

28:24>> twenty seven years. And my wife is my investing partner. We've invested in over 130 startups in the past twelve years. We're in 40 VC funds as well. So we have our own family office, as you mentioned at at the top. And we have two kids. Our daughter is 18, and she's going off to Tulane University in the fall. That was her dream school. And our son is 13. We have his Bar Mitzvah in Israel this year

28:51>> in June, which we can't wait for.

Nathan Latka

28:53Oh, that's awesome. Very cool, Brian. How old are you?

Brett Hurt

28:56>> I'm 51.

Nathan Latka

28:57Last question, take us home here. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Famous Five: Books, Sleep, Family

Brett Hurt

29:01>> Oh, gosh. Well, I'll stick with the kid theme for a second. I took this path of being an entrepreneur. And when I graduated from the Wharton School, I made $0 for a long time. And it took a long time to gain wealth on the entrepreneurial path, but I knew it was what I was going to do. My wife and I talked a lot about it before we got married. And because of that, we waited for a

29:29>> long time to have kids. We didn't have our first child until we didn't get pregnant until we were 32.

Nathan Latka

29:35And I would

Brett Hurt

29:36>> have gotten started earlier, all things considered. And they say that you live with no regrets in life, or some people say that I think that's BS. I think there's lots of regrets in life. And that's one where I would have just said to myself, hey, believe in yourself more. Believe in your ability to become successful. Don't worry as much about the financial security for having kids, you'll figure it out.

Nathan Latka

30:02Guys, Brett Hurt, his fourth company, Coremetrics, launched in 1999. He left in 2005 after the company broke $30,000,000 in revenue. And in 2010, the company sold for $300,000,000 to IBM. That was his first sort of big cash day, but he left actually earlier in 2005 and launched with his one of his friends, Brandt, Bizarre Voice, which ended up growing to a $100,000,000 in revenue, spending just $13,000,000 to get there and a billion dollar IPO, very capital

30:26efficient. Obviously, Bizarre Boys taken private in 2018 by Marlin and other stuff has happened since then. But now Brett's focus is data dot world. Competing with Calibre, really a large scale widespreading data platform, very opposite of the capital efficiency of his earlier companies. He had to spend, not spend but raise over $53,000,000 of capital before his first dollar of revenue at data world, but now scaling team of 150 engineers focused on efficiency and scaling in a

30:51good way. He's written about his success and his book, The Entrepreneur's Essentials, which I encourage all of you guys to check out. Brett Hurt, thank you for taking us to the top.

Advice: Believe in Yourself Earlier

Brett Hurt

31:00>> Yeah, thank you so much.

Nathan Latka

31:02One more thing before you go, we 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

31:28Central. Additionally, 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

31:50fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or 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

32:12for 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, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got

32:31to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you. Hi.