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Founder Interview

How Workato Reached 1,000 Paying Customers and 300% YoY Growth in 2018 (Interview with CEO Vijay Tella)

Interview Date
January 30, 2018
Interviewee
Vijay TellaCEO and Co-Founder
Watch
Watch the full interview on YouTube

Company Metrics at Interview Time

Paying Customers

1,000

Free Signups

21,000

YoY ARR Growth (2017)

300%

Total Funding Raised

$17M

Team Size

80

Historical Snapshot

These numbers were reported by Vijay Tella during the interview recorded in January 2018 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See Workato’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways

  • 01Workato had over 1,000 paying organizations as of January 2018
  • 0221,000 organizations had signed up on the platform in total
  • 03800 to 900 new organizations were signing up each month
  • 04The company grew 300% year over year in 2017
  • 05Enterprise plans start at $60,000 per year and line-of-business plans go up to $30,000 per year
  • 06Net revenue expansion from existing mid-market and enterprise customers exceeded 50% annually
  • 07CAC payback period was within 12 months
  • 08Total funding raised was $17M, with investors including Salesforce, Workday, and Storm Ventures
  • 09The team was approximately 80 people, with about two-thirds working remotely
  • 10Workato had approximately 225,000 public community recipes on the platform

Company Metrics at Time of Interview

MetricValueSource
Paying Customers1,000Founder interview, Jan 2018
Free Signups (Total Organizations)21,000Founder interview, Jan 2018
New Monthly Signups800 to 900Founder interview, Jan 2018
YoY ARR Growth (2017)300%Founder interview, Jan 2018
Total Funding Raised$17MFounder interview, Jan 2018
Team Size80Founder interview, Jan 2018
Enterprise Plan Starting Price$60,000 per yearFounder interview, Jan 2018
Line-of-Business Plan Priceup to $30,000 per yearFounder interview, Jan 2018
CAC Payback Periodwithin 12 monthsFounder interview, Jan 2018
Net Revenue Expansion (mid-market and enterprise)greater than 50% annuallyFounder interview, Jan 2018
Public Community Recipes225,000Founder interview, Jan 2018
Community Recipe Adoption Rate75% of new integrations start from a community recipeFounder interview, Jan 2018
Daily New Trial Signups60 to 70Founder interview, Jan 2018
Year Founded2013Founder interview, Jan 2018
Quik Acquisition Price by Skype$150MFounder interview, Jan 2018
Quik Total Funding Raised$15MFounder interview, Jan 2018

Growth Breakdown

Revenue

Vijay Tella confirmed Workato grew 300% year over year in 2017. Enterprise plans start at $60,000 per year and line-of-business plans go up to $30,000 per year, with Fortune 500 customers paying six and seven figures annually. Tella indicated the company was on a path to reach $50M in ARR within one to two years of the interview.

Customers

Workato had over 1,000 paying organizations as of January 2018, out of 21,000 total organizations that had signed up. Between 800 and 900 new organizations were signing up each month, and 60 to 70 new trials were starting each day.

Team

The team stood at approximately 80 people, with headquarters in Palo Alto and about two-thirds of the team working remotely. Sales and marketing headcount was growing faster than engineering at the time of the interview, reflecting a shift from the product-heavy early years.

Funding and Profitability

Workato had raised $17M in total, with Salesforce, Workday, and Storm Ventures as investors. The last fundraise was approximately one year before the interview. Tella stated the company was operating well within its means and could pull back variable marketing expenses to reach profitability if needed.

Growth Strategy

Partner Co-Marketing

Workato generated a significant portion of its leads through partners such as Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and Slack. These relationships brought in organic referrals and co-marketing opportunities that reduced reliance on paid acquisition.

Community Virality via Recipes

Workato built a GitHub-like library of approximately 225,000 public integration recipes. About 75% of users creating new integrations started from one of these community recipes, driving organic adoption and word-of-mouth growth.

Organic SEO

Tella noted that when potential customers searched for specific apps or integration solutions, Workato showed up in results. This inbound search presence contributed meaningfully to daily trial signups without paid spend.

Expansion Revenue from Existing Customers

Net revenue expansion from mid-market and enterprise customers exceeded 50% annually. Customers naturally expanded their usage as they built more integrations and connected more apps, making existing accounts a major growth engine.

Upmarket Focus on Mid-Market and Enterprise

Workato deliberately targeted mid-market and enterprise buyers rather than small businesses, which drove higher ACVs and lower churn. Enterprise customers showed almost no churn and strong expansion behavior over time.

Best Quotes

We are an integration software company.
Large companies have over a thousand apps. There's an explosion of SaaS in every corner of a business. And the challenge with all of that, Nathan, is that the information about your customers and your business is splintered and split across so many different apps.
Workato is like an enterprise version of integration tools.
We grew 300% last year in 2017.
We have about 21,000 organizations that are, that have signed up on Workato, about 800, eight to 900 a month are signing up each month.
In the segments that we focus on, mid market and enterprise, see the churn is net very positive, meaning our expansion, we typically do the same amount of new revenues with existing customers from twelve months ago than, you know, like when we have a the revenue base, we start with a set of customers.
We have about 225,000 public integrations. You know, we call these things recipes.
About 75% of people that are creating integrations on Workato start with one of these community recipes. So this community based approach to solving an enterprise problem directly came out of our experience in the consumer space.
We are around 80 people. Most of us in I mean, not I mean, the headquarters is in Palo Alto, but about two thirds of the team is remote.
When I was 20, I was very impatient for results and outcomes around everything I did. I would encourage that person to focus and enjoy the process. The results will come.

What Happened Next

This interview captured Workato at an early stage in January 2018, when the company had just over 1,000 paying customers and had grown 300% in 2017. In the years that followed, Workato raised a $200M Series E led by Battery Ventures in November 2021, reaching a valuation of $5.7 billion and total funding of $421M. The figures discussed here are a point-in-time snapshot and do not reflect the company's current scale or metrics.

View Workato’s current profile and metrics

Full Transcript

Introduction and Vijay Tella's Background

Nathan Latka

00:01Hello everybody. My guest today is Vijay Tella. He is the creator and one of the founders of a company called Work Auto. He's led the creation of market leading integration technologies for over twenty five years. Before Work Auto, he was the CEO of Kik, a consumer video communications company acquired by Skype. He helped create two multibillion dollar integration products before that. He's also part of the team that created the world's first middleware platform, TIB, the information

00:25bus, if you guys need a jogged down memory lane there, Act Technetron Software Systems, which was acquired by Routers PLC in 1994. He's also the founding on the founding team and SVP of engineering of TIBCO through its IPO. As chief strategy officer, he then helped launch Oracle's Fusion Middleware platform in 2005. Vijay, are you ready to take us to the top?

Vijay Tella

00:47>> Yes. Of course.

Nathan Latka

00:48Alright. I always know when a when a bio has lots of acronyms in it, you must be impressive. Right? That's how it works.

Vijay Tella

00:53>> Oh, well, let's see.

What Workato Does and How It Makes Money

Nathan Latka

00:56All right, tell us more about Work Auto. What's the company doing? How do you make money?

Vijay Tella

01:01>> So we are an integration software company.

01:07>> Companies out there are using a lot of apps. You know, large companies have over a thousand apps. There's an explosion of SaaS in every corner of a business. And the challenge with all of that, Nathan, is that the information about your customers and your business is splintered and split across so many different apps. So you don't have a really complete or consistent view of what's happening with your business, with your customers. Workato's products, helps you connect

01:36>> all these apps together and automate your processes that cut across all these apps.

Competitive Landscape and Enterprise Focus

Nathan Latka

01:42Elastic.io, Zapier, Segment, how do you beat all these guys?

Vijay Tella

01:47>> Yeah, I think it's a very big market. Some

01:54>> of the tools that you talk about focused on sort of the small business segment and are suitable for just moving data between applications A and B, right? Know, Workato's heritage comes from companies like TIBCO and Technicron that you referred to earlier. You know, there's, you know, it really refers to enterprise grade integration for connecting sort of these mission critical applications in large companies. For example, when you are integrating Dropbox with Instagram, and there's a photo coming

02:35>> in on Instagram with Nathan tagged in it, and you mistag Nathan, or you kind of tag it twice and put the photo in twice into a Dropbox folder, it's still fun, but not so in enterprises where all of these integrations and automations and workflows need to be super robust and very reliable and secure and all that. So Workato is like an enterprise

03:00>> version of integration tools.

Pricing Structure and ACV

Nathan Latka

03:02Got it. What would you say the average customer is paying you per month? I know you go from about $600 up to $2,500 a month and probably much higher.

Vijay Tella

03:09>> Yeah, much, you know, even much higher. I mean, I think it's, we have Fortune 500 companies that are paying us 6 and 7 figures. But the problem is very broad. Have companies Vijay,

Nathan Latka

03:24if I forced you into an average though, just before I move on, what would you say the average customer is paying you per month?

Vijay Tella

03:28>> No, we're not sharing that, Nathan, but we support

03:36>> a range of customers from line of business and sort of mid sized companies to enterprises. That's Give sort of

Nathan Latka

03:41me a general range. I understand you wanna keep it vague, but generally between what and what, just to slim it down a little bit.

Vijay Tella

03:47>> Well, I think, know, we have enterprise plans at 60 ks and line of business plans that go up to 30. It's sort of in the- A

Nathan Latka

03:55month or year?

Vijay Tella

03:57>> That's per year.

Nathan Latka

03:58Per

Vijay Tella

03:59>> year? That's the starting, the enterprise plans start at 60 ks per year. And then, like I said, we have, you know, we have companies that pay us 6 and 7 figures per year.

Nathan Latka

04:07Got it.

Vijay Tella

04:08>> And then we have line of business, which are more departmental purchases that, you know, go up to 30 k a year. So it's sort of in that range.

Nathan Latka

04:14Okay. That's okay. Good. So we'll say kind of fair to say $30,000 ACV on average. That's about $2,500 a month. That's a good kind of sweet spot for you guys.

Vijay Tella

04:21>> It's it's probably trending up from there, but

Nathan Latka

04:24yeah. And and and give me now that we understand kind of the co that's kind of a sweet spot cohort. You said it's trending up. So are you intentionally trying to move up market, increase expansion revenue?

Vijay Tella

04:34>> I think expansion has been happening very naturally for us. We have

04:39>> companies that start on Workato, like within months they have hundreds of integrations going, and they're connecting hundreds of apps. So there's expansion within existing customers that is happening.

Nathan Latka

04:51Is that your number one pricing lever, by way, number of connections?

Vijay Tella

04:56>> I think we've priced by features as well as number of connections. That's correct. So the more projects you'll think of it, the more integration projects you do, the more you'll pay Workato.

Nathan Latka

05:06Interesting. Give me more of the backstory here. So you have a well documented history and kind of this heavy tech space, when did you start this company and why?

Company Origin Story and Founding Team

Vijay Tella

05:17>> Yeah, that's a really good question. So, you know, yeah, as you mentioned, our background in this space goes back a long time. Know, we invented the integration software at this company called Technicron, and then which became TIBCO, which became public, and then we started the middleware group, middleware product line at Oracle. But, you know, in between, you know, I was the CEO of a consumer video company called Quake. It was a mobile video application that grew

05:43>> to 20,000,000 users, and it got acquired by Skype in 2011.

Nathan Latka

05:47You guys relied, I think I remember you guys, because you relied heavily on Facebook's API, and then they shut you off.

Vijay Tella

05:53>> Well, no, they didn't shut us off, but we were the first people

05:58>> that basically launched with the Facebook mobile SDK.

Nathan Latka

06:01Was that your most effective customer acquisition strategy and the cheapest for you though was through Facebook's SDK?

Vijay Tella

06:07>> It was actually Facebook, the Apple App Store. We were the top paid Apple app in the Apple App Store for many months.

Nathan Latka

06:13Okay.

Vijay Tella

06:16>> And we were preloaded by carriers like Verizon, Sprint, and Quake, and Docomo onto millions of phones, Samsung and Nokia. So they all preloaded us. So we had growth coming in through social media companies, carriers, as well as handset makers.

Nathan Latka

06:37And how much did Skype end up paying for the company?

Vijay Tella

06:40>> They paid 150,000,000 for us.

Nathan Latka

06:42Okay, 150. And how much had you raised?

Vijay Tella

06:46>> We had raised 15.

Nathan Latka

06:48Okay, so I assume this made you, it was a significant, was it this the most significant financial event of your life to that point or no?

Vijay Tella

06:55>> Not really. I mean, was the third one for me.

Nathan Latka

06:59Had But was it the most significant or no? No, it You had larger successes before that in terms of exiting companies?

Vijay Tella

07:05>> That's correct.

Nathan Latka

07:06Interesting. You obviously got your investors'money back and then some of those, so it was a good event. How does a guy like you stay motivated after you've created so much wealth?

Vijay Tella

07:14>> Yeah, no, that's a really good question. It goes back to your earlier question on why we started this, right? So we have a long background in this space. So one thing that happened, Nathan, is when I got out of like we were part of Skype and after I did my time and got out of there, and I looked at what was happening in the world of software, what I saw was that there's just been a huge

07:35>> consumerization trend in the enterprise space, especially with SaaS and the cloud based apps and the business users sort of driving this kind of transformation that's going on. And what I saw was the integration tools that was required to make all these apps work together and connect together remain complex and technical.

07:59>> They kind of move to the cloud in form, but not in the spirit of it. Meaning you still needed to be like a developer or a technical guy to kind of use these integration tools. Whereas the whole business transformation, the cloud apps are being driven by business people that don't know what XML is or what JSON is and so on. So the thing that we saw was we saw maybe one of the biggest gaps in enterprise

08:24>> software is the ability for these non technical business users to be able to connect all their apps and automate all their systems at large scale in a very dynamic environment. So we saw a really big

Nathan Latka

08:38Vijay, what year was this, by the way? When were you launching this

Vijay Tella

08:40>> This was in 2011 and 2012, we were looking at this whole space. And what we saw was we needed to bring the consumerization approach, the things that we learned at Quik and how you build and grow consumer products, that type of approach was really very much needed in the enterprise integration space. And so it was really, you know, bringing together a background, a long time background in the integration space with a consumer background that made something

09:09>> that worked hard to And

Nathan Latka

09:10who's we? How many founders?

Vijay Tella

09:12>> I have four found, we have four founders.

Nathan Latka

09:14Okay, that's a tough conversation to have. How do you figure out who gets what equity at the beginning?

09:19You say, listen, I've sold a bunch of companies. I get 80%, you three split the 20.

Vijay Tella

09:24>> Yeah, it was something like that.

Nathan Latka

09:25Was it really?

Vijay Tella

09:27>> Look, I think the other guys were like the rock stars, they were some of the smartest guys I've ever worked with in the integration space.

Nathan Latka

09:36Are they

09:37>> still at

09:37the company?

Vijay Tella

09:38>> They're still all at the company. You know, one of them was a very early person that created AWS, and one of them ran products at TIBCO after I left. I mean, guys are I wouldn't be doing this without them. Okay. Brains behind the company.

Nathan Latka

09:51So twenty twelve, four of you guys, you get together. It sounds like really intelligent people. You've scaled to where you are today. How many customers are you serving now today?

Customer Count and Free vs Paying Users

Vijay Tella

10:00>> Yeah, we have about 21,000 organizations that are, that have signed up on Workout, about 800, eight to 900 a month are signing up each month.

Nathan Latka

10:09Okay. Now you said that very specifically, I think that was a free organization number. How many of them are actually paying?

Vijay Tella

10:18>> You know, we have, I mean, you know,

Nathan Latka

10:21Definitely more than what?

Vijay Tella

10:22>> What what you know, again, I think we're not, like, you know, sharing that out, Nathan, but I I think we you know, when when you say organizations, know, Workato is is used by teams. So you have a customer success team in a large company or a finance team. And the licensing with Workato can be done at the team level or they can actually roll it up to an entire company and lots of organizations within the team

10:47>> can roll up under that.

Nathan Latka

10:52Can Vijay, you have above a thousand paying organizations. Is that fair to say?

Vijay Tella

10:58>> Yeah, about.

Nathan Latka

10:59Okay. Right around there. Okay, good. That's helpful to understand. Talk to me about growth. And the reason I'm asking this question specifically is because you said you brought growth from the consumer space and lessons from Quick into this. Name one lesson that was applicable both to consumer and you've used, you feel like exceptionally well at Work Auto.

Vijay Tella

11:18>> No, absolutely. You know, the scope of this integration problem is so large. There are so many

11:26>> hundreds of thousands of companies and so many different groups within these companies and with so many different apps to connect. The scope of it is so large that we took a GitHub like approach to integrations. So we have, you know, Workato is basically like a GitHub for integrations. We have about 225,000 public integrations. You know, we call these things recipes. You know, these recipes, this core concept in Workato.

Nathan Latka

11:48Is Google Sheets to Instagram or Gmail to whatever, the different mixes.

Growth Tactics and Community Recipes

Vijay Tella

11:53>> Yeah, Salesforce. The more typical scenarios are like Salesforce and SAP, NextSuite, Google Sheet, these kind of things, right? If you want to integrate Instagram, you probably go to like the other tools that you were mentioning earlier. It's more business or enterprise apps that we connect, right? So we have about 225,000 public recipes on Workato or public integrations that anybody can pick up as a starting point to connect their apps. Right? And about 75% of people that

12:26>> are creating integrations on Workato start with one of these community recipes. So this community based approach to solving an enterprise problem directly came out of our experience in the consumer space.

Churn and Net Revenue Expansion

Nathan Latka

12:38Interesting. Churn is always a critical component of any kind of SaaS company. What is your churn today and how do you manage it?

Vijay Tella

12:44>> Yeah. I think the churn, you know, varies. You know, it's you know, churn in enterprise customers is basically almost nothing. You know, in smaller businesses, we do see churn, especially when people do integrations like to kind of do a campaign, you know, and they need to, you know, do integration for a couple of months, and then, you know, and when the campaign is done, they need to stop. So we see we we you know, we're not

13:09>> again sharing some of those the numbers, but we we see, you know, like in large companies, it's larger companies, it's been very strongly expansion oriented. We just like keep, you know, with So the number of

Nathan Latka

13:22ignore gross and net logo churn. Talk to me about revenue churn or revenue retention. Where do guys at there?

Vijay Tella

13:29>> We're doing really well there, Nathan, but again, I'm not a

Nathan Latka

13:34lot of Well, Jay, I can't let you say you're doing really well without backing it up with data. You're a data guy. Give me something there. What do you mean you're doing really well?

Vijay Tella

13:42>> In the segments that we focus on, mid market and enterprise, see the churn is net very positive, meaning our expansion, we typically

13:56>> do the same amount of new revenues with existing customers from twelve months ago than, you know, like when we have a the revenue base, we start with a set of customers. We do as much with them in the following year as we did, to land. So our expansion business, we're a platform company where like you're know,

14:20>> when you're

Nathan Latka

14:22Vijay, hold on. Sorry. I wanna clear this up. So if your current customer base over the past twelve months, I think what I just heard you say is that any revenue that you lose in the next twelve months, you more than make up from other customers in that same segment upgrading. Is that accurate?

Vijay Tella

14:38>> You know, quite a bit more than that. I mean, it's like,

Nathan Latka

14:41mean, Like how significantly more than that? Like talking 10%, 50%, 100

Vijay Tella

14:45>> It's at least 50% and it's higher when it goes to larger companies.

Nathan Latka

14:51Okay, got it. Got it. So revenue expansion is greater than 50% year over Yeah.

Vijay Tella

14:57>> Okay. Interesting. With existing customers.

CAC, Payback Period, and Sales Efficiency

Nathan Latka

15:00Talk to me about acquisition. Obviously your recipe component, you probably have some recipe story with SEO and SEO play that helps. But talk to me about CAC. What are you spending to acquire these organizations, which you've got, you know, 21,000 of?

Vijay Tella

15:12>> Yeah. I, you know, I don't have the numbers, you know, in front of me, but it's, you know, our CAC to

15:22>> our, you know, sort of revenue to CAC ratios are are well over once. We're good with that.

Nathan Latka

15:28Well over what?

Vijay Tella

15:29>> You know, we're we're you know you know, so, Nathan, we are like, we don't share out these revenue these numbers with anyone, so I'm not, you know, like

Nathan Latka

15:37Yeah. Vijay, sorry. The the reason I asked so have you listened to the show before?

Vijay Tella

15:42>> No. I have. I have not.

Nathan Latka

15:43Okay. The show drives incredible amounts of new ARR to companies that come on. And so one of the trade offs is you share lessons with hard number data and in exchange, my audience gets exposure to your tool. And so that's part of the trade off here. So I understand if you don't want to give specific numbers, but helping us in tying lessons you're teaching us with some kind of range is really helpful, and that's really all

16:05I ask. So when you say something like your LTV to CAC ratio is really healthy, but then you say it's greater than one, a Here's the situation. Mean, our

Vijay Tella

16:15>> company has been around for four or five years.

16:18>> A lot of our customers have, a lot of our revenues, we've been ramping our revenues fast. Our- How

Nathan Latka

16:24fast? Like are you talking about a 100% year over year growth or more?

Vijay Tella

16:27>> No, we grew 300% last year in 2017. So, you know, the LTV is, you know, over you know, we are still early to kind of talk about LTV because, like, you know, we don't see the it's really much more about expansion. But what we are saying is that, in the segments that we are focusing on, mid market and enterprise,

16:52>> both new and expansion revenues are kind of like more than what we spent.

Nathan Latka

16:58How quickly do you like to get your money back on CAC? What payback period do you like to optimize for?

Vijay Tella

17:03>> We

17:07>> make that up in the,

17:11>> I think the key thing that we focus on is like revenues over sales of a quarter over sales and marketing expenses for the previous quarter. We

Nathan Latka

17:21do want to lot of Yeah, that's a sales efficiency ratio though. Give me the payback. I'm curious about payback period. I mean, you try and recover costs in the first twelve months, twenty four months, six months?

Vijay Tella

17:30>> Within twelve months.

Nathan Latka

17:32Okay, good. So, I mean, that's great. And you said you're, you know, generally an average first year ACV is around 25, 30 Yeah.

Vijay Tella

17:39>> Reason I'm holding back a little bit on that, Nathan, is that like you saw, we've been a young company that's growing fast. So the LTV, you're able to talk a lot better about LTV with more years of history with these companies.

Nathan Latka

17:51Yeah, sure. But Vijay, payback period has nothing to do with LTV. Payback period is a function of CAC and ACV. Yeah. Right? So I understand what you're saying about LTV. LTV can really lie to you if you're just plugging numbers into Excel sheet, but I'm just talking about numbers you already which is CAC and how quickly you get the money back. That's all.

Vijay Tella

18:06>> Yeah, no, that's within a year.

Nathan Latka

18:08Okay, that's great. Have you raised, I assume you raised capital or have you bootstrapped?

Vijay Tella

18:13>> We've raised about 17,000,000 total, about 10,000,000 from ourselves, and about you know, the number one and two SaaS companies, Salesforce and Workday are investors, and so is a longtime Silicon Valley VC called Storm Ventures.

Fundraising, Investors, and ARR Discussion

Nathan Latka

18:28That's great. Storm both all those guys are are obviously great guys and gals. Segments right now doing about $20,000,000 in terms of ARR. Are you larger than them?

Vijay Tella

18:37>> You know, again, we're not going I'm not going to, you know, talk to that. You know?

Nathan Latka

18:41Generally speaking, you say you have above a a thousand organizations paying and you said at minimum, they're paying $30 a year or $2,500 a month, that's put you at about $2,500,000 a year or 30,000,000 annually. I mean, those are just your numbers multiplied. Is that generally accurate?

Vijay Tella

18:57>> And, you know, no. I'm I'm I'm not gonna comment on that, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

19:01Okay. Well, are one of those numbers you told me earlier not accurate, either the thousand or the $30,000 ACV?

Vijay Tella

19:09>> I mean, the I I I think those are generally accurate, but those are all no. Those are things that have been going up. And I talked about the segments that we are, you know, that where we're the ACV for the segments that we are focused on, right, which is the mid market enterprise.

Nathan Latka

19:24Why does it make you nervous to say you're doing, you know, more than $25,000,000 in ARR?

Vijay Tella

19:27>> Because we're not shaking these numbers out. You know? It's, you know, it's that

Nathan Latka

19:32Yeah. Vajay, strategically help me understand that. What makes you nervous about doing that? It's

Vijay Tella

19:40>> I think people are gonna, you know, it's I think people, you know, we like, you know, sort of being private and, you know, sort of

19:55>> making determination of our, like, you know, what kind of strategy approach we take, and change, you know, change path and plans and things like that, and putting so we know, like that's one of the benefits of being a private company, and we know we want to take advantage of that.

Nathan Latka

20:09Sure. I mean, one of the things is, and one the things I have to hit on is, I mean, we see so many press releases go out that are full of PR jargon. So someone says we went from $1 of ARR to $3 of ARR. Hey, we grew 300% year over year means nothing. Right? And and so one of things I do with this show on purpose is to try and cut through that kind of stuff

20:25and get to real numbers and credit. Yeah. Frankly, your success. I mean, it's incredible what you've built. You've had a lot of success in the past. You've learned a bunch of lessons. You're pulling that into this company. So the more numbers you can share, the more valuable it is for my audience. But

Vijay Tella

20:36>> Yeah. But I understand that.

Nathan Latka

20:38Yeah. But but I but I also understand your your interest in keeping things vague as well for competitive reasons. So talk to me more about team today. Where are you guys at in terms of team size?

Team Size and Remote Work

Vijay Tella

20:47>> We are around 80 people. Most of us in I mean, not I mean, the headquarters is in Palo Alto, but about two thirds of the team is remote.

Nathan Latka

20:54Okay. So so okay. Interesting. Mostly remote. And where are you growing most right now? Break down that team for me.

Vijay Tella

21:02>> We're growing most in The US and we're also growing in Asia and Europe.

Nathan Latka

21:10I meant, sorry, engineering, sales, marketing support?

Vijay Tella

21:14>> Yeah, I think our sales and marketing is definitely growing faster, but, you know, than engineering. We were traditionally, you know, very engineering and product focused for the first two or three years, and that's been shifting last couple of years.

Nathan Latka

21:25Are you spending right now a bunch of money on paid stuff, or is it mostly branded content, content marketing, things like that?

Vijay Tella

21:34>> We don't do much paid stuff.

21:38>> It's much more, you know, we get a lot of our leads in through partners and referrals from existing customers. So it's been pretty organic. You know, we have 80 to, you know, sort of every day around like, you know, 60 to 70, you know, sign up, you know, to try us out. And a lot of that is pretty, you know, pretty word-of-mouth or through partners like Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Slack,

22:07>> you know, and

22:11>> sort of, you know, other customers.

Nathan Latka

22:12Vijay, before we wrap

Paid vs Organic Marketing

Vijay Tella

22:13>> Marketing it is also a big part of it. I mean, we when people are looking for us, looking for certain apps and for certain types of solutions, we show up. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

22:25Your last fundraise, when was that?

Vijay Tella

22:27>> About a year ago.

Nathan Latka

22:28Sorry, you're fundraising right now?

Vijay Tella

22:31>> No.

Nathan Latka

22:32Are you profitable?

Vijay Tella

22:33>> We're operating well within on our power. So at this point, that's all I'm gonna say about If

Nathan Latka

22:39you kill all your variable marketing expenses, are you profitable? You could easily pull that lever if you needed to?

Vijay Tella

22:44>> We can pull that lever if we if we need to.

Nathan Latka

22:47Interesting. Great. Last question before we wrap up with the with the famous five. What year do you think you'll break $50,000,000 in ARR?

Vijay Tella

22:56>> Well, I mean Will you do

Nathan Latka

22:57will you do it this year?

Vijay Tella

23:01>> You know, I think, you know, we're looking to do that, do it, you know, within the next one to two years, yeah.

Nathan Latka

23:06Come on Vijay, that's when you get to stand on a soapbox and say, we're gonna kill it this year. We're gonna blast past it, man.

Vijay Tella

23:13>> Yeah, no, that's, you know, within a couple of years.

Nathan Latka

23:16Those of you listening, those of you watching, you're going, Nathan's trying to be all energetic and Vijay is just like engineer, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But I love it, Vijay, that's good stuff. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Vijay Tella

23:29>> I'd say it's The Hard Things by Ben Hurwitz.

23:33>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

23:34Number it's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?

Vijay Tella

23:39>> You know, I've followed

Nathan Latka

23:41a

Vijay Tella

23:42>> couple of people like Thomas Curian from Oracle and Vivek, who was my old CEO at TIBCO.

Path to $50M ARR

Nathan Latka

23:46Okay, number three. Besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for growing the business?

Vijay Tella

23:51>> For growing the business, you know, we use a lot of, you know, we are big consumers of technology here from Salesforce to, you know, Intercom to all kinds of tools. You know, are you talking about company tools or

Nathan Latka

24:04Yeah, just like what you use personally to help you grow the company.

Vijay Tella

24:12>> You know, I think, you know, for me, it's not tools that I use to grow the company, right? It's strategy and the team.

Nathan Latka

24:19Yeah, sorry, Vijay. The question is just name a tool that you use daily that helps you keep everything organized. Absolutely,

Vijay Tella

24:24>> yes. I think I use Pomodoro Timers to organize my own time. What's it called? Pomodoro Timers.

Nathan Latka

24:32Ah, yeah. Pomodoro Timer. Yeah, very good.

Vijay Tella

24:34>> And I use this tool called self control when I need to like really lock down and not be distracted by all the news and sports and politics and everything else.

24:43>> That's good.

Nathan Latka

24:44Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Vijay Tella

24:47>> About seven.

Nathan Latka

24:48That's good. And what's your situation? Married, single, you have kids?

Vijay Tella

24:51>> I'm married with two kids.

Nathan Latka

24:53Okay, two kiddos. And how old are you, Vijay?

Vijay Tella

24:56>> Me, I'm 53.

Nathan Latka

24:5853, okay. Last question.

Vijay Tella

24:59>> What do you wish your 20 year old self knew?

25:03>> Well, I wish they

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Personal Habits

Vijay Tella

25:07>> would be, you know, when I was 20, I was very impatient for results and outcomes around everything I did. I would encourage that person to focus and enjoy the process. The results will come.

Nathan Latka

25:21There you guys have it from Vijay. Be more patient. He's had a lot of success now working on Work Auto, an enterprise version of some of the more consumer oriented folks that help really create the plumbing for the new cloud infrastructure that is growing so rapidly by connected apps, many, many different recipes. They have loads of folks using them, over 21,000 organizations, well over 1,000 that are actually paying ACV first year, call it $30 on average.

25:45So you can do the math, figure out generally how they're doing. 300% year over year growth in 2017, which is great. Dollars 17,000,000 raised. 50% net annual revenue expansion. Super healthy. Their team of 80 and about onethree in Palo Alto, the rest remote going rapidly. Less than twelve month payback period. Pretty there efficient there with cash founded in 2012. Vivek, thank you for taking us to the top.

Vijay Tella

26:07>> Thank you. Thank you, Nathan.