Interview with Christian Chabot of Tableau Software

Tableau Software makes data and databases easier to use and understand. I don’t really feel the need to use any more complex terminology than that. We believe that databases are too hard to use. They’re like the Web before Google. There’s hundreds of things you can use to poke and prod and try to make a database useful, kind of like the Web back in ’97, ’98, ’99. We all thought the problem solved, in a way, and then, all of a sudden, Google comes along and just opens your eyes to a much easier way to see and understand information.

Google is focused almost completely on unstructured data like the Web and we are focused on structured data. There are a number of similarities between the companies. We were spun out of Stanford like Google, working down the hall from them. And, whereas the Google gang was focused on unstructured data, we’re focused totally on structured data, and that’s why I use the word “database.” We think databases like Excel–which by the way, is a database contrary to popular belief–and Access and SQL Server and Oracle and Postres and MySQL, they’re just too hard to use and understand and that’s the problem we solve.

It is, and we do that in our own way. Our mission is to make information easier to see and use and understand. Simplicity, literally, is our number one brand value, cultural value, company value and at the core of what we do.

We have created a really simple user interface, it’s drag and drop and exploratory. It has unlimited undo so you can never break anything. Users can install the product in 90 seconds, connect to data of any size, shape, language, or subject in 30 seconds, and be asking their own questions of that data interactively within a couple of minutes. The best way to see whether or not what I’m saying is true is to go to our website and get a free downloadable trial in 90 seconds.

Currently it is simply too hard to ask data some questions. I think, everyone can relate to the idea of kind of a big Excel spreadsheet packed with data, where there are just row after row after row after row. Maybe it’s an Excel and just, I don’t know, 20,000 rows or 2,000 rows or 500 rows of data. But it could also be, literally, an Oracle warehouse or an OLAP Cube or a MySQL production database with, quite literally, billions or hundreds of millions of billions of rows.

Regardless of whether it’s that Excel case or that giant billion-row case. It’s just too hard for your human brain to sit there and interrogate a database. It’s just too hard. It should be as easy, so to speak, as searching the Web. Right? Now, maybe that’s a goal we’ll never quite get to, but it should be simple and drag and drop and learnable in a few minutes. How easy is it for you, right now, to open some data and just start asking some rapid-fire questions of it. That’s what Tableau enables.

It’s all actionable to varying degrees. Regardless of how actionable it is, it can be much more actionable.

No matter what stage you are you need a simple, visual, high performance interface that you can point to that data and interrogate it, ask it questions, explore it, browse it, examine it, drill into it, zoom up, pivot it around, and give information. That’s true no matter, really, what state your data is in.

I like to think in terms of users. In terms of revenue, this is obviously in the billions of dollars. There are quite literally billions of databases on the planet. I would argue that 98% of them are too hard to use. I can tell you that from personal experience.

If you look at that market, there are certainly no fewer than five million users of a product like that. If you look at our customers and sales today, you will just see an intoxicating array of industries from, literally, three-letter secret agencies to corner grocers to restaurants to supply chain experts. Our biggest customer is Microsoft, our second biggest customer is Google. I mean, you can’t name an industry or a function or a country or a job profession that isn’t benefiting from Tableau’s discovery today. So although we’re in the tens of thousands of users today, we will not stop until we cross at least the low millions of users.

When you have so many millions of users to conquer how exactly do you proceed? There’s kind of a well-known book Crossing the Chasm that has become religion in the technology industry with regards to how’d you do this at least at 15,000 feet?

I think the good thing about that book and that thinking is that it correctly identifies the fact that hey you’re never going to get your 100,000th user without first getting your 50,000th user. You’re never going to get that user without getting your 1,000th user and so on and so forth and back. And so you have to try to find a way to carve that pyramid of opportunity up and advance. I think the analogy they use is kind of one bowling pin at a time.

The unfortunate thing that I have just discovered from people who have read that book is they tend to immediately think that means an industry. You know, so I’ve seen young growth companies just sit there and kind of say, “OK, we’re going to pick the financial industry!” or “We’re going to go pick the retail industry!” or “We’re going to go pick the defense in government!” and they kind of do these things on Power Point slides and offsites without any customers in the room.

And they’re not really thinking through whether or not an industry-based targeting is really the right way to attack the bowling pin. So for us, we have found that industry actually isn’t useful, at all, even though people recommend it to us quite a bit. But instead it’s more of a job function.

So, as I said earlier, you can’t name an industry that isn’t buying Tableau in significant volume anymore, and, in fact, the distribution is pretty uniform from defense, to retail, to government and finance, and, boy, just every industry you can name.

But I will say you’re still looking for early adopters right? And for us an early adopter is usually a business line manager or an analyst or an executive who’s very data-oriented of some kind. Many of our customers work in groups responsible for working with data, but not all of them. Sometimes, it’s just a…it’s a chief marketing officer or a VP of sales or supply chain director or, actually at Google, their HR department was the first group who discovered us.

And so it really–the biggest criteria for us is trying to put ourselves, put our message and put our brand in places where people who care about data and information are congregating. So I guess that’s our marketing strategy at 30,000 feet.

Tableau has three co-founders, and to use a familiar analogy, a triangle is a very stable structure.

Also, each co-founder has to bring something substantial as a contribution not just in the company’s first year but in the company’s first ten years. In our particular case, the key inventor of our technology is Dr. Chris Stolte who is a Ph.D. student of Pat’s. Chris is really a worldwide expert and award decorated researcher into the fields of database querying and database optimization and data analytics and information visualization.

We also have Professor Pat Hanrahan who’s probably one of the most important computer scientists in our country. His resume you can research online. It speaks for itself. He co-founded, he was one of the founding employees of Pixar, the animation studio, which revolutionized the world of animated film.

My whole background was in data and analytics. So I was very much bringing the business users’ perspective of how to do good analysis: what the problems with databases were, what the challenges of businesses and organizations had, trying to better understand information.

Let me answer that question in two ways. I think one of the things the founders in a company need to do is keep the company educated and on task with regard to its mission. In our particular case, the three founders are so tightly synced on that mission, no one of us plays a more prominent role than anyone else. I could trust Pat or Chris, in a second, to work with new hires in the company, as an example, or new business partners, as the case may be sometimes, and properly educate them on our place in the world and the values that we hold dear to reach the goals we have.

I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are kind of obsessed with culture and they just act very on and “we need to be very careful about the culture and we need to write it all down and we need to post it.” And that hasn’t really been our style and then, and I actually think that can be a little condescending.

The fact is your biggest goal as a founder is to hire more fantastic people, in fact, hopefully better people than you are. Better, smarter, more accomplished. That’s your goal. And so, the start-ups who kind of post all their values and what their culture is going to be like and write it all down really early before people’s personality quirks and before the whole talented birth-base has really kind of an emerged for itself. I think can kind of force the issue and, actually, make the culture, I think, a little bit fake.

So our biggest cultural point at Tableau is number one: make sure everyone understands and then starts actively contributing to the mission of the company. Number two, that people feel like they’re in a great work environment, and they’re having fun and they’re learning new things every day, and are in jobs where they feel like they can succeed. So, they’re kind of higher-level things than just kind of writing down cultural bullet points.

The first thing that comes to mind is creative problem solving. If you ask me what’s the single hardest thing to find out there in the market for people, it’s creative problem solvers. There are all sorts of people who have worked on successful projects, worked for successful brands, had successful experiences, who–in no way, were part of the formative group of people–who creatively solved the problems that made that project or brand a success. Quite, honestly, in an interview, you can tell in the first ten minutes.

People will often ballyhoo their attachment to a successful product or brand of some kind, which is great. You’ll, immediately, ask a follow-up question, “OK, so what did you, specifically, do to make that project a success?” Then, as they start to list those things that they can (often they can’t), and when they want to start to list those things, you then say, “What went into that decision? It all probably seems obvious now that that was good. It all probably seems obvious right now that Google’s home page shouldn’t be a portal but, how did you make that decision?”

Again, ten minutes later, you can tell clear as day whether they actually were one of the formative people who came up with the creative solutions to those difficult problems, because you can tell by their depth of thinking on the issue. When you try responding in an interview, intelligently, to a deep question about which you never, actually, thought very deeply, I can tell you weren’t one of the key creative problem solvers on the team. So anyway, a little long winded answer but that’s the hardest thing to find, if you’re asking.

For me, this entrepreneurial journey was the culmination of everything I’ve ever done. I did software engineering as an undergrad at Stanford so I always had an interest in being involved with or building a software company in some way. I then worked as a professional data analyst for four years. I was a senior economic analyst for a research firm, and then I, actually, wrote a book on the economics of the euro, the European currency where I just struggled for data for a year and became intimately familiar again with all the problems of trying to understand data easily and fast.

Then I went to Stanford Business School where I’m happy to say to have probably just one of the most amazing entrepreneurship programs from an educational perspective. Now, some people would say entrepreneurship can’t be taught, I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but it can be. Stanford does a really good job of it. After that, I actually founded my first software company with one of the other co-founders at Tableau who is Chris Stolte, the gentleman I have mentioned earlier. That was actually an information visualization set-up of a different variety. We invented a way to better render route maps and it had a successful outcome and was sold, and it’s now used by about a million people.

So when Tableau came along, I was looking at new entrepreneurial ideas, and I realized that software engineering plus entrepreneurship plus data analysis plus information visualization, this was really the culmination of everything I’ve ever done. I felt like I had the expertise to be a formative leader, at least, for the company’s first decade or so.

The biggest one I see is people spend too much. I don’t see all that many start-ups focusing on too many things. That’s a common criticism: that a start-up tried to do too many things. That does happen, but to me, it’s nowhere near the top of the list. Most start-ups figure out pretty fast that there’s no way they can do more than a couple of things well, so why bother. So that problem will tend to fix itself although, admittedly, not always.

So things like that are sort of seventh or eighth on the list of mistakes. But the big number one and number two, number one is you’re spending too much money too fast. You’re spending money ahead of customer attraction. Number two is you are not doing enough of the hard marketing and selling work early to get the feedback you need to inform your strategic choices and your product direction.

You’ll hear an entrepreneur or start-up group say, “Hey, there’s no way we can go show a customer this thing we’re trying to do or talk with them, because it doesn’t exist yet. You know, it’s like a chicken and the egg, right? We haven’t built it, and, therefore, how do we sell it? If we can’t sell it, therefore, we can’t get feedback on what to build. Boy, what do we do?”

Almost always when someone had said this, when I would then drill down on what they actually had, I found they had more than they thought they had. They’ve formed the business. They have a mission articulated. They have drawings for the things they’re going to build and the website they’re going to launch or the consulting service they’re going to promulgate. They have references from previous people they’ve worked with. They have intimate knowledge of some problem that somehow inspired them on what to do. Most people, I just say, “Literally, wrap that up as a package and go try selling it.” I think most entrepreneurs don’t do this because they’re afraid.

To be specific, even if your product isn’t built, take the drawings, take the PowerPoint. Unless it’s so confidential you can’t possibly tell it to anyone; take it to a customer, lay it out, and ask that person how much they’d pay. It’s an interesting conversation to have. You will find the minute you ask someone to pay or become a partner or to sign on to your service in some way, go sell a free beta–I guess, that’s an oxymoron–go invite people to sign up for a free beta. And then, as they say, “No.” or “I didn’t have enough time.” or “Boy, that’s not a priority now.” listen to what they’re saying, because if they’re saying they don’t have time and it’s not a priority and I just can’t get around to it, guess what? When the product is built, they’re going to be saying the same thing. So you might as well get that feedback, hard tough love feedback, early rather than later, so you can get the boat pointed in the right direction.

I think the fear is that even Shakespeare wrote hundreds of years ago, “Often your advantage becomes your disadvantage.” You know, Caesar’s unmistakable bullheadedness and strength and leadership and vision became hubris which caused his downfall. I mean, this is one of the great topics in leadership, generally, whether you’re talking about business leadership or political leadership, which is maybe a more timely subject. But often people’s greatest assets can, if they’re not very careful, it’s usually what the lesson is, if you’re not very careful, it can become your downfall.

In the case of entrepreneurs, just think about it. You got to be crazy to be an entrepreneur! You’ve got no customers, no product, no employees, no health care. You’ve got to leave a secure job, you have a hope and a vision and a dream. So the people who ultimately become entrepreneurs, whether they’re that corner shop owner or the founder of Cisco, they often share a real bullheadedness which is just a great strength. I mean, God bless Steve Job’s bullheadedness. Where would we be without it?

You have to be kind of obstinate and ignore what the data is telling you and go on instinct and don’t listen to criticism and just plow, plow, plow. We need entrepreneurs to have those traits. But I just happen to think when I’m, maybe in a coaching situation or being coached for that matter, is that often, you have to just be a little careful because that can become your weakness. So I think, to answer the fear question, often, people are where they are with their idea because they’re thinking differently.

So they don’t want to hear data or opinions that say it’s not going to work, and that’s partly what’s making them drive forward. But they can also become a real disadvantage because they stop listening or, in this case to your question, what I was on to there was they’re a little afraid actually. They are a little afraid after being in the basement working on this for a year and perfecting those schemas and PowerPoint slides and mission statements and sales points, they’re going to go out and be criticized whether they’re on the right track and so on.

But usually, they get over it. So my advice is that people don’t get over it; that everyone figures this out; they’re smart. It’s just that they often tend to wait; they withhold that stage of tough customer feedback just too late. In fact, I’ll put it this way, I’ve never seen a case where you did it too early. I’m sure there are cases of that but you can almost never be starting to get people’s opinions and tough feedback too early. If nothing else, it’ll just help spur your own thinking.

You’re asking the $64 million question of entrepreneurship. You know, that’s the hardest thing. You just can’t. It’s like saying, “But what does it take to win the World Series, anyway?” If I can list a thousand things, I would, but even I can barely remember them.

If I were to give two cents of advice, I would say number one is get co-founders or get advisers. Personally, at Tableau, I am always assured that we are going to make good decisions even when I may be veering towards the wrong decision, because I have co-founders, and, by the way, beyond co-founders, it’s a team, a whole management team and a whole company full of people with strong opinions and good insights and super high IQ who you can use to really find the right path. So I guess, in a word, stop trying to do it yourself is my best answer. You need a circle of teammates or co-founders or even advisors–some people do–who can help you not be too close to the decision that you can’t see, the forest for the trees anymore.

Our biggest dream is that we can make data everywhere–in spreadsheets and text files and little Web downloads and data marts and data warehouses and SQL Server and Oracle and Excel and in Access extremely easy to use for millions of people. Luckily, our company is growing exponentially in pursuit of that dream. We just launched our second product line, which has sold over a million dollars in its first four months of general availability. We’re launching a third in 2009, and we just want to build a whole suite of products for helping anyone of any scale anywhere install or connect to one of our products in seconds and better understand the information that’s around them in their world.

So certainly, ten years from now, without any question, we’ll be a public company. I think, in fact, we’ll be, hopefully, considering being a public company well within five years and selling products to people of all professions and industries all over the world in pursuit of that vision.