Today I’m incredibly excited to be joining ThoughtSpot, a rocket ship in the analytics space. The company is on a meteoric trajectory — winning awards like Forbes Cloud 100 and Fast Company’s Best Places for Innovators, reeling in 100 enterprise SaaS customers in 6 months, and growing ARR from cloud products at a massive clip.
The high growth, industry accolades, culture of innovation, and strong customer adoption all make for an attractive place to work. But they’re only part of my story for why I joined ThoughtSpot.
Getting to the real value of data
I’m joining ThoughtSpot from Cohesity, another emerging, high-growth company that ticked many of these same boxes. During my tenure there, I managed the company’s portfolio of analytics and security on the data under management. I saw up close and personal just how valuable data-driven insights are. Simply capturing and storing data isn’t enough. Turning data into insights, and those insights into actions, is where real value is created — and this market is set to explode.
The truth is existing business intelligence tools fall woefully short. The best companies want to build their businesses on data-driven insights, but need better technology to make that happen. ThoughtSpot was the early pioneer in search, empowering any person to ask questions, find insights, and drive actions. Since then, the team has continued to innovate—and pull away from the pack of competitors in the process.
Supercharging innovation with SaaS
It was clear to me that ThoughtSpot had the right product to solve a real pain in a large market. But, as any good techie knows, product/market fit is only part of the battle. You have to continually, relentlessly innovate to give your customers what they need.
In today’s world, there’s no better way to make that possible than SaaS. ThoughtSpot recently made this move, bringing the Modern Analytics Cloud to customers via SaaS for the first time. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen how SaaS creates incredible value for both companies and their customers. At VMware, and then at Cohesity, I saw firsthand the hard work and dedication required to make this change. What surprised me is Thoughtspot’s speed of execution. Just six months after GA, they not only have an incredible SaaS analytics offering, but also more than 100 enterprise customers!
But launching a SaaS analytics offering is only step one — it’s the beginning of the journey. As ThoughtSpot goes full throttle into this new SaaS world, they have a massive opportunity to accelerate new capabilities, build new integrations, and launch entirely new products faster than ever before. Helping companies reap the benefits of SaaS is some of the most rewarding work I’ve ever done, and I can’t wait to do it again at ThoughtSpot.
Defining the new competitive battleground
As someone who has spent my career in enterprise tech, one thing that surprised me when exploring a potential new role at ThoughtSpot was the company’s dedication to UX. For years, you could get away with clunky UI, time-consuming trainings, and 6 month windows to file bugs and get them fixed. Today, that’s all changed.
Users demand tools that not only work, but are easy to work with. This is where ThoughtSpot truly shines. With an analytics experience that takes the best from the consumer world, ThoughtSpot was built for anyone to use. ThoughtSpot’s Cofounder and Executive Chairman Ajeet Singh has spoken numerous times about why UX is the greatest differentiator for tech today. Seeing ThoughtSpot in action, it’s easy to see this thinking built into the product itself.
The most important part: People
So, a company solving a huge problem in a large market, with the right distribution, the right product thinking should be a no brainer. But every company is really a collection of people. Their ideas, perspective, and work ethic that ultimately drive a company’s success or failure.
It is the people you meet during the interviews, and the comfort you seek in those discussions, that make you finally tilt over. I knew going into the interview that ThoughtSpot has great people. At Cohesity, we often competed for the same talent. Some great folks I interviewed for roles at Cohesity ended up at ThoughtSpot. I knew the caliber of people I’d be joining in my new team.
It wasn’t just the quality of these individuals, but the coordination between teams that was so attractive to me. In each interview, I asked the same question: What is the company’s north star? Every individual answered the same – building a more fact-driven world – as if they were copying from each other! It was clear to me there is massive alignment between different teams on the company’s mission, vision, and path to execution. That level of alignment can only stem from a strong culture of transparency and accountability, and gives me nothing but confidence for the road ahead.
Last, the team was willing to sweat the small stuff on my behalf. Even before my official first day, IT not only took care of my request to change laptops on short notice, but delivered it to my doorstep!
This is only the start for ThoughtSpot. If you want to see all the exciting things we’re unveiling in the year to come, come join me and the team at Beyond 2021 on Nov 16.
Until then, onward!
