SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
652: SnapLogic Raises $136M, $70M+ ARR Helping 750 Customers ($138k ACV) Connect Data Streams with CEO Gaurav Dhillon
07 May 2017
Chapter 1: What inspired Gaurav Dhillon to invest in SnapLogic?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million.
He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
When I do webinar interviews or I give big speeches to thousands of people all over the world, I usually will talk about data and sometimes show my dashboards, like my SaaS dashboard as I'm growing my SaaS company to top inbox, or my website dashboard, which shows how I take impressions to convert them into email leads and convert them into customers for NathanLacke.com.
The funny thing is, guys, I build these dashboards with myself, no developer, and it's basically free, and I use one tool to do it. You can see the tool at NathanLacke.com forward slash dashboard.
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Chapter 2: How did Gaurav transition from Informatica to SnapLogic?
analytics. I'll tell you more later in the show. This is episode 652. And coming up tomorrow morning, we have Maria on she invests $120 million into financial technology companies. If you're a female and you want to see more female founders and smart women in our world, you don't want to miss Maria.
Her company's put through 39 graduates so far and accepting six to eight new per year with the New York Partnership Fund.
good morning everybody my guest this morning is grov dylan he's an early investor in a company called snap logic he joined as ceo in 2009 when he saw the potential to transform how companies integrate applications data and devices for digital business he spearheaded snap logic's rapid growth and oversees its strategy products and operations he was previously the co-founder and ceo of informatica grov are you ready to take us to the top
I'm on it. All right, let's have some fun. So first things first, I want to understand the transition from Informatica to SnapLogic.
Chapter 3: What is SnapLogic's business model and customer base?
So what happened at Informatica? Why'd you leave?
Yeah, so basically, look, I built that. I wouldn't say I, we, in particular, my co-founder and I built that up. From our garage, we had a $75,000 SBA grant that we used and then raised venture capital to build that into a market leader in the data warehousing and ETL space. How much total did you raise? We raised $13.5 million. Got it. Those were different times.
It was the world before the internet.
Chapter 4: How much funding has SnapLogic raised to date?
And it was just a... Wonderful time for me as a 27-year-old chief executive. But it was a lot of working Sundays. It was 12 odd years of working Sundays. Took it public in 1999. Then ran it for another five years. A couple of busts, 1999 bust, the year 2003 bust, 9-11. And it was 11, 12 years is a long time. It was time to go.
And I think also fundamentally, this is getting long-winded here, but my strategy was to go build new products.
Chapter 5: What challenges does SnapLogic face in the integration market?
And in that kind of public environment, there wasn't an appetite for risk. There was more of an appetite to harvest earnings per share and so on. So You know, it was time for me to move on. In hindsight, I was probably crisp a year or two before I did move on.
Be a capitalist, a cold hearted capitalist with me for a second. You personally wanting to get your own wealth out of Informatica. You deserved it. You worked hard to build it. How did you extract money for yourself from this?
Chapter 6: How does SnapLogic differentiate itself from competitors like Zapier?
Did you sell your shares back? How did you do that?
Yeah. So, look, I am not a cold hearted capitalist. I'm a company builder. For me, wealth is a byproduct. And it's just who I am. You build something great, there's enough for everybody. So how did we do it? So first of all, when I did the IPO, I was able to sell some of my shares after the IPO in a secondary, which is a very good way.
Chapter 7: What metrics are critical for SnapLogic's growth strategy?
There was no lockout? No, because in the secondary process, you're registered with the SEC for a secondary sale of shares. And some of those shares are sold to, some of the proceeds go to the company and some of the proceeds go back to the selling shareholders, which were some venture capitalists. I took a portion of my shareholding and sold it, but it's an open and public view.
There's a book, you build a book. Thanks to Charles Phillips and some of the people at Morgan Stanley, some of Franco Tron's team here in Silicon Valley, we did a $480 million secondary. Most of the proceeds went to the company, but not all.
What was the primary? What would you raise in the initial public offering? You know, I think it was less than 100.
Chapter 8: What advice does Gaurav have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Oh, wow. Yeah, and that's the way to do it. That's what Tableau did, which shares some finance board members with my old company and so on.
Really? So the secondary was four times as much as the initial, huh?
Yeah, if you do well, that's the right way to do it.
Interesting.
Look, because the IPO, you're also trying to build a brand for yourself. Nobody knows you as a company or as an executive. So if you do a modest IPO, you've got to price it so there's some wealth for the new buyers. And as they do well, they get a sense. You do a couple of good quarters and you have the right momentum. And then they're very much more confident of buying a bigger chunk.
And at that point, you can price it more efficiently instead of trying to do it all in one go. So I certainly feel that was good policy.
So take us through the exit here. When did you what year did you leave the business in and then how did you get involved with SnapLogic? Yeah, so I left in July 2004.
And for one year, I did nothing. I had certain bucket list items. I wanted to learn a language. So I learned Spanish. I wanted to travel in certain parts of the world, want to spend some time with my parents before they got too old. I did that. And I also wanted to win the bet that many of my friends made with me that I wouldn't last more than six months.
So I basically left the country and moved to Argentina.
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