In the age of Big Data, figuring out the best ways to store, move, analyze and make sense of data can be everything for a company. Or, all the data at a company’s disposal could amount to nothing if the business doesn’t know what to do with it.
“People can ask about things like supply chains and sales pipelines and very specific areas,” said Frank Bien, chief executive of Big Data analytics company Looker. “But when they want to ask more broad, ad hoc questions in every department in a company, it’s very difficult. And what we’re trying to do is make that less difficult.”
Bien says that in helping Looker’s clients find the value in all of their data, his 400-person company has “a focus on boring stuff that works, as opposed to being flashy and getting headlines while doing little to transform a business.” Based in Santa Cruz, Looker has so far received the backing of $180 million in funding from CapitalG (formerly called Google Capital), Redpoint, First Round Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
In an interview at Looker’s San Francisco office, Bien talked about the state of Big Data and how Looker is helping its customers solve their Big Data management issues. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Companies have always dealt with data. What’s the difference with data today as opposed to recent years?
A: We help companies better understand all the data they have and use to driver their business, and I think this has been sort of a holy grail for a long time. Companies want to be data-driven. They want their employees to be able to ask questions and get factual answers. But, surprisingly, it hasn’t been solved, yet, in a very broad sense.
Q: When you say “data-driven,” what does that mean in terms of the data we’re talking about?
A: When we started out, we wanted to have a very business-centric focus. But we really felt that companies didn’t really understand their core business model all the time. Companies didn’t understand the lifetime value of their customers completely, and there was this chaos going on where people would think they were agreeing to numbers like the value of their customer. But, you would see that they didn’t have that value defined the same way, and while they thought they were making business decisions based on that data, it, maybe, wasn’t accurate. And it was really a mess underneath. What we wanted to do was bring it into the reach of any company so it could use data more effectively.
Q: So, how do you simplify something like that?
A: I think there are a few different layers. Above all, Big Data gave us cheap, analytic databases. And what happened is people in a company could collect and store everything. Once they put a new tool on top of it, like Looker, you could start to ask and answer questions much more simply. And then we realized there was more of a cultural shift to be had, and if we could lower the barrier of pain to ask a question and give people reliable answers and guidance, then people would start to deal with the chaos of data they had.
Q: You mention that employees have a lot of questions about their company’s data these days. What kinds of questions are they asking?
A: Let’s say I’m a customer success manager in a software company, and my job is to understand how people are using my software product. I want to understand if people are happy using it, if they are going to stop using it, why they might stop using it and if they have a propensity to churn, or go to a new service. Now, I’m starting to understand where I should focus my time. And with data, I start to build a view of how they are using the product. How much of it are they using? What kinds of features are they using? Are the number of features expanding or going down? Are more users being added every day? Are they paying their bills? Now, I can focus on a specific customer and their experience with a product, but I’m also making sure that I can maintain that revenue stream for my company in the future.
Q: The concept of software as a service (SaaS) gets thrown around a lot when it comes to topics like data and the cloud. What’s your take on this part of cloud-based offerings right now?
A: We are a SaaS company. We host the vast majority of our customers in our cloud. But, data is interesting because data has weight. We’re dealing with trillions of rows of data, and it’s hard to move all of that around. We took the approach that we would be a SaaS company, and that we would be cloud based, but we also have the ability to deploy on (a customer’s) premises or in their cloud. That’s worked really well for us. It’s all subscription based. And the big advantage of SaaS is that you’re married to the success of the customer. And we’re really driving toward the success of our customers in that (technology) model.
Q: We’re meeting here in your San Francisco office, but Looker has always been based in Santa Cruz. Why have you chosen to keep the headquarters there?
A: I would have thought we would have had to move at some point, but it turns out that given all that is happening in the Valley, there’s a big benefit to not being headquartered over here. There are so many data companies, and I would argue that most Big Data companies have thought the same way; they are building on the same notions that databases are slow, and that they have to do things in a certain way. We really felt there was this other way to do it. And people thought we were crazy. And we just kept doing it and getting one successful company after the next, and next thing you know, we have 1,500 customers and some of the “Who’s Who” of people who use data.
Frank Bien profile
Age: 50
Job Title: Chief Executive Officer, Looker
Education: Bachelor’s of Science, California State Univeristiy, Long Beach
Hometown: Los Angeles
Place of Residence: Santa Cruz
Family members: Two sons
Five things about Frank Bien
- In his spare time, he likes to spend time in the mountains around Santa Cruz with his sons.
- He always makes time to read newspapers online.
- He sees promoting Looker’s customers as bringing value to the company’s business.
- If he could have lunch with one person, it would be with the child he lost some years ago.
- He says the “weaponization” of data keeps him up at night. “It’s about privacy for sure, but it’s more than that. It’s about the intentional use of technology to do real harm on a massive scale. I want this world to be better for my kids, not worse.”
