He went 7 years with no revenue— then grew to $100M ARR. | Rob Woollen, Co-Founder of Sigma

Rob Woollen, founder of Sigma Computing, shares the unfiltered reality of going from 0 to $100M ARR. After spending seven years grinding without product-market fit, Sigma finally hit an inflection point—tripling revenue year over year. Rob dives deep into the pivots, setbacks, and critical decisions that turned early failure into a massive success. If you’re an early-stage founder feeling stuck, this episode will show you how patience, resilience, and radical product decisions can transform your startup.

Why You Should Listen

• How Sigma went from $0 to $100M ARR—but spent 7 years figuring it out.
• The pivot that turned years of failure into explosive growth.
• Why obsessing over speed to product-market fit is the wrong game.
• How to handle the psychological toll of startup uncertainty.
• The hidden power of building features your customers never ask for.

Keywords

product-market fit, Sigma Computing, pivot, startup growth, business intelligence, Snowflake, early-stage startup, SaaS growth, cloud analytics, founder stories

00:00:00 Intro

00:02:49 Debating speed to product–market fit

00:10:14 Quitting Salesforce and the EIR leap

00:23:12 Two years of prototypes that went nowhere

00:36:53 The Snowflake meeting and spreadsheet pivot

00:45:41 Dealing with Investors

00:52:30 Tripling three years straight to $100M ARR

00:54:46 Why most people shouldn’t start a company

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:49 Debating speed to product–market fit
• 10:14 Quitting Salesforce and the EIR leap
• 23:12 Two years of prototypes that went nowhere
• 36:53 The Snowflake meeting and spreadsheet pivot
• 45:41 Dealing with Investors
• 54:46 Why most people shouldn’t start a company

Transcript

Pablo Srugo (00:00:00):
Like, give us a sense of what growth was like in that first year, for example.

Rob Woollen (00:00:03):
Yeah. We think three years in a row tripled the company. We would have little blips of success. I remember, like, in April of 2019. We had a new salesperson, where three days in a row. She closed deals. I was like, we are there. The next quarter. And I still see this on our company's sort of dashboard. The next quarter, we closed zero new customers. I'd say we're very fortunate in that we had long track records. So we were very well-known people to the investors, but the investors gave us an $8 million Series A out of the gate. Roughly what I've told you here. Long track record, big idea, confidence in that they knew us so well that they thought we were going to be able to solve this. Yeah, it's funny. You know, people ask me, should they start a company? And my answer very quickly is no. And the reason I say that is actually related to your question. I say that because if, just talking to me and I tell you, No, you're convinced that, like, oh, maybe I shouldn't do this. You should definitely not do this. I feel like it has to be something that's innate in you where you're like, it doesn't matter what anyone says to me. I believe that I need to go do this. I want to go do this. And you have to also accept the fact that almost everyone fails.

Previous Guests (00:01:16):
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:28):
Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders, and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Woollen (00:01:44):
Thank you. It's great to be here.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:45):
So, I mean, you started Sigma Computing. You've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and you're doing over $100 million in revenue. Which, for me, is kind of the most important milestone, you know, the revenue milestones. And you grew from zero to 100 in three or so years, but that's if you don't count the first seven. Where you had no revenue. So there's, you know, it took, and this is something. Actually, I wrote a post about this on LinkedIn this week that seemed to get a lot of traction. I even got some people messaging me directly. Which is, you know, I think founders are maybe obsessed, but certainly pushed towards obsessing over going from zero to one. Like really fast, you know, zero to one in a year. These days, it's like zero to 10 as fast as possible with AI. And I'm not sure, you know, looking at companies like you. You look at Nike, you look at Shopify, you look at a lot of examples. Whether it even matters, you know, that was what the post is about. Does it really matter how fast you get to product market fit out of, you know, as long as you get real product market fit? Then the rest takes care of itself. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that. Maybe before we started this story.(Context: Sigma Computing is a cloud-based business intelligence and analytics platform that enables users to explore, analyze, and visualize data directly from cloud data warehouses using a spreadsheet-like interface without needing code.)

Rob Woollen (00:02:49):
Absolutely. I mean, obviously I'm biased by our experience of it was a long road to. To product market fit. But I think the most important place is obviously where you end up, and, you know, you can get to one or five quickly and then stall out. And I would not trade for that, given where we've been able to get to.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:09):
I don't think there's a correlation between that and ultimate success. And your ultimate ability to get to a hundred. There's so many reasons why you might go off. In fact, you know, sometimes. And I know we're starting off on a tangent a little bit. But just top of mind, like, you could argue if your goal is to get to a million. You'll do the wrong things because you'll create easy to build products, copycat products. Those are easier to sell in the early days, but that might not position you to actually get to a hundred million.

Rob Woollen (00:03:36):
I totally agree. I think to get to a large, let's say, public company. You have to go attack a big market, a big problem. It's very hard to do that. It's very hard to find product market fit there. I actually think one of the most important things is for people to align with their investors. Some investors are looking for more of a higher percentage win in a smaller market. But I think you can build a great company doing that. You need to make sure that you and your investors are on the same page versus someone that's only looking for, let's say, a public exit.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:10):
Well, maybe first off, what is Sigma Computing? What do you guys do?

Rob Woollen (00:04:14):
So Sigma builds data analysis software. And our key insight was that companies increasingly move a large majority of their data into these large cloud data systems like a Snowflake or a Databricks or a Google BigQuery. And those systems, traditionally, you could really only access them directly if you were writing SQL or Python. Or you had some sort of limited visualization tools that really sort of limited you in what you could do with them.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:43):
This is like a Tableau sort of thing, like that world.

Rob Woollen (00:04:46):
Exactly. And so you could build sort of like visualizations. But you couldn't really get to all of the data, especially at scale in these systems. And you couldn't really, for lack of a better word. Play with it like you could if you had. Sort of data locally in a spreadsheet. So our fundamental idea was, what if we could take this great advances in cloud infrastructure and make it directly accessible to a very broad audience of people? And that started first with making it so they could build analytics, dashboarding, business intelligence. We then moved into, you can then build, you take those experiences, and you can build them and put them inside your own websites or your own applications. So people that would now increasingly, like, take Sigma and they actually embed it in their application. Sigma becomes part of their application. And then now we've moved into even people that say, I want to actually build my own applications using Sigma on top of all of this enterprise data. And so that's been sort of the journey for us on the problems we're solving, but they all come back to this fundamental idea.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:44):
These are all business intelligence applications or all kinds of applications that people are building today?

Rob Woollen (00:05:49):
All kinds of applications. So one of the sort of key insights we've had over time with the company is that if you're putting your company's data into this centralized system. It then becomes kind of a natural place for you to build all of your internal applications because they can leverage all of that company data that you have.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:07):
So, and, where did this idea come from? What's kind of your background or your team's background?

Rob Woollen (00:06:12):
So I've spent, gosh, roughly 25, almost 30 years now in enterprise software. I'm trying not to count the years exactly here. And prior to this whole adventure, I spent seven years at Salesforce.com. And so I was a CTO there of the platform. Also ran product management on the platform there. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how do people build cloud systems at scale? What are the problems that people see? What are the types of use cases and applications that people want to leverage cloud data? And one of the things that really sort of sparked my interest was. Salesforce is obviously a company that has massive amounts of cloud data, right? They have essentially everyone's data about sales, increasingly service, and marketing. And I watched, at least 10 years ago when I was there, the company was still largely run on hypotheses, you know, spreadsheets with some guesses in it. The vast majority of people that were making the important decisions. Couldn't really leverage all of this data that they had. And so that, that really bothered me. I didn't like the fact that it clearly was possible. And yet, you know, we were running largely on people's, you know, hunches. Now they made good hunches. That company grew very well, but it doesn't seem like the scalable solution. So that was sort of one of the inspirations for me.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:33):
When you had that idea. Was it always, Okay, I'm going to start a startup to do this, or did you ever think about building it within Salesforce? Either for internal use or even as a product that maybe they'll use one day?

Rob Woollen (00:07:42):
I was pretty determined. I sort of always wanted to go build a startup. And so I was pretty determined to figure out something I was gonna go do. And so whether it was this or something else, I was gonna go start a company.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:52):
How do you? This is maybe a weird question to ask you, but I speak with a lot of both founders and people who might be founders. And one of the things when somebody's in a role like CTO, Salesforce being the peak of these sorts of roles. But it happens with many high-end engineers at name your favorite company, like the math of starting a company. In your case, you're now very much post this, like, you know, things have taken care of themselves. But a lot of people will say, like, why would I ever start a startup? Do you know what I mean? It just makes the amount you're making here and the certainty of you making it versus the risk of starting something, and it does become that. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that or how you personally thought about it at the time.

Rob Woollen (00:08:39):
Yeah, it's funny. People ask me, should they start a company? And my answer very quickly is no. And the reason I say that is actually related to your question. I say that because if just talking to me and I tell you no. You're convinced that, oh, maybe I shouldn't do this. You should definitely not do this. Because it is something that is like there's so much uncertainty. There are so many nights where, yes. You look at like, Hmm, if I had just stayed at Salesforce, I would have made X about a buddy. And like, why did I go down this adventure? Why did I walk away from those shares? I feel like it has to be something that's innate in you where you're like, It doesn't matter what anyone says to me. I believe that I need to go do this. I want to go do this. And you have to also accept the fact that, like, almost everyone fails, right? You need so many things to go right, including some luck. And it's like all those things have to line up for you to be willing to take this plunge.

Pablo Srugo (00:09:35):
It's funny that, you know, if you're asking somebody whether you should start a company or not, you probably shouldn't. Kind of reminded me, there's this J.P. Morgan. I think it was a J.P. Morgan quote back in the day. Somebody asked him. He had a really nice boat, and somebody was like, you know, what's the, you know, thinking of buying a boat, what's the maintenance on a boat? He's like, if you're asking about maintenance, you shouldn't buy a boat.

Rob Woollen (00:09:59):
I can believe that.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:02):
In the same vein. So anyways, back to your story. I mean, you see this idea. You see this kind of disconnect inside with the data that's available and yet how people are making decisions. What kind of steps do you take from there?

Rob Woollen (00:10:14):
Yeah, we took a really interesting path. I had had a longstanding relationship with some of the venture capitalists at Sutter Hill Ventures. What I really liked about them was that they're an interesting firm and that they tend to primarily start companies as opposed to investing in other people's companies. I joined Sutter Hill as what they call an entrepreneur in residence. Which for them is really someone like me that they'd known a while. They're going to give you some time to leverage the resources of the firm and think about what is the problem you're trying to solve. What is the company that you would try to build out of this? Ideally, you find a fit, obviously, where they would then want to invest in it.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:56):
But to be clear, you left Salesforce. You didn't start building and try to figure it out. Is it going to work? You just were like, okay, let's do it. and you took the plunge, sort of thing.

Rob Woollen (00:11:04):
I took a plunge. I often joke with people that the entrepreneur residents at Sutter Hill, the only challenge to it, is that they pay you very little. Otherwise, you're like, I'm happy to hang out here forever and think about my great ideas. It was a large pay cut from Salesforce, so you're incentivized to think about, what am I going to do next?

Pablo Srugo (00:11:25):
And so what's the structure actually of being an EIR there? How do things work?

Rob Woollen (00:11:31):
It's pretty open-ended. So I remember my first day I showed up, and I think I had spoken to a few people for like the first 10 minutes. And then I was shown my office, and you have sort of a whiteboard. And it's like, now I know, big thoughts. Obviously, you know, there's lots of resources there. There's lots of people that started big companies. And so that's a lot of what I think you can leverage out of it. But I'd also say, like, a huge part of it is just getting out of, you know, for me, it was getting out of Salesforce. Not having, you know, day-to-day Salesforce things to think about and just having sort of the white space to think about. What would I really want to go do here?

Pablo Srugo (00:12:04):
And what's the first step? You have this general idea. Are you, do you start talking to customers? Do you get, do you have a co-founding team? Kind of where? What path do you take?

Rob Woollen (00:12:13):
Yeah, so I came in with, I think, probably six or seven very high-level ideas I was roughly interested in. And I would just start talking to, initially, people there and then some of the other prospects and customers they introduced us to. And eventually, one day. I remember the partner, Mike Spicer, I was working for, said, "Hey, you know, the problem you're talking about here. Actually, Jason France, the other EIR here. He seems to be talking about the same problem, like maybe you two should work together." And so, that's how we went from being, you know, the two people with our office next to each other to becoming co-founders, was all sort of. We happened across sort of the same problems from different directions.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:53):
Where was he at on that journey? Was he like ahead? Was he kind of even-keeled where you were? What happened when you guys started talking together?

Rob Woollen (00:13:00):
It's interesting because his background was very much. He had previously spent all of his time building databases and system software. So he was really coming at it from that perspective of, I've spent all my time building out this infrastructure. He was advising at Snowflake at the time. On how to build sort of their optimizer. And he was trying to think about, like, hey, I'm tired of building just the infrastructure. I want to think about how do end users? How would they actually use all this stuff that I'm trying to build for them? So he was sort of coming up the stack. And I was coming down the stack from, you know, I've been building these sort of sales and service applications. I want to get back into a little bit more of the sort of platformy type things. And it felt like we kind of met in the middle.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:38):
And did you? Were the other ideas related to this, or they were all like six or seven completely different ideas?

Pablo Srugo (00:13:42):
Six or seven different, complete ideas. A lot of them were not very well thought out, but I just sort of had early. I used to just, whenever I was walking around. I would just have some idea, and I would just put it in my phone. And have a little idea doc of here's the problems I'm interested in.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:57):
But at this point, when you joined forces with him. You ditched the other ones, and you kind of went all in on this one?

Rob Woollen (00:14:01):
Yep. It's funny because that was probably January or February of 2014. And I recently found some document we wrote back then, and we sort of outlined all these problems in the industry at the time. And we've wavered a lot on exactly how we're going to solve all those problems, but the actual problems we're going after still all the same things.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:23):
Walk me through some of those.

Rob Woollen (00:14:25):
Sure. So I think that the traditional problem with these sorts of business intelligence applications is they really focus on technical users. So if you could write SQL or Python, you could do whatever you want in them. They give them a really powerful interface. But the vast majority of people, they're not going to become SQL programmers, nor should they. And for those people, the only real choice was you would look at one of these tools and you'd press download to Excel. That was the only sort of thing you ever want to do in one of these tools, which is get it out of there so I can play in Excel. And our realization was, obviously, you can download to Excel. But now the data you have it's going to get out of date. You can only these days get a very small subset of the data. Because, the systems. Much, much larger data sets behind them. And so we wanted to build something that essentially brought those things together. Make it so that anyone could actively use all of that data in real time without having to download it to some separate system. And that was essentially the first thing that, well, it wasn't the first thing we built. It was the first successful thing we built.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:30):
What was the first thing you built?

Rob Woollen (00:15:32):
We went through a long set of adventures. What was interesting about it is that. Again, like we've always had this same idea of we're trying to solve this problem of we're going to build a better interface for people to access all of this data. You're sitting there, and you're like, oh, if we just build the right interface. All of this will be solved. And it sounds so easy, right? You're just like, oh, obviously we'll just figure this out. And I do think as an entrepreneur, you need some sort of irrational optimism. So our irrational optimism was we actually left this nest of Sutter Hill and got our own office with little more than what I've just told you. We had sort of a hypothesis of this is a huge problem. We had a bunch of people that acknowledged to us, yes, we believe this is a huge problem. If you solve it, it's going to be very valuable.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:17):
And you raised money, right, at that point, like in January/February of, you said, 2014?

Rob Woollen (00:16:22):
Yeah, it was actually. We raised in April, but yes. We were able to raise, and this is the part where I'd say we're very fortunate in that we had long track records. So we were very well-known people to the investors, but the investors gave us an $8 million Series A out of the gate with roughly what I've told you here. Long track record, big idea, confidence in that they knew us so well that they thought we were going to be able to solve this. You know, I realize for most people, that's a hard thing to relate to, right? Someone just going to hand you $8 million. I recall them telling us, "Don't spend a lot of money until you know exactly what you're doing." And so, you know, we got a terrible office in San Francisco. We, you know, didn't pay ourselves particularly well. We did all the things to try to be pretty miserly on what our spend was to give us that time to try to figure out what we were actually going to do to solve this problem.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:15):
How many people did you hire?

Rob Woollen (00:17:16):
Initially, we brought in three people. So it was a team of five. Our first employee is actually still with us today. So it's one of the things that I love. So he's been through every transition of the adventure here.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:31):
You know, this is one of the interesting thing about raising, you know, a million out of the gate. Like, because you could ease, I mean, with 8 million. You can hire like 20/30 people and do a lot of stuff. Not necessarily the right stuff. That's, you know, it's interesting. It's the upside, but you really have to be able and willing. And also, you mentioned, actually, a bit about this. Maybe you can dive into it a little more. The investors have to be fully aligned with that because the last thing you want. I would think when you raise 8 million out of gate, is for them to be like, Hey, let's go. Go faster when you don't really even know where you're going.

Rob Woollen (00:18:03):
Right. I mean, I think Our investors are very clear, and we were all very aligned on the only goal we were trying for. Is to build a big independent public company. That, since day zero. Has been our goal and our destination, what we tried to do. As part of that, obviously, you end up rejecting a lot of great ideas that you feel like, I'm not sure this is a big enough market or a big enough change or maybe a feature in someone else's product. That would be great. And obviously the odds of getting to the end zone here are very low, but that was always sort of what we were aligned on. And I think that gave us, at least with our investors. Some patience, I'll say, for as we went through these different iterations. Because they sort of understood we've got to get the perfect thing here, right? It can't just be something that's pretty good because we're going to have to exit well before then.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:52):
By the way, maybe a tangent, but like BI is an interesting space. It feels like one of those spaces that just gets reinvented every 10 years, making it up. What are kind of the eras of BI? I'm assuming at that time now too, but I'm assuming at the time you thought about and looked at kind of the history of BI to understand where it might go.

Rob Woollen (00:19:08):
Yeah, it's really sort of crazy. It seems to go through these waves every, like, five or 10 years where a new crop of companies come in. A lot of the existing ones seem to get acquired and then sort of fizzle out. And then this new wave takes over. And so there was like a wave of people like Cognos that was bought by IBM. There was, you know, SAP bought business objects. These are all back in like the 2000s. And then later you saw sort of Tableau and Click come in. And you saw kind of a wave where people like Looker came in. And I remember, I think it was in 2020 or 2021. There was like a single week where I think both Looker and Tableau got acquired. And we were, like, ecstatically celebrating because sort of knew that just. I think big company acquisitions like that just, it's really hard to do anything but slow down the team. And frankly, that's what we've seen in both those cases.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:01):
What drives that, though? Like what drives? We made an investment in a company called Clipfolio, and this would have been back. I guess 20, yeah, actually around the similar time that you started. But, you know, it kind of, you know, it never got to true scale. But, you know, the same idea is like a Tableau or something like that would have been a similar type of play. What's driving this Cognos, and then Tableau, and now Sigma? And then even like for you. I mean, obviously the important pieces, you know, how do you not become one of those? How do you become the one that kind of stays top of market for a long, long time?

Rob Woollen (00:20:31):
Yeah, I think there's a couple of interesting dynamics in this market. The first is that any of the, this part I find just sort of fascinating, any of the products in this market are basically useless by themselves. So, Sigma's not useful unless you can connect it to something like a Snowflake or a Databricks. Just by itself, is not that useful. You need something that's actually bringing data into it. You need something that's actually leveraging all the data and doing actual business problems on top of it. So it becomes this sort of natural thing where you have all these products that kind of need to work together. And so that part is really sort of fascinating about the market. The other part that I found is that it goes through these big sort of technology shifts. And so the wave we sort of initially rode was all of the data was going from these on-premise servers. Where you would say, We only have, like, an eight CPU server over here. We can't have a lot of people using it. We need it to be sort of protected to. Once you're at the cloud, and you could scale things out. And you could just, you know, press a button and say, I want more resources. You could really sort of build a much more, you know, scalable infrastructure. And we were able to sort of leverage that technology change. So that brought in a big wave of things. And then the last thing is I think the market's just hard because there's just a lot of features people expect. And so part of our product market journey was just people would be like, Hey, this looks really neat, but can you do X, Y, and Z and all these things? And we're like, no, we don't do any of those things yet. And so it took, honestly for us, even when we sort of got onto the right idea. It took a while to get enough features in that people were like, Yes, now you can solve my problem completely.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:07):
But where were Tableau and Looker? When were they founded? Did they come up as you did, or were they ahead when you started?

Rob Woollen (00:22:13):
They were much earlier. So Tableau came out of a research paper in, I think, 2001. So they've been around quite a while. And then Looker, I want to say, was maybe 2010 or 2011, something like that.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:28):
But it was a different approach. It still required that SQL piece that you mentioned.

Rob Woollen (00:22:32):
Yeah, Looker is very, very heavy in the other direction. It's very focused on. You're going to have a very small number of people that write in this made-up programming language, LookML. And essentially, those are the only people that love that product. And then everyone else, they could care less about. They just want them to download to Excel and essentially get out of there. And we were very focused on, we don't want that kind of interface. We want something that brings everyone together.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:56):
So back to the storyline, there's five of you. You've got the office. You've got eight million dollars. You've got a high-level idea. And yet there's seven years here that we need to go through until there's true success. Tell me about the early phase of that. What do you start? What happens in that first few months, in that first year?

Rob Woollen (00:23:12):
Yeah, I've seen this sort of graph before where people show, like, there's initially this sort of high where everyone's, like, super excited about the idea. And, you know, there's no data that shows your idea is not going to turn into the next greatest thing ever. And so I feel like that first, like, I don't know. Maybe three to six months, you're just like, we were building out kind of our initial ideas. We're building out these prototypes of things. We're trying to show them to people and show them to our investors. We spent a lot of time trying them ourselves. And we actually, initially, even amongst the five of us. We were actually sort of pursuing a couple different approaches, even amongst those five of us. So we would constantly be showing each other stuff we're trying to work on. I think after about six months. We hit that sort of dip in the curve where it was like we didn't feel like we built anything that we were super happy with. And we started getting sort of. You could tell it was sort of rumblings of, like, are we actually going to figure this out or not? We spent probably another six months iterating on kind of the initial approaches and ideas. And then actually two of the people were just like, Yeah, we're doing this for a year. We're out. And so we went from team 5 back to team 3. Which, you know, understandable. But also, as you'd imagine, hard. When you're such a company of only, you know, five people, to lose two of them.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:31):
Did that give you real doubt? Because people that know, you know, it's one thing for, you know. You talk to people about your ideas, and people can tell you it's great. Some people can tell you it's dumb. They don't really know, right? But like when you do have five people, it's not just that half leave. It's that these are two people that know intimately what you're building. They spent a year building it, and they're effectively saying, Listen, you're crazy. I'm going back to work, you know what I mean? How did you guys internalize that?

Rob Woollen (00:24:55):
I certainly had some doubt in my own abilities after a year. I feel like it's hard not to look back and be like, you know, these two founding employees we had. One of which was someone I brought in from Salesforce. It's hard when, you know, essentially they're like, Yeah, we love working with you, but we don't think this is going to work out. It's hard not to take that sort of, and ponder it. I think you'll hear about almost in everyone of these cases. Somehow, irrationally, we're like, no, we're going to keep going. We're going to keep going and build another approach. We threw everything away and started over.

Pablo Srugo (00:25:30):
What kept you going? Was it a fear of failure? Was it a promise of what you could do? Was it just the problem was so interesting? What was that big driver for you?

Rob Woollen (00:25:37):
I feel like both my co-founder and I. At different points, would be on some high of, like, we really think we're onto something here. And we really, you know, I think this one's going to work out. I think we're going to end. And often when one of us was low, the other one would be high, or vice versa. And I feel like that sort of kept us going at different points because, I mean, people. You hear about these stories in retrospect where it's like, oh, we went through this seven-year journey. And like, trust me, there were points where people were like. Even myself, were like, this is not going to work out, right? We got to go do something else. And it, I think, it's part of why just having even a small group of people is so important because you just need other people to bounce ideas off of or just pick you up at times. And that definitely happened for us.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:20):
Yeah, I think this is a point that's often glossed over is, like you need almost like reasons to survive. It's very, very uncommon to have a, I don't know. Facebook-like trajectory, Amazon-like trajectory. Where things just get pulled from out of you and you're just always basically winning. And yeah, you have problems, but it's always really up, into the right. And when you're going through these flat phases. I mean, most, you know, most startups you can feel for a lot of reasons running out of money, this and that. But a huge one is just at the end of the day, the founders coming together and saying, like, I just don't think it's going to work. Let's kind of wrap it up here. And, you know, I think having a co-founder is one of those where, yeah, part of it is just about complementary skills and higher odds of success because you can build more and do more. Part of it, frankly, is like when you have those drops. Hopefully one of you just happens to not be as low as the other, pulls the other one up, and just gets you, like, drags you through that so you keep going.

Rob Woollen (00:27:16):
Yeah, I mean, it's easy to forget about the human side of this, right? We all have some doubt of, do I really have the ability to do this? We have some doubt of, like, is this idea actually going to work out? And you need other people to pick you up at times.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:28):
By the way, this is a stupid question. But when I look at your product now and what you're describing, I'm like, yeah, that's a no-brainer. What would take so long? What happens like in that year? I guess I'm curious. You're doing all these different ideas. Some work, some don't. You rewrite it when the people leave. But like, what are those things that you're implementing? Because fundamentally, I'm like, yeah, if you can make me. I'm a non-technical user. I don't know how to use SQL, like if I. But I've played with Tableau, played with all these different kinds of BI tools. Like, yeah, if I could just use a spreadsheet and get real data into it, no-brainer, I'm in.

Rob Woollen (00:27:59):
Yeah, and I can walk you through sort of some of the major transitions. We initially spent the first year. We kind of built out two big prototypes. One was focused on, could we just look at your database and figure out, like, what are the important things you should be asking it? And so instead of you having to go in and do the analysis yourself. We'd essentially show you, like, hey, here's kind of what you should be asking. Here's all the interesting things pushed to you. And people were like, Yes, that would be amazing. And then when we actually did it for them. They were like, This is not interesting. They were like, either I already knew this, or you're telling me something that's like, the computer thinks it's interesting. But as a human, I don't. I already know these things.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:39):
What sort of things would that be? Like just pulling out revenue over time. Basic things like that, or deeper?

Rob Woollen (00:28:44):
We went deeper, but you know, one of the. There's sort of, and you see this actually a lot right now in sort of AI programs that people show off. It's really hard to capture what is in a human's head. So, you know, for instance, I'll give you some examples. DraftKings is a customer of ours right now. And they, as you'd imagine, do a huge amount of their business on Super Bowl Sunday. There is no one at this company. Where if I told them, Hey, you're doing a lot of your business on Super Bowl Sunday, that would be an interesting insight. But to a computer, it's like, wow, there's really this odd day in February where things are really anomalous. And this is an extreme example, but there's a lot of things like that. Where there's just inherently humans know things about their business. It's hard to necessarily capture in a machine. I remember one of our early examples here was we had an early user who. They would loan equipment out when they were doing a proof of concept, and they were recorded as a negative sale when it came back. So it would sort of balance out on their books. And our system was like, I have some really interesting things to tell you about these negative sales. They were like, that is not the interesting part. And so we started playing with this, like, oh, well, maybe the human has to guide it a little bit. And I remember we got to this point where we were sort of down because we're, like, the human really has to guide it a lot to get it to something that's kind of interesting here. And it just sort of, you know, we became disillusioned with our own approach. And so that was kind of one of the major turns.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:18):
And when was that, by the way, that whole segment of that idea?

Rob Woollen (00:30:21):
That was most of the first, I'd say the first nine months. We built a couple other ideas in parallel, but that was probably the one we spent the most time on. And it seemed very promising when we pitched it to people. People were super excited about it. But every time we would demo it or get people using it. It was sort of, you know, you can sort of tell that polite feedback where people are like, yeah, it's kind of interesting. And then, you know, it doesn't turn into them actually being users.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:50):
Well, this is the idea versus reality of a demo versus, like.

Rob Woollen (00:30:53):
You know, and actually you mentioned with AI, like I think with AI, it's, you know, it's one thing to say. And obviously it's getting better, and at some point it is getting there. But it's one thing to say, like, this thing's gonna auto-complete your emails, and then it's another thing to use it and realize. Sometimes you have to say more for it to write your email. And just writing the email, you're like, oh, it's not as good as I thought.

Rob Woollen (00:31:13):
Right. You still have to read what it wrote and make sure it's actually what you want.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:17):
Exactly.

Rob Woollen (00:31:18):
Yeah, I think, I mean, one of the clear lessons here was that just trying to figure out how do you interpret product feedback from early users, right? How do you separate the, what is the lightness? It's very rare someone's going to be like, I think your idea is terrible. I would never ever use this, right? Tend to give you some sort of positive thing. The other lesson, actually, I'll just mention we found early on was. You know, initially, we would try to build prototypes, and we tried to build them, like, pretty rough. And so we wouldn't think necessarily about, like, I'm not going to worry too much if this button isn't aligned with the thing next to it. Because we're just trying to get something out here. Surely they understand that, like, we could pretty up the UI here. And then you show it to someone. You'd be like, what's your feedback on our great idea? And they'd be like, that button needs to move two pixels over. That's not what we want.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:01):
Humans, man. Humans.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:04):
And so I think we very quickly learned the lesson of you have to make things that people aesthetically like, and they feel like it looks polished enough that they don't focus on that. They focus on the actual product feedback. But we had a few. It took us a little bit to learn that lesson.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:19):
I'm really worried because listen, you've been listening for like what, 10, 20, 30 minutes now. Clearly you like it. And the thing is, the next episode is way better, and you're going to miss it. You're going to miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. How does that translate into this MVP idea? How do you kind of bridge that gap between building an MVP but also making it, you know, kind of pixel perfect?

Rob Woollen (00:32:43):
Obviously, you have to make some degree of compromise. But I feel like these days there's enough sort of existing libraries and things like that that you can leverage a lot of that. But I feel like even just having a designer engaged early on is super helpful because producing things that look at least professional quality was. I mean, it's a major difference than some UI I hack out. And you're like, people just realize quickly it's off.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:07):
And then, so 2014, you tried this approach. This is the feedback you get. What's the next thing that you try in 2015 or so? And is it driven by what you heard here, or is it a complete restart?

Rob Woollen (00:33:19):
So the big takeaway we had was we had sort of been treating these end users like we're going to figure out via AI or our intelligence what they should be doing. We have this big realization that ourselves, and frankly, everyone in the industry, had gotten it wrong. Because they weren't valuing enough what was in the heads, the knowledge of these end-users. The fact that, yes, they're not SQL or Python programmers. But they know way more about marketing, or finance, or sales, or you name it. Than I'm ever going to know. So there's no way I'm going to be able to tell them, Here's what you should be looking at in the marketing department. The marketing department needs to tell me, Here's what I want, and we need to make that possible. So we shifted to a system where we really wanted to empower the end user to essentially be able to build almost any kind of analysis, and we. Our approach was we tried to build what we called sort of a vertically integrated application for them. And what I mean by that is we built the brand-new interface. We built our own sort of programming language, essentially, that everything in that interface transmitted to. And one of the sort of key things was that you could see both what you had kind of typed or used in the UI. And you could see the output of the kind of programming language. And you could change kind of either side. So you get very detailed and change, like, the. And it would change the UI. So they were perfectly in sync. And we built our own analysis engine. So it was time, we were not using, like, a Snowflake or Databricks. We built all these things ourselves. And the idea was, if we could kind of specialize every part of this stack to this particular use case and vertically integrate them. We could build this really sort of special experience.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:02):
And what's the outcome of that? Like, what is that? Maybe walk me through an example of the sort of things you could do with that vertically integrated product.

Rob Woollen (00:35:09):
So it looked, if you're familiar with any of these sort of notebook-like products. It looked kind of like that. Where you'd have kind of a little, almost like a cell of here's a user interface, here's a bunch of code we're working on for that. And it was pretty good at manipulating data. You could do things like data cleansing, you could do things like data transformations, and you could do visualizations. It had an interesting problem where it was very powerful because it was showing you the code behind it. But it also meant when we showed it to end users, a lot of times when people see code, they're like, Oh, I'm not a programmer. This tool is not for me. It was like a visual turnoff to them. And I remember at one point we were showing it to someone, and they were like, Oh, maybe you should show this to our engineering department. And I was like, oh, that is not who we're targeting.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:59):
What was the thinking, by the way, behind showing code? What was the upside?

Rob Woollen (00:36:02):
We felt like a lot of the challenges in these interfaces was that there was always some point where you kind of ran out of gas. You couldn't do exactly what you wanted in the interface. And we're like, oh, if you could see the underlying code, you'd always get sort of that fine-grained control over exactly what it was doing. And so it was meant to be this progressive idea of you would do 90% of the work in the UI, but you might get to some like fine-grain thing. But, like, this one, I just want to edit this one part here. And at some level it makes sense, right? You want users to have sort of, start off with a really easy thing. This becomes super power users you give them, like, ultimate flexibility, but even just thinking about, like, how did it actually come together was. We never quite got it right. I mean, the outcome of this is we worked on it for about a year and a half.

Pablo Stugo (00:36:51):
Because that's a big build, it sounds like.

Rob Woollen (00:36:53):
Yeah, and I'd say the last six months of it, every month I felt like we're almost there. If we work one more month on this, it's going to be like it's going to cross over this usability barrier. And we kept doing that and doing that and doing that. It may be, if I'm doing that math. It may be longer than that because it actually got all the way into 2017, early 2017. And this was probably my lowest point, I'll admit, because we were, you know, at this point over three years in. We had worked. We built a lot of stuff, and none of it was revolutionizing the world yet. Now is when I think we actually have a pretty funny story, which is our investors had also invested in Snowflake, the data warehouse company. They were actually the people who went through this entrepreneur residence program right before us. Their company was flying. They had taken off. They were already a pretty successful company by 2017. And so they had said to us, "Why don't you go down, meet with their CEO and founders, and show them kind of what you've built and see if there's some opportunity to partner with them?" And so we got this meeting set up. It was maybe a month or something out from when we got it set up. And I remember my co-founder sent me a message the next day. He was like, "We're going to go down to Snowflake. And we're going to say, Hey, would your customers like to take all their data out of Snowflake and put them into our system?" Because we're not connected to them in any way. And he's like, I don't think this pitch is going to work out. And so we once again threw away everything we'd done. And in, essentially, I think, about three weeks between the time we set the meeting and when we actually showed up there. We built a brand new interface, one that looks like a tiny part of our product right now. It had a grid. It sort of looked like a spreadsheet. But we said, what if instead of us building all these different pieces, we just gave you something that looks kind of like a spreadsheet? Everything you do in it, we're going to translate to SQL, and we're going to run against one of these warehouses like Snowflake. And so the idea is, what if we could build on top of them? And that's what we demoed to Bob Muglia, who was their CEO at the time, and the founders. And I remember Bob said to us, like, "This sounds great. I want to use this myself. Like, when can I use this?" And that was a very different reaction than, like, Hey, that looks kind of interesting. It was like, no, I want this.

Pablo Srugo (00:39:22):
That's the visceral reaction that you're looking for when the eyes light up and you're like, yes.

Rob Woollen (00:39:27):
Yep. And I remember he marched us into their partner team. We signed up for, you know, a partner account. And it was, you know, it still took. Those took actually another probably good six months for us to get to the point where we could actually hook it up to their real warehouse. Because, as you'd imagine, people are pretty security conscious about, like, this is my most important data in my company. I can't just let, you know, random people hook up to it. So we'd do a lot of work on security certification and things like that. But it was just a night and day reaction difference.

Pablo Srugo (00:39:58):
Where does the, so I, this is really interesting. It's kind of serendipity in a sense that you get this snowflake thing. One thing leads to the other. You're like, I can't, you know, look like an idiot. So I need to at least plug in their data. That's one part. But then the visualization is the other, like, aha moment there. Where does that idea come from to use an Excel-like spreadsheet-like UI?

Rob Woollen (00:40:19):
We had been looking a lot at sort of our existing system and where people kind of fall apart. And our existing system had sort of this programmer-like idea. Where there's kind of a linear set of steps. And for programmers, this is a familiar concept. It's called data flow, where you have the output of this pipes into this. It felt like that was failing when we showed it to people that are not programmers. Because they were used to sort of the Excel-type thing of like, I just have a cell over here. And I point it over here, and I point it over here, and I don't have to think about this as I'm doing one, two, three. No one opens up Excel and is like, here are the next 20 things I'm going to go do. They just play around. And so we tried to shift our just fundamental, how are people going to use this to. We want something that feels playful, right? I want something where people, like, get data in front of them. And then they're like, Oh, you know, I just spent an hour here. I didn't even think about it. And I'm just, you know, moving things around. I see something that's interesting. And it's funny because I remember we had this hypothesis, and then if you fast forward maybe six or nine months. And we had some early users. We would look at the, you know, the user journey, like what are they doing? And I would start seeing some of these people that, like, man, this person did, like, a hundred changes in a row. And they just sat there for, like, two hours using the product. So you sort of realize, like, oh, that proves our hypothesis that people are going to get, like, see something to be like, yeah, why is that number seven? And, you know, get like really pull on that thread.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:47):
It's pretty incredible because this is, I mean, you can see the evolution from the idea that you want to get rid of SQL. First, drives get rid of everything. Just give them the answers. That doesn't work. Which then drives kind of like, okay, let them do some stuff. But then you got to vertically integrate. And then the serendipity stuff, like it's just so messy, right? And then you're like, okay, connect to Snowflake, the UIPs. But now it feels like post that Snowflake meeting, you are at the true kind of ground zero of what Sigma later became.

Rob Woollen (00:42:18):
We were, and I think the, you know, and that brought us into. We were able to raise a series B at that point and start scaling the company a bit.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:26):
That was 2017 or 2018?

Rob Woollen (00:42:27):
It was right. Beginning of 2018.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:30):
So it was once you had, you know, six months later. You said you really plugged it in and you had a kind of demo-able version of the product.

Rob Woollen (00:42:39):
Yeah, and we had a handful of early, I don't know. Customers would be strong, because I don't know if they were. They were paying us maybe some token amount, but we really focused in 2018 on. We wanted a lot of people using and giving us feedback. And I remember my goal was I wanted people that were ideally within walking distance of the office. It's one of the, you know, one of the advantages of being in something like San Francisco is like, I know there's lots of startups right around here. And so I remember, we tried to make it so all of our users were either, you know, a BART ride or a walk in distance from our office and just try to get, like, super engaged people. We, you know, we would know them all by name. We would be on Slack with them. We would have very strong relationships with them. And they were giving us lots and lots of feedback.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:29):
It's still like three years from doing the math right until you get serious revenue. What happens during that time? Because it feels like you're there. Like you're ready to just, sales and marketing, boom, let's go get 10,000 users.

Rob Woollen (00:43:40):
That's what I thought too. I thought, oh, we're there. We would have little blips of success. I remember in, I think it was 2019, April of 2019. We had a new salesperson. Where three days in a row she closed deals. I was like, we are there. And so the next quarter, and I still see this on our company dashboard. The next quarter we closed zero new customers. It is very funny actually right now for me to look at our, as you'd imagine, we have this great hockey stick of growth. But I look back at this second quarter, Q2, and it's like zero. For some of the reasons we talked about earlier, the market requires lots of features. We were only supporting these cloud systems like a Snowflake or a Databricks. And remember, you know, yes, they were doing well in these days. But they were still relatively early themselves. So we were sort of dependent on a relatively small market itself at the time. And our product, I think we had a lot of the right instincts, but it wasn't quite right yet. And we actually rebuilt the user interface one more time. Threw everything away again in 2020, released that in June of 2021. And that's when things, I think, both the product and the market. That's when things sort of clicked. But imagine, it's again an easy one to talk about in retrospect. But imagine it's 2020, you're in the pandemic. A company has some success, right? We have some customers. We're hiring people. We've raised money. It's not clear to everyone that we've built the wrong interface. And my co-founder and I make this decision of, like, no, we actually think we need to do something different here and eventually rally the whole company around it. And luckily we were right. But those are big, hard decisions.

Pablo Srugo (00:45:41):
So I'll ask about that specific change in a second. But first, were investors at this point. Any investors, maybe the $8 million round or the $20 million round. Were they at all getting impatient with kind of where things were at, or was it still fully aligned even in that period?

Rob Woollen (00:45:56):
I think the period between sort of the initial founding and so, you know, investors are, I think, actually follow the same curve as employees at some level. Initially, they're super enthusiastic. They believe it's the most great idea. Very proud of their investment. And then, you know, two years in when you haven't produced anything. Obviously, there's some degree of concern, right? And I remember our investors. We'd spend a lot of time, they'd introduce us to some of their other companies. And so we would try to learn from, well, what are they doing well, or what's going well there? I think probably right around that last pivot before that Snowflake meeting was probably the peak for myself personally. And I suspect for our investors, the peak of their concern of is, this going to work out at all or not? Once we started getting even the initial traction, I remember actually our lead investor saying, like, This looks really promising, but I remember him telling me, like, You also have to sort of mentally, you know, you're at day zero. Like, it doesn't matter that you spent three years trying to build stuff. You're at day zero. And you have to be ready to fight from day zero. Not ready to fight from over, you know, four years into this. And he was a thousand percent right. You know, I remember pausing for just a second and being like, okay, I understand. It's, you know, it's one of the challenges of these long roads.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:13):
But what about the Series B investors? Just because from 2018 to 2021, it takes a while to get going. And, you know, the $8 million was kind of fully aligned on. Okay, two very smart people with a big idea, track record, but, you know, they're going to figure it out. It'll take time. Okay, maybe it took longer than they wanted, but kind of that idea of 20 million. I would have to assume was more of, like, these guys got something. Let's put in 20, and like, let's go. And yet it took, you know, three years for that moment.

Rob Woollen (00:47:37):
It's funny because Altimeter led our Series B, and I remember the partner Kevin and Altimeter speaking to him right after I had signed the Series B documents. They had a great track record. They invested in a lot of the best recent enterprise companies like Twilio and Snowflake and a bunch of others they had been into. I remember this conversation with him where I said, Oh, you know, what other companies are you investing in right now? And he looked at me, and he goes, I only invest in one company a year. And I remember being like, we better do well. Yet, I would say I never got any sort of pushback on what we were doing. I only ever got real sort of support on, like, the market is there. The opportunity is there. We should be the ones to take it. And, you know, our board meetings would be very focused on, like, we've got to go do this, right? Like everyone, I think everyone on the board was very well aligned on the problem, and opportunity was there. Even if we aren't the ones yet that are getting it, like they saw the opportunity. And so I think that's sort of what unified us all.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:40):
So then walk me in more detail through that last UI change. Which seems to be the catalyst. What was there in the old one that you wanted to fix? And then what was there in the new one?

Rob Woollen (00:48:50):
So, when we initially built the product, you know, as you often do, you take inspiration from a bunch of the existing products. And so, a common pattern, even in things like Tableau, is that you have sort of this separate kind of worksheet where you work out things. And then you have a dashboard where you bring visualizations in and you share them out to people. And we had sort of mimicked a similar workflow in our product. And what we found was that you spent a huge amount of sort of friction and time going back and forth. Flipping between these things, you know, it was. It had the feel that we didn't want. Which was it had the feel of, like, I'm making something, and now I need to go to this other place and see what happened and whether it did what I wanted.

Pablo Srugo (00:49:30):
So you would play in an Excel-like thing. But then, have to go somewhere else to see the visualization versus, like, an Excel charts right there as you kind of edit it.

Rob Woollen (00:49:37):
Yeah, and if you think about the fundamental thing we're trying to get past, is traditionally people would have to ask some technical person, Hey, can you build this chart for me? And people hate this experience. Because the technical person hates doing it. They build the chart, and then you're like, That's not what I want. And you go back and forth, and it's all painful. And it felt like in our product, we had almost mistakenly recreated a little bit of this flow. Where it was like, oh, you have to go through all these iterations. And we had some underlying technical things we just got wrong on the first attempt. And so all those things combined to, like, what if we tried to build something again from scratch? What would we do differently? And we leveraged a lot of existing code, as you can imagine. But we focused on something that was much more like a unified interface. We called it a workbook. And you would actually work in the same place that you could present. And it really sort of changed how people visualize the product.

Pablo Srugo (00:50:30):
So tell me now, now we're in happy time. You do this work, you put this out. What happens? What's the market reaction like? What happens in sales, velocity, et cetera?

Rob Woollen (00:50:40):
Well, the first thing you have to understand is when I tell these stories in retrospect. It's like, well, obviously we were going to do that new thing, and everyone's aligned. And it's never like that. Every time we've done some of these transitions. You have some set of people that believe you're right and are gung-ho in going forward. You have some sort of people that are very justifiably concerned. I remember speaking to one of our people, and they were like, we have salespeople. They have a quota. They believe they're going to hit their quota on selling this old thing. What are we going to do? And I remember being like, we have to move things to the new. We have to move on to this new product. We've made a company decision. We can't support two products. We've got to make this transition. And luckily we had some very senior people in our sales engineering department at the time that were like true believers. And they really sort of helped evangelize and help get people aligned to it. But it was a big company decision. I think we also signed a couple of our early largest customers at that point. And that obviously got us early feedback on, Oh, this is clicking, and we're selling on it. And then it was just everyone was convinced.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:50):
How, like, before you launched this. What kind of revenue numbers were, like, were you at a million, or were you below that?

Rob Woollen (00:51:55):
We were about 800 and 900K, something like that.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:59):
And then how quickly did. What was that? What, like, give us a sense of what growth was like in that first year, for example.

Rob Woollen (00:52:04):
Yeah, we. I think three years in a row tripled the company. So, you know, it was like three, nine, twenty-seven, something like that. Each of the years, I remember I would look at the numbers. It would be very daunting. I remember then it seemed it's just things start working. It never got easy, even now. Each year is.

Pablo Srugo (00:52:27):
You're over 100 now? Is that right?

Rob Woollen (00:52:30):
We're over 100 now. We're over 1,400 customers. We're still aggressively growing the company, trying to double it this year. To me, it almost feels like the things in the company change dramatically. Each of these big sub-steps. What you're doing at 1 million doesn't necessarily work at 10, doesn't work at 50, and doesn't work at 100. And you've got to sort of make changes and, you know, accept there's some things that are core to the company you're never going to change. And there's some things that, you know, it makes sense when you're at some scale. And then as you get bigger, it changes, and you have to make adjustments.

Pablo Srugo (00:53:07):
When was the moment when you personally felt like you'd found product-market fit?

Rob Woollen (00:53:11):
I think for me, in the early days. Every customer we signed, I touched in some way. I'd spoken to them. I knew intimately about the deal. I sometimes had to approve building some specific feature for them. I think for me, the first sign of product-market fit was we were signing customers that were paying us as much or more than all these ones that I had personally spent all these hours on hand-holding. And I'd never even heard of this deal. It just happened. And that for me was a big turning point.

Pablo Srugo (00:53:48):
And you mentioned a few kind of valleys through this journey. But is there one point in particular that you remember where you really thought, like, this might not work out. Like you guys might just fail?

Rob Woollen (00:53:59):
I was probably the most concerned after, kind of right before that Snowflake meeting. Because we had spent, you know, I'm not doing the math. Almost two years, I think, building this previous prototype. And it became sort of clear we were not, frankly, it became very clear we were not as good as we thought we were on iterating to sort of get to product market fit. Two years is not super efficient on doing that. And so I was worried at that point. I was like, maybe we don't have the right skills to do this. Maybe we need, you know, maybe there's something missing in our company or ideas or even just our knowledge. That was probably the height of my doubt.

Pablo Srugo (00:54:34):
Last question, you know, having been in tech for as long as you have and now building Sigma for over a decade. What's kind of your number one piece of advice for early-stage founders?

Rob Woollen (00:54:46):
I think for me, it's you have to pick something you love. You are truly excited about it. You truly can imagine spending 10 years or more solving this problem, especially if you want to try to build a big company. I mean, yes, there are these freakish stories where someone gets to 100 million in three years, but for most people, it's a long road. And so you have to be able to pick something where you're like, I'd be willing to go into work every day and try to solve this problem. And I think that's the. For me, that's been, you know, the most gratifying thing is I feel like we've made all sorts of progress in solving this problem we laid out in 2014. And yet I'm super happy to go work on it for another 15 years because I feel like there's so much more we can do.

Pablo Srugo (00:55:33):
Awesome. Well, Rob, thanks so much for sharing your story with us. It's been, it's been great.

Rob Woollen (00:55:37):
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Pablo Srugo (00:55:39):
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