#134 Becoming Proactive Through Data Activation with Tejas Manohar, Co-Founder at Hightouch

Speaker A: Three very different companies using hitouch for the same exact purpose, saying that it solves the same burning need. At that point I realized, okay, we can get these companies from very different places. They're all coming from different backgrounds, but they have this universal problem. We're onto something big here.

Speaker B: Hi everyone. Welcome into Hatch Map on Tap. Thanks for tuning in. We appreciate you listening to the show today. I'm Kelly Kohleffel and I'm really pleased to have you, Tejas Monahar back on the show. He visited us in April of 2021 about a year ago. I think that was the first time on hashmap on tap. Tejas is co founder at hitouch. They are a Bay Area based startup series B. We'll talk about that a little bit. They're helping customers sync data over 80 destinations. They've got a variety of operational business SaaS, platforms that cover sales, marketing success, other key applications that pretty much every business team relies on. Prior to founding hitouch, Tejas led an engineering team at Segment where they own the Segment developer center and platform APIs that allowed partners, customers and developers to build apps on top of Segment. Tejas, it is great to have you back on Hashmap on Tap. What are you drinking today?

Speaker A: Hey Kelly, thanks so much for having me on the show. Uh, it was awesome to be here a year ago and it's great to be back on the show again to tell the story since then. I'm drinking coffee, so I, you know, it's the middle of, middle of the work day for me here, so I, I didn't go for my vodka soda as I did last show, I think a year ago.

Speaker B: Oh, that's right.

Speaker A: But I, I'm, uh, drinking coffee today.

Speaker B: That's right. Awesome, I remember that. Yeah, I, so I grabbed a coffee today too. Where did you, uh, are you in the office right now? Home office? Where are you that you grab. You grabbed the coffee.

Speaker A: I'm in our office. So we actually opened a new office in downtown San Francisco, um, on first and Folsom Street. So it's about 10, 10 minutes south of kind of the city center and just a couple minutes away from the Salesforce tower for anyone who knows the area. But yeah, I'm grabbing a coffee produced by this coffee machine at the office. It's a pretty straightforward cup of coffee today.

Speaker B: I think I caught it. Seemed like I caught you last time you were in New York.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So it was later, uh, later in the day last time. So I Decided to try a vodka soda. But um, yeah, I was traveling to New York for a couple months. I've been based in the Bay Area and San Francisco Bay Area for about six years now and grew up in Tennessee actually. But I was just in New York for a few months during the pandemic to see what it's like.

Speaker B: Very nice, Very nice. I grabbed a coffee today too, so had um. I don't know if you know Jeremiah Lowen, he was. Or uh, he is CEO and co founder over Prefect, which uh, plays a huge role in the whole modern data stack from an orchestration and automation workflow perspective. Anyway, he helped found Compass Coffee a uh, number of years ago and he had, he had had that on the show. Sent me a discount code. I said man, I gotta try that. So this is the first time today I'm actually having it on Hashmap on tap. They're based out of the Washington D.C. area. Really, really good coffee. They have a number of different combinations, bean, uh, type roasting combinations that you can choose from. So we'll definitely link them up in the show and shout out to, to uh, Jeremiah for, for that discount code as well.

Speaker A: That's awesome. No, I'm drinking some local, local San Francisco coffee beans. I think Linea coffee beans here and

Speaker B: there are some great coffee shops in the San Francisco area. Well, man, Tejas, it's been a little while. We have a number of topics to kick around and you and I really didn't chit chat a lot before the show and everything. So you know, we talked a little bit. So the. What High Touch is doing how you guys are positioning in the market today versus say a year ago, you guys raised a, a tremendous round of financing. Uh, long ago. I think it was your third round in about 12 months. I know you've been hiring, interested in where the High Touch service is today. But first of all, and we didn't even get to talk about how have you been, what's been going on, just, uh, overall. Just give, give me a rundown there.

Speaker A: Yeah, we have not had a, had a chance to uh, to catch up, Kelly. So thank you, thank you for inviting me to the show. But things have been good. Things, um, have been good, but, but crazy. Of course. Yeah. As you mentioned, in the last about 18 months, this is our, our third round of financing. We raised a series A and a series B. The last, in the last like 14 months, which is a bit, bit crazy um, for the state that the business is in. But it's been amazing. I think what We've been really, really blessed and lucky that almost as soon as we hit product market fit, we realized it wasn't just a small product market fit that existed in some niche, you know, up and coming customer base. We realized that like the trends that we're riding on in the data warehouse space are moving faster across all parts of the market than anyone's realizing. And companies just have a wealth of information in these data warehouses that they want to start operationalizing in their business tools. So yeah, things have really blown up for Reverse etl. I think in the last year we've gone from getting on every sales call and needing to tell the customer what is Reverse etl? Why would I want to even use the data warehouse as a source for other systems? That's just not the way people thought about it a year and a half ago or two years ago. And today, you know, every day we get new hot startups to Global 2000 companies coming our way and saying they want to replace their in house Reverse etl. And they're already using that term. So it's absolutely insane.

Speaker B: I remember that when we talked previously, uh, Reverse ETL not out there in the market much at all. I'm really interested. You talked about hitting product market fit. What were the signals, especially for other early stage uh, founders and co founders? I mean, what did you see that said, hey, we've hit this, we're absolutely, absolutely close to it.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question. So honestly, uh, the first five customers of our product were all over the place. You know, very different industries, very different types of companies, but they all had the same use case. And you know, not every startup has the same journey as us or has the same signs to say this is product market fit. But to me, when we had a, you know, we had a newspaper in the Netherlands using our software to sync data from the data warehouse to marketing tools. We had a hot, fast growing B2B SaaS startup here, um, in San Francisco called Retool that was using us for the same exact use case. And we had a healthcare company in the uh, in the D2C space that was using us for the same use case as well. And like three very different companies using hitouch for the same exact purpose, saying that it solves the same burning need. At that point I realized, okay, we can get these companies from very different places. They're all coming from different backgrounds, but they have this universal problem. We're onto something big here. It's just we need to get our name out and our word out and teach people what, what is reverse ETL and what can they do with it. And that's when I got the conviction of product market fit. I would say it took some more time for, for investors and the whole market and our, our team, etcetera, to really feel the product market fit. You know, that's when I got the inclination. But I would say once we had maybe 20 customers or 30 customers using our software product for, for the same purpose, that's when it was, you know, undeniable.

Speaker B: Really nice. Really nice. And I was, I was out on the High Touch site, uh, here recently and I noticed, and I don't know if this was a very, very recent change, but I'm seeing some new messaging. You guys are talking about data activation now, and I really like the way you're saying, hey, if you have sales systems, if you have marketing systems, success systems, other business applications, we will connect you to those and activate those systems for you in a new way. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of that new messaging, what it means, you know, data activation versus reverse etl. What drove the change? What was the inspiration behind it?

Speaker A: Yeah, today's a huge day for us at Hisitch. Actually, uh, my co founder published a post on our blog today called High Touch is the Data activation Company. And this is really the positioning that we're trying to take to the market. Um, so I'm glad you brought it up. I'll give a quick summary. So when we started our product, we didn't know what to call it. We called it High Touch. That was the name of our business, but we didn't really have a name for this first product of the High Touch platform that allowed you to take data from the data warehouse and move it to different SaaS systems. It could make sense to call out an ETL product, but we didn't want to do that. We weren't aiming to compete with FiveTrans, Stytch and all those types of companies. We were aiming to move data the opposite way, to show people how they can use data from the warehouse in their source and SaaS systems. Instead of bringing the data into the warehouse, which we saw as a solved or being solved problem already. And when we got on customer calls and started telling people what we're doing and solving their problems, companies would always say, oh, so is it like the reverse of five Tran or oh, is it like the reverse of Stytch or the reverse of my ETL script? And when companies said this over and over, we realized this word reverse ETL was starting to click. People were starting to use it without us saying it. And this is another time where I think those startup founders, spider senses kind of come in. Just like with the product market fit thing, where you feel product market fit a little bit before it's provable per se. And we just got this sense that the word reverse ETL was going to absolutely blow up just from the number of people that were organically coming up with it when we were on call with them explaining what we were doing. So we decided to put out a ton of marketing around the word reverse etl. You know, it was a, it was a point of contention initially. We're like, should we really adopt this term? It's a weird term to call your business like the reverse of another software category. And it's just, it's just not something that most people do. It's a weird, funky word. And we all kind of acknowledge, okay, this is not what we can call our whole business long term for a number of different reasons, but we're going to do it and we're going to ride this wave and create this wave. And we did exactly that. Now one of our biggest lead drivers is literally people googling reverse ETL and finding our product. So from a business perspective, it was a great decision. But as we look towards the next few years of the high touch business, we think we really want to go beyond reverse etl. Uh, and we believe data activation is a term that sums up really what we're trying to do in a more generalizable way and to give you a bit of context into that. You know, the way people see reverse ETL typically is just copying data points. So ETL and these data points or values from the data warehouse into different SaaS tools. And they just see it as kind of moving fields around. But the way we see data activation is, you know, today all the data in the warehouse, people are using it for data analytics. And our goal is to really help business teams activate the data in the warehouse and use it towards their business processes to take action on it and drive towards their goals. And copying data into their, into their operational tools like Salesforce is one piece of that. But we've been releasing a lot of features and products and high touch to allow business teams to really create more workflows like, you know, running marketing campaigns or automatically creating Salesforce tasks or to dos when certain criteria happens to one of your customers. And we think those types of workflows that we're building on top of the data warehouse is more represented by data activation than just, you know, ETL and copying data points over.

Speaker B: Oh, uh, that makes sense, obviously. I mean, you and the team have been helping to create this net new category out there the last couple of years. And you know, having that sounds like you got a lot of Google Organic search results that are coming your way from that. And now you gotta build on this one. Because really, even it seems to me, I mean, uh, I've been saying data activation for a while. I probably heard it from you or somebody else out there. But in general, are you finding that is it going to be a similar process, I guess, Tejas, to what you had to do around reverse etl? Do people know what you mean when you say data activation?

Speaker A: Yeah. So that's what took us so long to finally jump to this term is when you have a term where people know what you mean, you're like, oh, it's a reverse of etl. You want to find another term where people know what you mean. And we really feel like data activation is something that people know what we mean when we say that, to put it simply. And one of the reasons is because data activation is a real term in many ways. Like if you look up data activation or activate your data, we're not the first company to use this sort of terminology or phrase. We're just the first company in the data infrastructure space. So marketing tools and other tools around the ecosystem talk about helping you activate your data all the time, but no one's talking about activating the data warehouse. And we think that'll be synonymous with data activation in the long run. Just like data analytics is almost synonymous with data warehousing and bi at this point. So I would say data activation took, uh, us so long, like two years to really settle on this term because we had a high bar after people could really understand what reverse ETL meant. Like, while it wasn't a flashy term, people could understand what it meant. And data activation, we really feel the same way. And not just technical people who are familiar with etl, but marketing leaders, sales leaders, finance leaders, people who are facing data activation challenges today in their business where they're unable to really use their data or act on it, can understand the word data activation when they hear it too, which we think is going to be super important for making data activation as big as data analytics as a whole. So I guess it's also worth noting the term reverse etail isn't going anywhere. We're still embracing that. We just see it as the technical process by which high Touch activates data.

Speaker B: Ah, got it. That makes sense. Are there any High Touch service product type changes that are in the works related to just that, uh, that messaging change? It sounds like the service remains the same as it is. Nothing really engineering wise that has to be done to adapt to Data Activation.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question. Data Activation, the core High Touch product of being able to take these data points and fields and columns from your data warehouse and SQL queries and sync those over to other systems one to one that's still going to exist. That's our bread and butter. Dozens and dozens of companies are signing up every day on our website and just syncing some fields into other systems. But Data Activation tells a story of where we're headed in some of our recent product development in High Touch. Our goal with Data Activation is to really help companies think beyond just syncing fields over from an account table in their warehouse to an account table in Salesforce and think about, okay, what type of business workflows are we trying to drive for our sales teams, our marketing teams, our finance teams, our growth teams in a business off the data in our warehouse. For example, we released um, a product area recently called High Touch Notify. It takes some of the basic integrations we have with services like Slack and Microsoft Teams and email and really takes it to the next level where it's like if you have any data in your data warehouse, you can build these workflows in tools like Slack on top of it in a very business friendly way and a very business friendly experience that you're delivering to your end customers. As an example, if you've defined uh, a SQL query that finds out when an account has a churn risk instead of just syncing that is churn risk true field to Salesforce, which you can do via reverse etl. With some of our activation products like High Touch Notify, you can turn that into like automated alerts that go directly to the person who owns the account in Salesforce via a uh, custom Slack message that's templated off fields in the data warehouse. So it's really, you know, Data activation is really meant to help the customers of ours see beyond just ETL ing data points from the warehouse and other tools and realize that we're going to help them build these end to end workflows, um, for their sales team, for their marketing team, et cetera, that you know, generate tasks, send messages, build actual workflows off the data warehouse.

Speaker B: Yeah, and as I'm hearing you talk, I mean to me it's about Sending that information to allow me, whether it's a sales function, service function in anything, you know, customer success, I can make proactive decisions based on that information. I may not do anything, but it may be that, you know, if I've got a churn risk with a particular client, I want to do something, may not be calling right away, but maybe I want to get some, you know, start uh, some sort of a, maybe it's a phone call, maybe it's a campaign going to ensure that I'm doing everything that I can. So I love the fact that it allows me to be more proactive versus relying on some of these things just being um, maybe in a report or some sort of analytics format, you're going to push that to me. I think that's great.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. It's about really meeting the business users where they are. And that's not just tools, that's also workflows like automatically creating tasks for them in Jira or sauna, or automatically shooting the right person, the right slack message at the right time. The other thing about data activation is that we want more people to be able to understand that they can come into the product, you know, not necessarily knowing SQL and activate the data in their data warehouse. So the original high touch product was really built for advanced data analysts or data engineers. But as we've progressed the market, our goal is to make everyone able to action upon the data inside of their company's data analytics stack and data warehouse. And uh, a lot of our product development recently has been to make that process easier and easier and easier. The audiences part of our app says, okay, if a data person at my company defines the data models that matter about my customers on top of the data warehouse, then a marketer should be able to come in and just start building audiences, which is like a marketing term for a customer segment that matches certain criteria, like maybe the abandoned cart. So marketers should be able to come in and build that type of audience directly on the data warehouse and sink it into like ad platforms and email platforms and just all through this sort of vertical app, this vertical data activation app built on top of the data warehouse. So that's really the type of thing we're trying to allow people to open their minds towards and realize is possible with the term data activation versus just reverse etl.

Speaker B: Uh, you've probably been talking about this with a lot of clients, uh, leading up to this change in terms of how you're adding to what hitouch does. What were some of the early returns that you were Hearing from clients and just the feedback that you got. Reverse ETL moving to, hey, really start thinking about data activation.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So I mean honestly, to be completely transparent, I would say reverse etl, uh, as we've gone up market, we've realized that reverse etl, data activation, whatever you want to call it is, is a cross functional problem. It's not a problem that just one data engineer has concerns about. It's a problem of helping data teams that are producing insights collaborate more closely with business teams that can benefit from those insights. So that's really the problem that we're solving, allowing business teams to act on top of the insights data teams are producing. And when you get into larger companies like some of our largest clients, like Warner Music for example, when we're selling High Touch and explaining it to them, it's not just about appealing to data folks that understand ETL and can kind of think about reverse etl, but it's also explaining, explaining it to the rest of the business of uh, you know, what's the value of something like High touch and why should I care about introducing something like High Touch to my business? And data activation is something people can really rally around and understand because they feel like there's so much dead data in their company that needs to be activated. Whereas reverse etl, it's pretty nuanced and requires a lot of prerequisite knowledge to understand. So that's what got us thinking about it from the beginning. When we adopted the term reverse etl, we knew that it wasn't the term that we can describe our business with for the aspirations we have from a long term perspective. But we also knew that it was a good place to start and would resonate quickly in the market. And that's rare. We capitalize on it, we're going to continue using it. But data activation is where we want to explain how we're headed for businesses and allow everyone to buy into it.

Speaker B: Seemed like when we talked a year or so ago, a lot of what you were doing to get the word out, uh, creating a lot of content, a lot of inbound was coming in just based off of that content. I don't know where you are in a go to market standpoint as it relates to maybe external folks talking to those clients. But as you were uh, describing kind of this shift in not only appealing to maybe data teams but also the business. I mean sometimes that can be tough for whoever is representing High touch, whether it's, you know, a sales function or sometimes even a marketing function or you know, whatever that may be internally to, you know, I'm really comfortable talking to data teams. Am I going to be as comfortable talking to a VP of Sales or VP of Marketing or VP of Customer success? Right. Is that kind of gone through your, your thinking at all? And, and if so, how are you approaching it?

Speaker A: For sure. It, it's been a challenge internally. It's, it's, it's, you know, one of our biggest challenges is how do we make we, we know what we're solving is a universal problem. Every data person wants one's better ways to serve their business team's data. Every business person wants better access to data. It's a universal problem. Everyone understands that. But how do we say it's succinctly in a way that everyone can understand it when they look at our website and know that this product is something they can use in their business, no matter if they're a data leader, marketing leader, sales leader, etc. That's been a hard challenge and honestly one of the hardest challenges and rooms for innovation in our go to market motion. Internally, what we see on the go to market side is about 70% of the time we sell into a company. No matter the size of company, a data, um, person or someone with data or analytics in their title is still our core champion. They're the ones that's going to say this is the way that we're going to start serving business insights to our same marketing, sales, et cetera team at our business. The same person who's creating reports and things like tableau is going to be the one that says, okay, we're going to use high touch to really help the marketing team use this data. That said, there's others in the organization that often are helping the data team prioritize what to focus on and uh, others in the organization that often request data or they need marketers and sales leaders and stuff like that often drive the roadmap of data teams and the larger organizations that we work in. And that's why it's so important to help them realize how data activation fits into their workflow versus like something super technical like reverse etl. So the data team is still our focus, but we need to help the data team pitch to the rest of the company why this actually matters to their business and help everyone get on the same page. And data activation as a term, as well as the product features we've been building to allow data teams and business teams to collaborate, uh, have been really effective in doing that, if that makes sense.

Speaker B: It does yeah, no, that's great. And the shift into really trying to help the business teams, uh, understand how high touch and having an impact in these day to day workflows around decision making and being able to have a more proactive, uh, stance. Sounds really interesting. What, uh, in addition to that, are there other, or maybe it's uh, offshoots of it, other key areas that you're looking to address? Tejas in this calendar year maybe? Because again, I heard you say loud and clear we want to be a part of those business workflows. Anything else from a, uh, maybe a product and engineering standpoint? That's at the top of the list right now for sure.

Speaker A: So honestly the way I think about our product roadmap and vision over the next couple of years is that we want to be the leading data activation platform and really turn this category into something that's as top of mind for the market as data analytics. You know, data is only as useful as much as it's used. Uh, if you're not solving the last mile of the analytics project and actually putting it to use, it's useless in some ways. It's just dead data. Right. So as we think about our product, there's like two axises that we're just going to be continuously optimizing and pushing as far as possible. The first access is just making a really good underlying platform to sync data from the data warehouse to all the different business systems. So this means just making the reverse ETL infrastructure and product really, really good. And what that means is a number of things. I mean, as we've scaled over the last, over the last year from just serving small startups to now Fortune 500 gaming companies, the magnitude of data between those two types of customers is night and day. And as we support those larger volumes of customers and larger volumes of data that they have, we need to scale our system so that it still feels like a breeze for the customer. Activating data via high touch and you know, they don't have to think anymore to deal with high data volumes or they don't have to face errors. And you know, all of that goes to say that there's a lot of work in our core platform to just make the product really good and just work no matter what the data scale is, in terms of volume, in terms of complexity, in terms of, you know, writing to really confusing fields and JSON structures and stuff like that in the tools that we integrate with and just making that core product experience really good and building a lot of integrations. The second access that we're optimizing outside of the core Versi deal platform is making the platform more accessible. And what that means is building things like high touch audiences, high touch notify, et cetera, all these vertical products that sit on top of the data warehouse so that more and more teams around a business, whether it's marketing, sales, et cetera, can come into the high touch platform and start activating data from their data warehouse. So those are the two accesses we think about making the reverse ETL platform, the foundation, really advanced and robust as well as making it more accessible to more people around the company. That's our kind of high level vision for the market.

Speaker B: Um, that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean when you look at the challenge that you have on engineering, it's just taking a couple of thoughts down. I mean you've got obviously a lot of new functionality that you're continuing to build in things that are in the roadmap. Maybe you're getting asked about, uh, from clients, hey, this would really be nice. You've got, you know, how do I ramp up my automation, how do I keep this thing resilient, how do I scale it? As you talked about and continue to expand everything that, that you're doing to hit the growth. Love that you talk, you kind of broke it up and you talked about as you were mentioning those different Personas that you want to be able to appeal to within an organization. And I don't know if you want to dig into a little bit more high touch notify, which you talked about a little bit earlier. But uh, then high touch audiences as well, things like that sound really interesting that aside from the platform could really start resonating with some of those business, uh, Personas that you were, that you're interested in helping them understand how high touch can be of value to them.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So I mean let's take audiences as an example. Uh, within the space of, you know, marketing technology, there's a lot of different tools that say we'll help you, you know, slice and dice your user base and create these custom audiences and sync them to different platforms. One of the largest categories of software in that sort of marketing technology space is the customer data platform, which I worked at previously and was an early engineer at called Segment and all of their competitors. And uh, what we're finding is that a lot of software in these categories, like customer data platforms, for example, workflow automation tools, it's probably like zapier and stuff like that is probably a more, a more clear Example for High analogy, for High Touch notify, what uh, we're finding is that these vertical software that was built for a very specific purpose are going to be rebuilt on top of the data warehouse and on top of reverse etl. And you may ask why? And really what it comes down to is because the best data in the company is in the data warehouse and that's a source of truth across the business. So you know, if a company is thinking, how do I allow marketers to build audiences on top of my customer data and sync these really personalized, tailor audiences to my different marketing channels and advertising networks, there's two approaches. They could say, let's go build another source of truth by buying something like a customer data platform, get all our data into that and then start allowing marketers to operate on top of that. Or they could take the high touch approach, which is we have a data warehouse, let's turn that into a customer data platform. Let's turn that into a workflow automation tool. Let's turn that into a notification center for our business. That's really the way we think about it, helping companies turn the data warehouse into these powerful tools that are almost purpose built for a specific business team, but can sit directly on the data warehouse based on the reverse ETL platform that we've built.

Speaker B: Hey Dave, just as you're talking, I was just wondering what, what have you seen that's been the most challenging or just that biggest, biggest rock to move? I guess when you look at, from a product and engineering standpoint, all of the things you have to do as a SaaS platform, you know, you're adding this new functionality, you're providing more automation, you're appealing to more Personas. You've got to build in resiliency and scale. What's the one that's the toughest, it seems, and maybe it doesn't have to apply directly to high touch, but just, you know, whether you saw it at segment, High Touch in the industry in general as a relatively early stage SaaS company, uh, what's the one I've got to be able to solve? And that tends to, uh, you know, hang you up a little bit if, if uh, you can.

Speaker A: So I think one product design challenge and product architecture challenge, an area of opportunity that we see in High Touch and Saw and segment, and you see in any sort of technical product, is before your product, you know, people would probably build scripts, like they would build a Python scripts or they would build scripts in Java or something like that to move data from the data warehouse into These different systems or, you know, in the case of any developer tool, it's usually, you know, before the developer tool existed, people were building something like this in house. And then a developer tool comes to the market, like high touch, like segment, that allows you to take a process that a lot of companies are building in house, or we need to build in house and serve everyone with that process, oftentimes through like, you know, an online user interface or something like that that makes it clearer so you don't have to cope. And one of the big design challenges with building developer tools or data infrastructure as a whole that I see is there honestly are a lot of, you know, tribal kind of knowledge and practices that engineers do when they build systems in house that do have value. So for example, if you build a reverse ETL or an ETL pipeline in house, you might version control it and things like Git, you might monitor it in something like Datadog, you might set alerts in it so that when something fails, it pings you in Slack, or you might be able to do a find and replace and change the name of a column across your whole code base. A lot of times when developer tool companies or infrastructure companies start building an online UI version, uh, of this infrastructure problem, like a reverse ETL platform or an ETL platform, they often don't translate. They think of, oh, we don't have to use git and code and we don't have to monitor our stuff. And those are all pros, um, but sometimes they're cons too because version control alerts, all those things that developers set up, actually do have value to the business in making it easier to maintain and monitor these pipelines that people were previously hand rolling with with custom scripts. So one just design challenge we face at high tech is how do we build a platform that is super easy to use and you can just, you know, use our online UI to configure everything you need to, but at the same time offers the same benefits that you'd be able to get if you coded it yourself and spent a lot of time building the best in house type of versatile platform. And that's been a fun, that's been a really fun and hard product challenge, honestly. And we've shipped a lot of cool stuff in the last year to address some of it, but I think it's still a journey. One of the things is whenever you configure pipelines in high touch now, you can sync all the configuration automatically that you're making in the Hitouch UI into these YAML configuration files in GitHub. So in GitHub or GitLab or any Git system that your company uses, you can get all these configuration files that represents your models and syncs that you've created in high touch without actually handwriting them. It's just like automatically sync synced both ways. Uh, so if you make a change in Git shows in high touch or high touch, get. And that's like one of the fun, like product design challenges of just figuring out how to bring all these practices from software engineering and data engineering to a more, you know, less technical audience without losing the benefits of those engineering practices and rigor.

Speaker B: Uh, really a smart approach, I think, and as you said, much easier for us probably to talk about it here than to, you know, execute that in a product across all those dimensions that you have.

Speaker A: So it's a journey.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I appreciate the transparency and just sharing that. Hey, let me ask you too. You guys have a ton of integrations already, I think 80 plus, something like that. How do you prior and I'm sure you got a lot on the road, but how do you prioritize integrations? Maybe I don't know if you can share some things coming up. Just anything there would be really interesting, I think.

Speaker A: Yeah, this is a fun one. So honestly, like, a lot of. A lot of building a company, I realized, is, uh, a lot of just scaling up the operations of it, right? There's problems that didn't exist when we were 5 people, 10 people, 15 people that now exist as the team's grown new, 60 plus people. And one of those is figuring out how to prioritize, especially with something like integrations, where the breadth of what people might be asking for is just so large, right? We have 80 integrations in the catalog. We're expecting to over double that this year. Within each of those integrations, there's tons of features, right? Like there's hundreds or thousands of objects that you can sync into when you pick one of these SaaS tools like a Salesforce or HubSpot or an SAP. How do you just prioritize that amongst the whole customer base? And initially it was easy, right? We were just, you know, the founders take the sales calls and they can kind of figure out what's the top priority for the week. But it's become a lot more challenging as we've scaled the business and we've actually created one of our product managers. Our first product manager of the company has created a pretty cool workflow between Salesforce, where a lot of our sales team and support team, customer success team kind of lives out of and Jira where the engineering team lives out of through a high touch sync. So it was mind boggling when he showed me this and we have to write a blog post about it, but we actually have a process where like the sales team and success team and stuff like that can submit all these like product feedback requests, whether that's a new integration or a bug or new feature or anything like that inside of Salesforce. And that gets like kind of automatically routed to the right engineering team in Jira, uh, via High Touch. And then as the engineering teams make progress on it or change the ETA or the size, it gets synced back to Salesforce where, where the go to market teams live all through like kind of a bi directional high touch sync. And on top of that obviously we also have product managers who are doing a lot of research into how to prioritize both based on, you know, the company's revenue as well as how many customers can this affect. Because our goal is to win the market overall and have the most companies using, you know, High Touch for reverse etl. So it's been an interesting process, an interesting challenge just prioritizing in general. And we've even had to use our own product, high Touch to build some interesting tools for this, which is not a use case we designed it for, but it's pretty cool.

Speaker B: Very cool, man, I love that. Hey, I want to switch gears with you. Um, you guys a, uh, really nice round, what about four or five, six months ago, that series B, 40 million bucks and you went from seed to uh, B round in a really short period of time. First of all, congratulations. Would love to get your thoughts, Tejas, on just kind of where you are today, where you're going and really open ended here. Let uh, you comment on anything you'd like to do from kind of that ongoing strategy about capital raises. Anything around custom. You talked about growing from five to 60 employees. Anything in that, call it that overall business, uh, land that you're dealing with right now. Uh, would love to get some perspectives from you on that for sure.

Speaker A: It's a great question. So honestly, yeah, the capital raises uh, happened faster than expected. The business is definitely growing faster than expected if you asked us at the time that we raised the seed round. Um, but really what we've realized is there's a certain market dynamic that exists in data activation and reverse ETL right now. And it's very similar to the dynamic that we saw I think with companies like snowflake in 2015 and 2016. So when I had just joined segment, Snowflake maybe had 50 to 100 customers. Mostly ad tech companies, mostly people using it to build other software platforms. Not as much for bi use cases yet like early adopter type folks were using it. But Snowflake solved this problem that huh, every business had, right? Every business was complaining about how hard it is to administer their data warehouse and how slow it is for all the queries and the lack of elasticity in that infrastructure. So while they didn't have that many customers yet, they had a clear product market fit that kind of every business faced challenges with, they just didn't, hadn't yet cracked. How to message that to all businesses, how to get everyone rallied around this, how to get everyone realized this is the problem a startup is going to tackle. Not you know, Microsoft or Amazon or Google, but they, and they realized that they had this pocket of time where they were ahead on product compared to say Amazon web Services. They were ahead on go to market compared to say Google Cloud with their bigquery offering. They realized there's this, there's this pocket of time where we don't really have that much competition but we've built a product that solves a problem that every company faces and we just need to slam the fuel. And I think we realize that same thing somewhere between our seed round and our Series A round. We realized, you know, we don't have that many customers to prove it yet, but the customers are across so many different industries that we can tell this is a problem that every business faces. And we just need to make everyone aware of it and acquire that market and teach the world that they can activate data in the data warehouse. So that's kind of the sense that we got. Not all businesses are this way. Say you're working on like self driving cars, you know, you might need to raise a lot of capital to focus on R and D for a long time and let the business sustain until the market's ready. That's just not the type of business that we're in. We're in a market dynamic where we are building and selling concurrently and we just need a race to acquire as many customers as possible as as fast as possible. Rather than kind of sequentially ordering R and D, then sales or you know, R and D and then market development. It's really like all things at the same time. And that's what led us to raise a Series B earlier than most companies would. Uh, because we just realized you know, the market is ready now. People just don't know that we exist and they don't know what's possible to do with their data warehouse. We just need to get the word out. So we raised the round, um, predominantly to focus to be able to deploy more resources on the go to market side of the business and just slam the fuel on the go to market side of the business and allow us to scale much, uh, faster than other startups a few years into business would be able to do. And I don't think this approach makes sense for all companies. It's really uh, a function of uh, market readiness and we just really felt that the market was really ready for a new solution to serve data to business users and it was really ripe. It's just that the word hasn't gotten out yet. So I think these things are super situational. But for our situation we felt it's just a very similar dynamic to Snowflake and we uh, want to take a similar path for that reason.

Speaker B: Oh, that's great. That's great. I noticed too, I can't remember if it was last week or the week before. I mean a little bit of consolidation going on in the space right now. Um, one of the open source data integration tools out there, airbyte acquired Grouparoo and any thoughts on that? I mean to me it's a bit of a confirmation for you too that hey, this space is really interesting. It's, you talked about the market being ready. Any thoughts on some of the consolidation going on right now?

Speaker A: Totally. So we've been expecting, you know, more and more competition for a while. We've realized there's a window where, where we have a product that's ahead and can slam the fuel on it. But by no means are we, are we, you know, assuming there's no competitors coming up, I think AirBite acquiring Group Peru is just step one. Um, we'll see a lot of customer data platforms starting to use the word reverse etl. We're going to see IPASS solutions like Workado and Mulesoft and Trey starting to use the word reverse etl. I think we'll see all data integration solutions start to use this term and reposition around the data warehouse. Competition is something we're expecting as a business. It's something that uh, we're not surprised by and it is validation in some sense. Uh, so that when we talk to a larger company they're not like, what is this approach of using the data warehouse as source? Instead they're like, wow, this is where everything's going. Everyone's moving to this direction. But these High Touch folks are the ones that are pioneering this and leading the charge. Um, so I think it's good from that aspect, uh, in terms of the consolidation aspect, you ask a super good question there. I think that Druparoo will deliver an interesting solution under sort of the uh, Urbite business for developers to be able to perform like simple reverse ETL in terms of syncing some data points over from data warehouse warehouses to destinations. But when it comes to really powering more of those business workflows on top of the data warehouse, like data activation, like we spoke about earlier, things like High Touch notify High Touch audiences, that's an area where I don't expect them to be able to deliver on, uh, you know, as much just because so much of the companies focus on that open source developer, et cetera angle. And it's not wrong of them, it's just a different angle for the product. Um, in my opinion, the other thing that will be really interesting to see is like from being at segment previously and seeing companies in the space like fivetran and DBT really succeed. I lay a lot of emphasis as a founder and as a business leader on focus and the value of focus. So the value of picking one thing and doing it really well. I, um, think when fivetran came to the market, a lot of mid market companies loved it, a lot of startups loved it, but a lot of enterprise companies thought why would I buy fivetran instead of something like Informatica that you know, supports ETL and data quality and maybe even reverse ETL and transformation, all these things in one platform, like why would I invest in fivetran? But then people realize that while they bought things like Informatica, they were still building ETL pipes in house because there's so many tools around the company that just aren't supported, that you just need to replicate the data in and can delegate the rest to another tool in the data stack. And I think it'll be interesting to see airbags definitely trying a consolidated approach earlier than most companies. It'll be interesting to see if that lack of focus has any results on um, product quality or product execution or if they are able to keep it up. Personally, our culture at High Touch is to really focus. We think data activation is a new problem, a big problem, and a uh, problem that's not really spec'd out. Like ETL is a known market. It's pretty spec'd out in terms of what people want. They want the data in their warehouse and then they can do whatever from there. Uh, reverse ETL and data activation is not that way. So we really feel like by focusing on this problem we uh, can come up with net new solutions for the market um, that push how people think about it. And we don't really think it's a space right. For consolidation or commoditization yet, but it'll be interesting to see.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that focus on a problem's really interesting. And you mentioned fivetran, dbt, some of the other uh, products in the modern data stack. And you look at you know, what did, what did fivetran really solve? For instance, you know they've got this utility based data integration that gives me 99.9% uptime for what's, what's a huge problem. I've got my ingest acquisition pipelines constantly breaking. Let me solve that. Right? That to me is, and you go, well it wasn't just one connector, it was a lot. But it, but it was at 99.9% uptime, uh, challenge that uh, you know, that really resonates. Give me sustainability, give me reliability because it's so hard to achieve. So I love where you're going with that, uh, at high touch as well, focusing in on something that as you said I get this big wow factor out of if I can, if I can help solve that. What about, and you talked about earlier? I think I noted this down. You said you've over, I don't know, the last 12, 15, 18 months. You guys have gone from you know, a few employees up to about 60 plus now. Always interested, you know, hiring, growing, scaling the business. What's working for you? Because it's tough right now. I mean it's tough to hire at the moment for everybody no matter who you are. But what's been working, it's an employee's market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What, what, what have you changed? What, what types of approach? What have you changed? Where are things going? Uh, and I don't know if you want to call out some of the key hires that you've had, but just kind of comment a little bit on this. Hiring, growing and scaling the business from a high touch growth perspective.

Speaker A: So a couple things, I mean as you mentioned, hiring, hiring is tough. That's something that then any business owner or any, any leader has, has in mind. It's just like a very competitive market these days. There's a lot of startups, there's, it's a very employee friendly market, um, which is great, it's great for everyone on the team, um, but a couple learnings that we've had over the last year. One is just the importance of aligning people. I mean as, as things are moving so quickly in a business from scaling from 15 to 60 people in a year, it's really important to make sure everyone's on the same page with where, where the business is headed, where is the product headed, what are the risks and what are we doing to minimize those risks, maximize our upside and ultimately uh, what's our path to win? Basically? And that's something we honestly didn't focus on, democratizing that kind of knowledge. How are the founders thinking about our path to win? Not just what we're doing this week, this month, but our path to win when we scaled from 15 to maybe 30, 40 people. But now as the company's getting from, you know that towards, you know, 120 by the end of the year, uh, it's a, it's top of mind for us and, and that's something that democratizing that sort of information, allowing everyone to be on the same page and contribute back to the company's roadmap, long term roadmap and vision and strategy is just something that we're focusing on as a business and has been a big challenge because it's, it's a new muscle for us to develop as startup founders and leaders, uh, for the first time. The other thing that I think was a lesson we learned is just hiring functional leaders earlier, earlier in the business lifecycle. So I personally led the sales team at High Touch up until about two months ago, until when we made a really big hire. Um, Prakash Durgani, who used to be in the sales leadership team at Segment, where uh, I worked with him and worked at a couple of companies in between, is now working as our VP of sales at High Touch. And it's been a huge lift to have someone with functional expertise but still founder type mindset come in and just run an area of the business to perfection. As I mentioned earlier, there's product strategy, there's vision, etc. There's terms like data activation, all those things are important. But the most important thing is honestly just getting the operations right, making sure the product quality doesn't go down as you add more engineers, you know, making sure you're maintaining stuff, making sure the sales team can grow, making sure the marketing team can grow. And functional leaders are masters of that and we wish we delegated to them earlier.

Speaker B: What, what's been working for you, I guess from a process and maybe even a tool perspective, for you and the other co founders to continue to communicate that vision throughout the team, especially as it's grown. How do you do that? I mean, is this a, is this an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly type thing? You know, you can go everything from a quarterly town hall to daily slack. I mean, what's working and what, what do you see the. Everyone at High Touch really responding to the best go. Oh man, I'm in. I love the vision.

Speaker A: Yeah. So honestly, I would say just completely transparently, I think that's one of our top challenges today. I think it's something that we need to get a lot better at as a business. I don't think it's something that we're succeeding at at the rate we're growing, but it is something that we're committed to solving over as we keep scaling the business. And as we know it'll be a bigger challenge if not everyone's at the same page. We're going to go from 60 to 1. So that's full transparency. I think that's one of the top things on, uh, mind for me as a leader of the business. And how do we get everyone aligned on the same page? Clear where sales, where marketing, where engineering is headed and where the business is headed. The biggest things that have helped for us though in our last year of experience is one first, a goal that everyone can rally around. You need a quantitative North Star metric that everyone can rally around. We have two parts of that goal. We have kind of an active workspaces goal that we blogged about in our series B launch, which is basically the number of companies that are actively syncing data off the data warehouse through High touch to different SaaS systems. The next goal we have is a revenue goal for the business, which I can't disclose here, but is also a very important, uh, component to rallying the team around and really making sure everyone knows how it's having impact to the business's top line. And then, uh, the other thing that's helped for us is just bi weekly All Hands. So running an all hands presentation where we talk a bit about our progress toward these goals, but more so we allow different functional leaders and teams to come and present how they're thinking about the most pressing problems on their mind. Whether that's a new product feature we're shipping, whether it's how to get data activation to the market when on the marketing side, or whether that's, you know, how we're beefing up the sales team and our problems there. Um, so all Hands presentations have Been really effective as well. I think what we need to get better at is writing. Writing about the thought process that we're going through that doesn't just encompass how we make one decision, like why we're hiring a VP of sales, um, but encompasses our general strategy towards the market and drives a number of those decisions throughout a year. So I think that's something we need to get a lot better at as a business. And it's something that most businesses don't do effectively, but we're really focused on figuring out.

Speaker B: Hey, with Prakash taking on a lot of that sales responsibility that you had previously, what's your. What would you say Tejas is your primary focus right now from a day to day functional standpoint?

Speaker A: Two things that are top of mind. Hiring, obviously is still very much top of mind. With Prakash taking over the, uh, sales team, we still have a lot of hiring, uh, we need to do across new areas like product as well as areas like marketing. Bringing in the right functional leaders there and then two, I would say, is, um, marketing is really a big focus of mine as well. So as you can see, we've been putting a lot of energy into how we position in the space with data activation, um, as well as things like how we position ourselves against incumbents and other data integration categories like customer data platforms and stuff like this. And just how do we get our message out as fast as possible?

Speaker B: Man, I've gotten caught up and hearing all the cool stuff you guys are doing. Um, anything that we haven't talked about, Tejas, you want to give some visibility to as it relates to High Touch that maybe we haven't touched on already?

Speaker A: No, I think that's it. I think we got a lot of good content here. Cool.

Speaker B: You guys started a podcast recently?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. So we, we can link that up and any major conferences, uh, or anything that you're going to be a part of that, uh, everybody can catch you and say, hey, Tejas, what's going on?

Speaker A: Yeah, we'll be at Snowflake Summit June. We'll be at the Chief Data Officer Conference at MIT in July. We'll be going to plenty of conferences this year. And if you just follow us on Twitter, High Touch data, uh, you'll be able to follow all the new events that we're going to or check out our website at hydrants IO.

Speaker B: Awesome. Hey, uh, I think we did this before. You got time for a quick lightning round to round things off here.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: All right. Hey, uh, technology you cannot live without these days. In your role at High touch.

Speaker A: I think, uh, Google, I think Gmail. Slack has not become enough anymore. I need Gmail again.

Speaker B: Google Apps. Google Apps. Yeah. Awesome. What, what, uh, time? I don't think I asked you this, but what time of day are you most productive and the most creative? Could be two different times.

Speaker A: I'm most productive right before, right before sleeping. I'm most productive when I, when I really should be going to sleep. Actually like slightly sleep deprived I think is actually like a pretty, pretty good state of productivity.

Speaker B: How many hours? What's your average per night on sleep?

Speaker A: I think six hours. It's nothing too bad, but I did right around the cusp of like, like, oh, six hours until I need to wake up. That's when I start getting the most productive. It, it's awful. It really bothers me and I would say most creative then too.

Speaker B: Okay, okay, very good. What about favorite uh, spot in the Bay Area right now?

Speaker A: Ooh, favorite spot in the Bay area. I see the whole of North Bay, so everything once you go north, like through the Golden Gate Bridge, just tons of great nature there. Bend to Mendocino recently. That's amazing place.

Speaker B: Very nice, very nice. Last one. Uh, do you have another company that you are watching closely right now? Whether it's in the data space, whether it's in the reverse CTL data activation space or some other part of the technology world in general?

Speaker A: I think the metrics layer in the data space is super interesting. I still have a lot of questions about it. It's just a uh, space that needs some untangling to the market I think. And uh, you know, there's DBT saying they're going to be releasing a metrics layer which is super cool and makes a lot of sense, but what they've released so far is rather primitive as well, so it'll be interesting to see how that evolves. But um, I know it's just in preview right now, there's also companies like Transform Data that have been around for a while that have recently released like open source versions of the metrics layer with metric. Kind of forgot what they call it, but they've released an open source version very recently and there's a lot of different startups in the space and obviously there's no real proof yet as well that the metrics layer will be unbundled from um, BI tools like Looker or will be this big standard. But there's a lot of talk about it and I'm very interested in, to see how it kind of untangles in the market.

Speaker B: Very cool Tejas. I know I kept you over a little bit, uh, time today, but man, it was great having you back on the show, getting a chance to catch up and hear all the cool stuff that you're doing at High Touch. Really, really appreciate it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on Kelly.

Speaker B: Awesome. Anytime you'd like to come back, just let us know. And thanks everybody for listening in today. Visit us@hashmapink.com and definitely subscribe to the podcast. Send us any feedback or comments we'd love to hear from you. We'll see you soon on another episode. Take care.

Speaker C: Thanks for listening to hashmapontap. Be sure to subscribe for weekly new episodes and visit HashMap's Medium blog for new data and cloud technology perspectives. If you have any comments or suggestions for the podcast, please visit the Hashmap Ontap page on Hashmap's website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in.