 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi everybody, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. This is Dave Vellante and as part of my CEO and CXO series, I've been bringing in leaders around the industry and I'm really pleased to have Siddish Nair who is the CEO of ThoughtSpot, CUBE alum. Great to see you again, Siddish. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure, Dave. Thank you so much for having me. Hope everything is well with you and your family. Yeah, I did, you know, back at you. I know you guys were in a hotspot for a while, so, you know, we power on together. So I got to ask you, so you guys are AI specialists, you know, maybe sometimes you can see things before they happen. At what point did you realize that this, you know, COVID-19 was really going to be something that would affect businesses globally and then specifically your business? Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? I mean, we used to think that Silicon Valley, we are sitting at the top of the world AI and artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud, IoT, and all of a sudden this little virus comes in and put us all in our places, basically. We are all waiting for doctors and others to figure these things out so we can actually go outside. That tells you all about what is really important in life sometimes. It's been a hard journey for most people because of what a huge health event this has been. From Silicon Valley point of view and specifically from artificial intelligence point of view, it is not a lot of history here that we can use to predict the future. However, early February, we had our sales pick-off and we had a lot of our sellers who came from Asia and it became sort of clear to us immediately during our sales pick-off in Napa Valley that this is not like any other event, the sort of things that they were going through in Asia. We sort of realized immediately that as and when it gets to the shores of the US, this is going to really hurt. So we started hunkering down as a company but as you mentioned early when we were talking, California in general had a head start. So we've been hunkered down for almost five weeks now as a company and as a people and the results are showing it's somewhat contained. Now obviously the real question is what next? How do we go out? So that's going to be the next journey. So a lot of the executives that I've talked to, of course they start with the number one importance is the health and wellbeing of our employees. We set up the work from home, infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera. So that's I think been fairly well played in the media and beginning to understand that pretty well. Also, you saw, I talked to Frank Slutman and he's had a sort of joke about the Sequoia memos that eliminate unnecessary expenses. Frank says, I've always eliminated unnecessary expenses. Keep it to the essentials. But one of the things that I haven't probed with CEOs and I'd love your thoughts on this is, did you have to rethink sort of the ideal customer profile and your value proposition in the specific context of COVID? Was that something that you deliberately did? Yeah, so it's a really important question that you asked and I saw the Frank interview and I 100% agree with that. Inside the company, we have this saying now our co-founder, Ajit actually coined the phrase of living like a middle-class company. And we've always lived that, even though we have 300 plus million dollars in the bank and we raised the big round last year. It is important to know that as a growth stage company, we are not measured on what's in the bank. It's about the value are we delivering and how much are we able to collect from customers to run the business. Living like a middle-class family has always been the ethos of the company and that has been a good thing. However, I've been with part support for a little more than 18 months. I joined as the CEO, I was an early investor in the company and there are a couple of big changes that we made in the last 18 months. And one of is moving to cloud, which we can talk. The other one has been around narrowing our focus on who we sell to. Because one of the things that as you know very well, Dave is that the world of data is extremely complex. Every company can come in and say we have the best solution out there and it can just be in the world. But the reality is not no single product is going to solve every problem for a customer when it comes to the data analytics issue. All we can hope for is that we become part of a package of solution that solves a very specific problem. So in that context, there's a lot of services involved, a lot of understanding of customer problems involved. We are not a BI product in the sense of Tableau or Clayton Microsoft, what they do, we are about use case based outcomes. So we knew that we can't be everywhere. So the second change we made is actually narrow our focus to exclusively sell to global customers. That plus the middle class mentality really paid off now because almost all the customers we sell to are very large customers. And the four verticals that we were seeing tremendous progress. One was healthcare, second was financial sector. Third was a telecom and a manufacturing and the last one is retail. Out of these four, I would say manufacturing is the one where we have seen slow down. But the other verticals have been, I would say cautiously spending, being very responsible and not spot, I'm not here to say that everything is fine but the impact, if you take Zoom as a spectrum, one end of the spectrum where everything is going amazingly well, because they're good product market fit to hospitality industry on the other side. I would say thought spot and our approach to data and analytics is closer to this than that. That's very interesting, Siddish, because of course healthcare, I don't think they have time to do anything right now. I mean, they're just so overwhelmed. So that's obviously an interesting area that's going to continue to do well, I would think. And then the financial services guys, there's a lot of liquidity in the system and after 2009, the FinTech guys or the financial banks are doing quite well. They may squeeze you a little bit because they're smart negotiators, but as you say, manufacturing with the supply chains and in retail, look, if you're e-commerce, I mean, Amazon hit all time highs today up whatever 20% in the last two weeks. I mean, just amazing what's happening. So it's really specific parts of those sectors will continue to do well, won't they? Absolutely, I think, look, I saw this joke on Twitter, what's the number one cost for digital transformation? Very soon people will say it is COVID. And even businesses that have been trying to, you know, reluctant to really embrace the transformation that the customers have been asking for, this has become the biggest force in function. And that's actually a good thing because consumers are going to ultimately win because once you get groceries delivered to you into your front doors, it's going to be hard to sort of go back to standing in the line in Costco when Instacart can actually deliver it for you and you get used to it. So there are some transformation that is going to happen because of COVID. I don't think the society will go back from. But having said that, it's also not transformation for the sake of transformation. Speaking from our point of view, data analytics, I thought I believed that the last three to four years we have been sort of living in the renaissance of enterprise data analytics. And that's primarily because of three things. The first thing, every consumer is expecting, no matter how small of the big business, is to get to know them. You know, I don't want you to treat me like an average. I don't want you to treat me like a number, treat me like a person, which means understand me, but personalize the services you're delivering and make sure that everything that you send me are relevant. But there's a marketing campaign or promo or customer support or make sure it's relevant, the relevance and personalization. The second is in return for that, customers are willing to give you all sorts of data. Privacy, you know, be damned. So to a certain extent, they're giving you location information, medical information to wearable stuff. And the last part is with cloud, the amount of data that you can collect and pre-pros in data warehouse, like snowflakes, like redshift, it's been fundamentally shifted. So when you tether them together, the customers, you know, demand for better access from the business, the amount of data that they're willing to give and collect through IoT and wearables, and then cloud-based technologies that allows you to process and store this, means that analyzing this data and then delivering relevant action to consumers is no longer a nice to have. And that I think is part of the reason why ThoughtSpot is finding sort of a tailwind even with all this global headwinds that we are all facing. Well, I think too, you know, the innovation formula really has changed in our industry. I've said it many times, it's not Moore's law anymore. It's the combination of data plus AI applied to that data and cloud for scale. And you guys are at the heart of that. So I want to talk about, you know, the market space a little bit. And you look at VI and analytics, you look at the market, you know, the Gartner Magic Quadrant. And to your point, you know, the companies on there are sort of chalk and cheese to borrow a phrase from our friends across the pond. I mean, you're not Power BI, you're not SAS. I mean, you're sort of search led, you're turning natural language into complex SQL queries. You're bringing in artificial intelligence and machine intelligence to really simplify and dramatically expand and put into the hands of business people analytics. So explain a little bit. First of all, do I have that sort of roughly right? And help us frame the market space and how you think about it. Yeah. And first of all, it is amazing that the diverse industry and technologies that you speak to and how you are able to grasp all of them and summarize them within a matter of seconds like this, which is a tremendous talent in itself. You and Stu, you both have that. You are absolutely right. So the way I think of this is that VI technologies have been around and it's played out really well. It played its part. I mean, if you look at it, the way I think of VI was biggest VI tool is still Excel. People still want to use Excel and that is the number one VI tool ever. Then 10 years ago, Tableau came in and made visualization so delightful and epic, so to speak, that that became the better way to consume complex data. Then Microsoft came in Power BI and then commoditized the visualization to a point that, you know, Tableau had to fight and ended up selling to Salesforce. We are not trying to play there because I think if you chase the idea of visualization, it is going to be a long hard journey for Salesforce to have long visualization. That's not what we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is that you have a lot of data on one hand and you have a consumer sitting here and saying, data doesn't mean you treated me well. Where is my action that is bespoke? Where is customized action for? So our question is, how does data turn into bespoke action inside a business? The insurance company is calling, you're calling an insurance company's customer support person. How do you know that the impact that you are getting from them is customized? So turning data into insight is an algorithmic process. That's what BI does. But that's like a few people in an organization can do that. Think of them like oil. They don't mix with water, that's the business people. The merchandising specialist who figures out which one should go to e-com, e-com site and what should be the price, what should be ranking. That's the merchandiser. The customer support person, that's a business user. They don't necessarily do Python or SQL. What happens is in businesses, you have the data people like water and the business people who touch the customers and interact with them every day. They're like the water, they don't mix. The idea of passport is very simple. We don't want this demarcation. We don't want this custom. We want to break it so that every single person who interacts with the customer should be able to have an interactive storytelling with the data so that every deficient that they make takes data into insight and knowledge to action. And that decision-making pipeline cannot be gut-driven alone. It has to be enabled by data science and human experience coming together. So in our view, a well-deployed data platform, decision-making platform, will enhance and augment human experience. As opposed to human experience face, this data says it, so you got to pick one. And that's an old model. And that has been the approach with the natural language space, interactive access with the BI being done automated through AI in the backend. ThoughtSpot, we are able to put very complex data science in front of a 20-year experienced merchandising specialist in a large e-commerce website without learning Python, without learning SQL, without understanding data warehouse. Right, so a couple of things I want to pick up on. I mean, data is plentiful insights aren't. That's really the takeaway from one of the things that you mentioned. And this notion of storytelling is very, very important. I mean, all business people, they better be storytellers in some way, shape, or form. And what's a better way to tell stories than with data? And so, because as you say, no longer gut feel is not the answer anymore. So it seems to me, to these that you guys are transformative, the decision to focus on the global 2000 and really not get washed up in the Excel, well, I could just do it in Excel or I'm going to go get Power BI is good enough. It's really, you're trying to be transformative and you've got a really disruptive model that we talked about before, search led and you're speaking to the system or typing in a way that's more natural. I wonder if you could comment on that particularly that disruption and that transformation. Remember, we are selling to global 2000. Almost all of them will have Tableau or one of these Power BI or one of these solutions already. So we're not trying to go there and change that. What we have done is very clearly focus on use cases where transforming data into action will move the needle for the best. So for example, with the COVID situation going on, one of the most popular use cases for us is around working capital management. Now, a CFO who's been in the business for 20, 30 years is an expert and have the right kind of gut feeling about how her business is running when it comes to working capital. However, imagine now she can do 20 what-if scenarios in the next five seconds or next 10 minutes without going to the SPN 18, without going to the BI team. She can say, what if we reduce hiring in Japan and instead we focus them on Singapore? What if we move 20% of marketing dollars from Germany to New York? What would be the impact of AR going up by 1% versus AP going down by 1%? She needs to now do complex scenarios, but without delay. It's sort of like, how do I find a restaurant through Yelp versus going to the lobby to talk to a specialist who tells me the local restaurant? This interactive database storytelling where gut enhances the decision-making is very powerful. This is why our largest customer has spent more than $26 million with PowerSpot. And this is not small. The average deals that are around close to 700 a day, like this week, for example, we are having a webinar where Verizon's SVP of analytics, specifically focused on finance, is actually going to be on a webinar with our CFO. Our CFO, Sophie, one of our financial specialists and Jeff Noto from Verizon are going to be on this talking about working capital management, what ThoughtSport is a portion of, but they are sharing their experience of how do we manage. So that kind of very extremely rigid focus on use cases, supply chain, modeling different things so that someone who knows Asia can really interact with the data to figure out if our supply chain from Bangladesh is going to be impacted because of COVID, can we go to Ecuador? What will that look like? What will be the cost, what's the transportation cost, fuel cost? Businesses become so complex, you don't have time to take five, six days to look at the report, no matter how pretty that report is to make decisions. You need to be able to make a lightning fast decision and something like COVID is really exposing all of that because day by day, situation on the ground is changing. Employees are calling in sick, virus is breaking out in one place, other place it is not, curves are going up and down. So you cannot have any sort of delay between human experience and data science and all of that comes down to your point telling visual stories so that the organization can rally behind the changes that you want to make. So these are mission critical use cases. There are big problems that you're solving and attacking, as you said, you're not all things to all people. One of the things you're not is a data store, right? So you've got a partner, you've got to have an ecosystem, whether it's cloud databases, the cloud itself. I wonder if you can talk about some of the key partnerships that you're forming and how you're going to market and how that's affecting your business. Yeah. One of the things that I've always believed in Silicon Valley is that companies die out of indigestion, not out of starvation. You try to do everything, that's how you end up dying. And for us in the space of data, it's an extremely humbling space because there is so much to do, data prep, data warehousing, mashup of data, hosting of data. We have clearly decided that our ability is best spent on making artificial intelligence to work, interactive storytelling for business use. That said, with that said, we needed high velocity agility partners in the back and cloud-based data warehouses have become a huge tailwind for us because our entire customer deployments are on cloud. And the number one, obviously, as you know from Frank's thing, Snowflake has actually given us, customers have seen Snowflake because ThoughtSpot is actually a good thing and we are exclusive in the global 2000 and Snowflake is climbing up there and we are able to build a good mutual partnership. But we are also seeing really creative partnership all the way from product design to go to market and compensation alignment with Amazon on their push on Redshift as well. Google, we have announced partnership. There is a little bit of deepening troubles in the beginning we are getting. And just a couple of weeks ago, we started working with Microsoft on their Azure Synapses Actual. I would say that it's lagging. We still have work to do, but Amazon and Snowflake are really pushing in terms of what customers want to see and it completely aligns with our value problem. One plus one equals three really works well for our customers. And Google is what, BigQuery plus Google Cloud or what are you doing there? Yeah, so both Amazon and Google what we are doing is three different pieces. One is obviously the hosting, their cloud platforms. Second is Data Warehouse Enterprise Data Warehouse which is Redshift and BigQuery. Third, we are also pretty good at taking machines learning algorithms that they have built for specific verticals. We are able to take those and then ingest them and deliver better. So for example, if you are one of the largest apparel companies in the world and you want to know what's the shipment rate from China and it shows. And then next thing you want to obviously what's the failure rate on this based on large behavior when you compress the shipment rate. And that probably could use a bit of specific algorithms and Google and others have actually built library of algorithms that can be injected into ThoughtSpot. We will simply answer the question we may have gotten that algorithm from the Google library as sort of the business user is concerned. It doesn't really matter. So we have made all that invisible and we are able to deliver democratized access to bespoke insight to a business user either to sort of being afraid to deal with the sector data. So as you mentioned that you've got obviously several hundred million dollars in cash you've raised over a half a billion. You've talked previously about potential acquisitions about IPO. Are you considering acquisitions M&A at this point in time? I mean, there may be some deals out there. There's certainly some talent out there but boy the market's changing so fast. I mean, it seems to certain sectors are actually doing quite well. Will you consider M&A at this point? Yeah, so I'll take IPO and M&A to a different IPO. Definitely, you know, it will be foolish to say that this hasn't pushed our clients back a little bit because this is a huge event. I think there will be a correction across valuation and all of that we need to keep. However, it is also important for us to use this opportunity to look at how we are investing our resources and investment for long term with the short term and make sure that we are more focused and more tightening up the belt. We are doing that internally. Having said that being a private company or valuation is, you know, at least in theory frozen. And then we have a pretty good cash position of close to 300 million dollars, which means that it is absolutely an opportunity for us to seriously consider M&A. The important thing, going back to my ad age of, you know, companies don't die out of starvation, it is critical to make sure that whatever we do, we do it with clarity. Are we doing it for talent? Are we doing it for tech? Or are we doing for market? When you have a massive event like this, it is a poor idea to go after a new market. It is important to go to our existing customers who are very large global 2000 firms. And then identify problems that we cannot solve otherwise. And then add technology to solve those problems. So technology acquisition for absolutely is something to consider. But it needs some more time to settle in because, you know, first two weeks were all, people were blindsided by this. Then the last two weeks, we have now gotten the Mojo back in sales and Mojo back in engineering. And now I think it is time for us to digest and prepare for this next two, three quarters of event. And as part of that companies like us who are fortunate enough to be on a good cash position, we'll absolutely look for interesting and good deals in the M&S space. Yeah, it makes sense. It's talent and tech, you know, post IPO, you can worry about TAM expansion. You'll be under pressure to do that as the CEO. But for now, that's a very pragmatic approach. My last question is just some things, when you think about, you say five weeks now, you've been essentially on lockdown. You must, as many of us start thinking about, wow, a lot of this work from home, which came so fast, people wouldn't even think about it earlier. You know, some customer companies mandated, you know, the beehive approach. Now everybody's open to that. There are certain things that likely to remain permanent post COVID. Have you thought much about that generally and specifically how it might affect your business, the permanence of post COVID, your thoughts? Yeah, I've, you know, I've thought a lot about it. In fact, this morning I was speaking with our CRO Brian McCarthy about this. I think the change will happen, think of like an onion thinner, most layer. I think the most, my hope is that the biggest change would be in every one of us, internally, as a what sort of a person am I and what does my position in the world means, the ego of each one of us that we carry because if this global event in one shot did not make you rethink your own sort of position in this big universe, I think that's a miss. So the first thing has to be about being a better person. The second thing is, you know, I had this two, three days of fever, which was negative for COVID, but I isolated myself. But that gave me sort of an idea of sitting in the dark room where I'm hoping my family won't get infected and my, you know, my parents are in India. So it sort of also realized that what is really important for you in life and how much family should mean to you. So that's the first, yourself, second, your relationship with family. But having said that, the most, the third thing when it comes to business building is also the importance of building with quality people. Because when things go wrong, it is so critical to have people who believe in the purpose of what you are trying to build. People with good faith and unshakable faith, personal faith and unshakable faith in the purpose of the company. And most importantly, you mentioned something which is the storytelling. People, leaders who can absolutely communicate with clarity and certainty. It becomes the most important thing to lead an organization. I mean, you're a small business owner. You know, we are in a small company with around 500 people. There's nothing like sitting at home, waiting to see how the company's doing over email if you're a frontline engineer or a seller. Communication becomes so critical. So having the trust and the respect of the organization and have the ability to clearly and transparently communicate the most important thing for the company and over communicating during the time of crisis. These things are so useful even after this crisis is over. Obviously from a technology point of view, people have been speaking a lot about working remotely and technology changes security. Those things will happen. But I think if these three things were to happen in that order, be a better person, be a better family member and be a better leader. I think the world will be better off. And the last thing I'll also tell you that in Silicon Valley sometimes we have this disregard for arts and literature and science. I hope that goes away. Because I can't imagine living without books, without movies, without Netflix and everything art majors have created to end whichever lives. You know, sports is no longer there on TV. And the fact that people are able to immerse in imagination in books and fiction and watch TV. That also reminds you how important it is to have a good balance between arts and science in this world. So I have a long list of things that I hope we as a people and as a society will get better at. A lot more game playing in our household and it's good to reconnect in that regard. Well, Siddish, you've always been a very clear thinker and you're in a great spot, an awesome leader. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really great to see you again. All the best to you, your family and the broader community in your area. You've been very kind with this. Thank you so much. I wish you the same and hopefully we'll get to see face to face in the near future. Thank you a lot. I hope so. Thank you. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.