 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. If I'm welcome to this special CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto Studios. During this time of the pandemic, we're doing a lot of remote interviews, supporting a lot of events. theCUBE virtual as is our new brand because there's no events to go to, but we certainly want to talk to the best people and get the most important stories. And today I have a great segment with a world-class entrepreneur, Ajit Singh co-founder and executive chairman of Thought Spot. And they got an event coming up, which is coming up in December 9th and 10th. But this interview is really about what it takes to be a world-class leader and what it takes to see the future and be a visionary, but then execute an opportunity. Because this is the time that we're in right now is there's a lot of change, data, technology, a sea change is happening and it's upon us. And leadership around technology and how to capture opportunities is really what we need right now. And so Ajit, I want to thank you for coming on to theCUBE conversation. Thanks for having me, John, pleasure to be here. So for the folks watching, you're the startup that you've been doing for many, many years now, Thought Spot, you're the co-founder, executive chairman, but you also were involved in Nutanik as the co-founder of that company as well. You know a little bit about unicorns and creating value and doing things early, but you're a visionary and you're a technologist and a leader. I want to go in and explore that because now more than ever, the role of data, the role of the truth is super important. And as the co-founder, your company is well positioned to do that. I mean, your tagline today on the website says insight at the speed of thought. But going back to the beginning, probably wasn't the tagline. It was probably maybe like, we got to leverage data, take us through the vision initially when you founded the company in 2012. What was the thinking, what was on your mind and how to take us through the journey? Yeah, so as an entrepreneur, I think visionary is a very big term. I don't know if I qualify for that or not, but what I'm really passionate about is identifying very large markets with very, very big problems. And then going to the whiteboard and from scratch, building a solution that is perfectly designed for the big problem that the market might be facing from scratch and just an absolute honest way of approaching the problem and finding the best possible solution. So when we were starting Thoughtspot, the market that we identified was analytics, analytics software. And the big problem that we saw was that while on one hand, companies were building very big data lakes, data warehouses, there was a lot of money being spent in capturing and storing data. How that data was consumed by the end users, the non-technical people, the sales, marketing, HR people, the doctors, the nurses, that process was not changing. That process was still stuck in old times where you have to ask an analyst to go and build a dashboard for you. And at the same time, we saw that in the consumer space, when anyone had a question, they wanted to learn about something, they would just go to Google and ask that question. So we said, why can't analytics be as easy as Google? If I have a question, why do I have to wait for three weeks for some data experts to bring some insights to me? For most simple questions, if I'm doing some very deep analysis, trying to come up with fraud algorithms, it's understood, you need data experts. But if I'm just trying to understand how my business is doing, how my customers are doing, I shouldn't have to wait. And so that's how we identified the market and the problem. And then we built a solution that is designed for that non-technical user with a very design-thinking UX-first approach to make it super easy for anyone to ask that question. So that was the genesis of the company. You know, I just love the thinking because you're solving a problem with a clean sheet of piece of paper. You're looking at what can be done. And it's just gonna bring up Google because the thing about Google's motto was find what you're looking for. And they had little gimmicky buttons, like I'm feeling lucky, which just took you to a random webpage at that time. While everyone else was trying to build these walled gardens in this structural apparatus, Google wanted you in and out with your results fast. And that mindset just never came over to the enterprise and with all that legacy structure and all the baggage associated with it. So I totally love the vision, but I got to ask you, how did you get to Beechhead? How did you get that first success, Milestone? When did you see results in your thinking? Yeah, so I mean, I believe that once you've identified a big market and a big problem, it comes down to the people. So I sort of went on a recruiting mission and I recruited perhaps the best technology and business team that you can find in any enterprise segment, not only just analytics, some of the early engineers, my co-founder, he was at Google before that, Amit Prakash, before that he was at Microsoft working on Bing. So it took a lot of very deliberate effort to find the right kind of people who have a builder's mentality and are also deep experts in areas like search, large-scale distributed systems, very passionate about user experience and then you start building the product. It took us almost, I would say, two and a half, three years to get the initial working version of the product. And we were lucky enough to engage with some of the largest companies in the world, such as Walmart, who were very interested in our solution because they were facing these kinds of problems. And we almost co-developed this technology with our early customers, focusing on ease of use, scale, security, governance, all of that because it's one thing to have a concept where you want to make access to data as easy as Google. You have a search interface, people can type and get an answer. But when you're talking about enterprise data and enterprise needs, they are nowhere similar to what you have in consumer space. Consumer space is free for all. All the information is there, you can crawl it and then you can access it. In enterprise, for you to take this idea of search but make it production-grade, make it real and not just a concept car, you need to invest a lot in building deep technology and then enabling security and scalability and all of that. So it took us almost, I would say, two and a half, three years to get to the initial version of the product. And the problem we are solving and the area of technology search that we are working on, we brought it for the market, it's almost an infinite game. You can keep making things easier and easier and we have seen how Google has continued to evolve their search over time and it is still evolving. We just feel so lucky to be in this market taking the direction that we have taken. Yeah, it's easy to talk a big game in this area because it's like you said, it's a hard technical problem because of little structural data, whether it's schema databases or whatever, legacy baggage. But to make it easy, hard, and I like what you guys go with this, find the right information and put it in the right place at the right time. It's a really hard problem and the beautiful thing is you guys are building a category while there's spend in the market that needs the problem today. So category creation with an existing market that needs it. So I got to ask you if you could do me a favor and to find for the audience, what is search-driven analytics? What does that mean from your standpoint? Yeah, what it means is for the end user, it looks like search, but under the hood is driving large scale analytics. I like to say that our product looks like a search engine on the surface, but under the hood, it's a massive number clenching machine. So search and AI-driven analytics, there's two goals there. One, if the user has any user and we are talking about non-technical users here, we're not talking about necessarily data experts, but if a user has a question, they should be able to get an answer instantly. They shouldn't have to wait. That is what we achieve with search and with SpotIQ, our AI engine, we help surface insights where people may not even know that those are the questions they should be asking because data has become so complex. People often don't even know what question they should be asking and we give them a tool that's very easy to use but it helps surface insights to them. So there is both a pull model that we enable through search and a push model that we enable through SpotIQ. So I have to ask you that, you guys are pioneering this segment, you're in first. And sometimes when you're first, you have arrows in your back as you know. It's not all the beginners survive. They get competition copies, but you guys have had a lead, you had success. What's different today as you have competition coming in, trying to say, oh, we got search too. So what's different today with ThoughtSpot? How are you guys differentiated? Yeah, I mean, that's always a sign of success. If you, what you are trying to do, if others are saying we have it too, you have done something that is valuable and that happens in all industries. I think the best example is Tesla. They were the first to look at this very well-known problem. I mean, we haven't had a very sort of unique take on the existence of the problem itself. Everybody knows that there is a problem with access to data, but the technology that we have built is so deep that it's very, very hard to really copy it and make it work in real world. With Tesla in automotive industry and cars, there is obviously so many other companies that have launched battery powered cars, electric cars, but there is Tesla and there is all the other electric cars which are a bit of an afterthought because if you want to build an analytics product where search is at the core, search cannot be added on the top. Search has to be the core and then you build around it. And that requires you to build a fundamental architecture from the ground up and you can't take an existing BI product that is built for dashboarding and add a search bar. I've always said that adding a search bar in a UIs, perhaps 10 to 20 lines of JavaScript code, anyone can add it. And there is so much open source stuff out there that you can just take it and plug it. And many people have tried to do that, but taking off the shelf search technology that is built for unstructured data and sticking it on to a product that is required to do analytics on enterprise data, that doesn't work. We built a search technology that understands enterprise data at a very deep level so that when our customers take our product and bring it into their environment, they don't have to fundamentally change how they manage their data. Our goal is to add value to their existing enterprise data, cloud data warehouses and deliver this amazing search experience where our search engine is able to understand what's in their data lake, what's in their cloud data warehouse, what are the schemas, the tables, the joints, the cardinality, the data type, the security requirements, all of these things have to be understood by the technology for you to deliver the experience. So now that said, we pride ourselves in not resting on our laurels. We have this sort of motto in the company, we say we are only 2% done. So we are on our own sort of continuous journey of innovation and we have been working on taking our search technology to the next level and there is something really powerful that we are going to unveil at our upcoming conference beyond in December and that is going to create even more distance between us and the competition. And it's all driven by what we have seen with our customers, how they are using our product or learnings, what they like, what they don't like, where we see gaps and where we see opportunity to make it even easier to deliver value to our customers and to our users. I think that's a really profound insight you just shared because if you look at what you just said around thinking about search as an embedded architectural foundational, embedded in the architecture, that's different than bolting on a feature we used at Java code or some open source library. You know, we see in the security market people bolted on security had huge problems. Now all you hear is, oh, you got a big security in from the beginning. You actually have baked search into everything from the beginning and it's not just a utility, it's a mindset and it's also technology, metadata, data about data, software, you know, all kinds of tech is involved. Am I getting that right? I mean, because I think this is what I heard you say. It's like, you got to have a big 10. This is totally right. I mean, if I can use an analogy, there is Google search and obviously Yahoo also tried to bring their own search. Yahoo search, Yahoo actually, Yahoo versus Google is a perfect example or a perfect analogy to compare with ThoughtSpot versus other BI product. Yahoo was built for predefined content consumption. You know, you had a homepage, somebody defined it. You could make some customizations and there is, but there is predefined content. You can consume it. Now they also did add search, but that didn't really go so far. While Google said, we will build from scratch ability to crawl all the data, ability to index all the data and then build this serving infrastructure that delivers this amazing performance and interactivity and relevance for the user. Relevance is where Google really shines and you can't do those things until you think about the architecture from the ground up. I'm looking forward to having more deep dive conversations on that one topic, but for the folks who might not be old enough like me to remember Google back at that time, Yahoo was the best search engine. It was a directory basically with a keyword search. It was trivial, technically speaking, but they got big and then the portal wars came out. Oh, we got to have a portal. Google was very much not looked down as an innovator, but they had great technical chops and they just stayed the course. They had a mission to provide the best search engine to help users find what they're looking for. And they never wavered. And it was not fashionable about that time to your point. And then Yahoo was number one, then Google just became Google and the rest is history. So I think, I really think that's super notable because companies face the same problem. What looks like fashionable tech today might not be the right one. I think that's- I totally agree. And I think a lot of times there is a lot of, in our space, there's a lot of sort of hype around AI and machine learning. We as a company have tried to stay close to our customers and users and build things that will work for them. And a lot of stuff that we are doing, it has never been done before. So it's not to say that along the way, we don't have our own failures. We do have failures and we learn from them. Yeah. Yeah. Just don't make the same mistake twice. That's so- Yeah, I think if you have a process of learning quickly, improving quickly, those are the companies that will have a competitive advantage. In today's world, nobody gets it right the first time. If you're trying to do something fundamentally different, if you're copying somebody else, then you're too late already. I totally agree. Great. When you do something new, it's about how fast you can iterate. And that's- That's a great mindset. That's a great mindset. And I think that's worth capturing and calling out. But I got to ask you because, first of all, distinguish history and you just, I love your mindset and just solving problems, big problems, all great. I want to ask you something about the industry and where you guys were in 2012, when you started the company. You were literally in what I call the before cloud phase because it was before cloud companies and then during cloud companies and then after cloud. Amazon clearly took advantage of that for a lot of startups. So right in around 2012 through 2016, I'd call that the Amazon is growing up years. How did the cloud impact your thinking around the product and how you guys were executing because you were right on that wave. You were probably in the sweet spot of your development. Yeah, yeah. Pre-business planning. You were in the pre-business planning mode, incomes to Amazon. I'm sure you're probably using Amazon because you just started as a whole startup. You used Amazon at first, but I just think about, do we have a premise with the data center? How did that impact you guys and how does that change today? Certainly, yeah. So it's been fascinating to see how the world and the world and how enterprises have also really evolved in their thinking on how they leverage the cloud infrastructure. Now, in the cloud, there is the compute and storage infrastructure. And then you have cloud data warehouses, the analytics stats in the cloud that's becoming more popular now with a company like Google having BigQuery and then Snowflake having really amazing success and things like that. So when we started, we looked at where our customers are, where is their data and what kind of infrastructure is available to us. At the time, there wasn't enough compute to drive the search engine that we wanted to build. There were also not any significant cloud data we don't see at the time. But our engineering team or co-founders, they came from companies like Google where building a cloud-based architecture and elastic architecture, service-oriented architecture is in their DNA. So we architected the product to run on infrastructure that is very elastic, that can be run practically anywhere. But our initial customers enterprise Global 2000, they had their data more on-prem. So we had started more with on-prem as a go-to-market strategy. And then about four, four and a half years ago, once cloud infrastructure, I'm talking about compute infrastructure started to become more mature. We certified our software to run on all three clouds. So today we have more than 75 to 80% of our customers already running our software in the cloud. And as now, because we connect to our primary data sources are cloud data warehouses, cloud data lakes. Now with Snowflake and BigQuery and Synapse and Redshift, we have enough of our customers who have deployed cloud data warehouses. So we are also able to directly integrate with them. And that's why we launched our own hosted SaaS offering about a month ago. So I would say our journey in this area has been sort of similar to companies like Splunk or Elastic, which started with a software model, initially deployed more on-prem, but then evolved with the customers to the cloud. So we have a lot of focus and momentum and a lot of our customers, as they're moving their data to the cloud, they're asking us as well to be in the cloud and provide a hosted offering. And that is what we have built for the last one year and we launched it a month ago. It's nice to be on the right side of history. I got to say, when you're on the wave to be there, and that also makes integrations easy too. I love the cloud play. Let's get to the final segment here. I want to get your thoughts on your customers, your advice. There's a huge untapped opportunity for companies when it comes to data. A lot of them are realizing that the pandemic is highlighting a lot of areas where they have to go faster and then go to cloud. They're going to build modern apps. More data is coming in than ever before. Where are these untapped opportunities for customers to take advantage of the data? And what's your opinion on where they should look and what they should do? Yeah, so I really think that the pandemic has shown for the first time the value of data to society at large. There is probably more than a billion people in the world that have seen a chart for the first time in their life. Everybody has been, when COVID hit us in March, April, everybody was looking at charts of infection and so on and so forth. So there is a lot more broad awareness of what data can do in improving our society at large. For the businesses, there is, of course, in the last six, seven months, you've heard it enough from a lot of leaders that digital transformation is accelerating. Everybody is realizing that the way to interact in the world is becoming more and more digital. Expecting your customers to come to your branch to do banking is not really an option. And people are also seeing how all the SaaS companies and SaaS businesses, digital businesses, they have really taken off. If a company like Zoom can suddenly have a $150 billion valuation because you are able to do everything remote, all the enterprises are looking to really touch their customers and partners in a lot more digital way than they could do before. And definitely COVID has also really created this, almost two buckets of organizations. There is a lot of companies that have tremendously benefited from it and there is a lot of companies that have been poorly affected by it really in a difficult place. And I think both of them, for the first category, they're looking at how do I maintain this revenue even after COVID? Because once this thing, hopefully early next year we have a vaccine and things can start to look better again sometime next year. But we have learned so much, we have attracted so many new customers, how do we retain and grow them further? And that means I need to invest more and more in my technology. Now, companies that are not doing well, they really want to figure out how to become more operationally efficient. And they are really under pressure to get more value from there. And both categories, improving your revenue, retaining customers, you need to understand the customer behavior, you need to understand which products they are buying at a fine-grained level, not with the law of averages, not by looking at a dashboard and saying, our average customer likes this kind of a product. That model doesn't really work. You have to offer people personalized services and that personalization is just not possible at scale without really using data on the front lines. You can have just managers sitting in their office looking at dashboards and charts and saying, these are the kinds of campaigns I need to run because my average customer seems to like these kinds of offers. I need to really empower my salespeople, my individual frontline workers who are interfacing with the customer to be able to make customized offers of services and products to them. And that is possible only with data. So we see really a lot more focus in getting value from data, delivering value quickly and digital transformation broadly but definitely leveraging data in businesses. There is tremendous acceleration that is happening. And next five years, it's all going to be about being able to monetize data on the front lines when you are interfacing with your customers and partners. Ajith, it's great insight and I really appreciate what you're saying. And I wrote a blog post in 2007. I said, data will be the new development kit. Back then we used to call development kit software that used to develop. John, you are the real visionary. It took me until 2012 to be able to do this. Well, it wasn't clear but you saw that data was going to have to be programmed to be part of the programming. And I think what you're getting at here is so profound because we're living 2020. People can see the value of data at the right time. It changes the conversations. It changes what's going on in the real-time communications of our world with real-time access to information whether that's machine to machine or human machine to human. Having data in the right place changes the context. And that is a true, not a tech thing. That's just life, right? So I think this year, I think we're all going to look back and say, this was the year that everyone realized that real-time communications, real-time society needs real-time data. And I think it's going to be more important than ever. So it's a really big problem and important one. And thank you for sharing that. Yeah, actually bring up a very good point programming, developing with data. Data is a development kit. We are also going to announce a new product beyond which will be about bringing ThoughtSpot everywhere. Where a lot of business users are in their business applications. And by using ThoughtSpot product, using our full experience, they can obviously do enterprise-wide analytics and look at all the data. But if they're looking for insights and nuggets and they want to ask questions in their business workflows, we are also launching a product capability that will allow software developers to inject data in their business applications and enable and empower their own business users to be able to ask any questions that they might have without having to go to yet another BI product. It's data as code. I mean, you can almost think about like software metaphors. Where's the compiler? Where's the source code? Where's the data code? You start to get into this new mindset of thinking about data as code because you got to have data about the data. Is it clean data? Is it dirty data? Is it real time? Is it useful? There's a lot of intelligence that's needed to manage this. This is like a pretty big deal. And it's fairly new in the sense in the science side. Yeah, machine learning has been around for a while on, you know, there's tracks for that. But thinking of this way as an operating system mindset, it's not just being a data geek. You know what I'm saying? So I think you're on the right track, Ajit. I really appreciate your thoughts here. Thank you. Okay, this is a CUBE conversation. Unpacking the data. The data is the future. We're living in a real time world and real time data can change the outcomes of all kinds of contexts. And with truth, you need data. And Ajit Singh, co-founder, executive chairman of Thought Spot shares his thoughts here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.