 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly. We're with Wikibon.org and this is the Cube, Silicon Angles flagship product. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we bring you the tech athletes who are really changing the industry and we have one here today. Kristin Chabot is the CEO, the leader, the spiritual leader of this conference and of Tableau. Kristin, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's our pleasure. Great keynote the other day. I just got back from Italy, so I'm full of superlatives, right? It really was magnificent, I was inspired. I think the whole audience was inspired by your enthusiasm and what struck me is I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek who says that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it and your whole speech was about why you're here. Everybody can talk about their differentiators, they can talk about what they sell, you talked about why you're here. That's right. And it just was awesome, so congratulations. I appreciate that. Yeah, so why did you start in you and your colleagues, Tableau? Well Tableau really started with a series of breakthrough research innovations. That was the seed. There are three co-founders of Tableau, myself, Dr. Chris Dolty and Professor Pat Hanrahan and those two are brilliant inventors and designers and researchers and the real hero of the Tableau story and the company formed when they met an entrepreneur and a customer. I had spent several years as a data analyst when I first came out of college and I understood the problems making sense of data and so when I encountered the research advancements they had made, I saw a vision of the future, a much better world that could bring the power of data to a vastly larger number of people. Yeah, and it's really that simple, isn't it? And so you gave some fantastic examples in which Penicillin was discovered, happenstance and many, many others. So those things inspire you to create this innovation or was it the other way around? You've created this innovation and said let's look around and see what others have done. Well I think the thing that we're really excited about is simply put as making databases and spreadsheets easy for people to use. I can talk to someone who knows nothing about business intelligence, technology or databases or anything. But if I say hey, do you have any spreadsheets or data files or databases? You just feel like it could get in there and answer some questions and put it all together and see the big picture and maybe find a thing or two? Everyone nods, everyone has been in that situation. If nothing else with the spreadsheet full of stuff like your readership or the traffic flow on the CUBE website, everyone can relate to that idea geez, why can't I just have a Google for databases? And that's what Tableau is doing. Right, right. So you've kind of got this, it's really not a war, it's just two front, two vectors. Sometimes I did tweet out that you had a two front war, BI, what'd you call it, the traditional BI business? I love how you slow down your kids when you do that and then excel, but the point I made on Twitter in 140 characters was it'll be longer here, a little long winded sometimes on the CUBE, but you've got really entrenched BI usage and you've got Excel, which is ubiquitous. So it sounds easy to compete with those, it's not. It's really not. You have to have a 10x plus value proposition. Absolutely, absolutely. Talk about that a little bit. Well, I think the most important thing we're doing is we're bringing the power of data and analytics to a much broader population of people. So the reason I answer that way is that if you look at these traditional solutions that you described, they have names like, and these are the product brand names. Forget who owns them, but the product brand names, people that are used to hearing when it comes to enterprise, BI, technology, are names like business objects and Cognos and MicroStrategy and Oracle, OBI and big, heavy, complicated, development-intensive platforms. And surprise, surprise, they're not in the hands of very many people. They're just too complicated and development-heavy to use. So when we go into the world's, even the world's biggest companies, this was a shocker for us. Even when we go into the world's most sophisticated Fortune 500 companies and the most cutting-edge industries with the top-notch people, most of the people in their organization aren't using those platforms because of their complication and expense and development pull. And so usually what we end up doing is just bringing the power of easy analytics and dashboarding and visualization and easy Q and A with data to people who have nothing other than maybe a spreadsheet and other desks. So in that sense, it's actually a little easier than it sounds. Well, you know, I have to tell ya, I used to have a CIO consultancy back in the day and we used to go in and do application portfolio analysis and we would look at the applications and we would always advise the CIOs that the value of an application is a function of its use, how much it's being adopted and the impact of that use, productivity of the user. And you'd always find that the DSS system, the decision support system, like you said, there were maybe three to 15 users in an organization of tens of thousands of people but they were very productive. So imagine if you can permeate the other hundreds of thousands of users that are out there. Do you see that kind of impact, productivity impact as the potential for your marketplace? Absolutely, the person who I think said it best was the CEO of Cisco, John Chambers. And I'll paraphrase him here, but he has this great thing he said, which is he said, you know, if I can get each of the people on my team consulting data, say, oh, I don't know, twice per day before making a decision. And they do the same thing with their people and their people and so on. You know, that's a million decisions a month, you did the math, better made than my competition. I don't want people waiting around for top management to consult some data before making a decision. I want all of our people, all of the time consulting data before making a decision. And that's the real spirit of this new age of BI. For too long, it's been in the hands of a high priesthood of people who know how to operate these complicated, convoluted enterprise BI systems. And the revolution is here, people are fed up with it. They're taking power into their hands and they're driving their organizations forward with the power of data thanks to the magic of an easy to use suite like Tableau. Well, it's a perfect storm, right? Because everybody wants to be a data-driven organization. You can't be data-driven if you don't have the tools to be able to visualize the data. Absolutely. So, Jeff, you want to jump in? Well, Christian, so in your keynote, you talked for the majority of the keynote about human intuition and the human element. Talk a little bit about that because when we hear about in the press these days about big data, so while the volume of data will tell you what the answer is, you don't need much of the human element. Talk about why you think the human element is so important to data-driven decision-making and how you incorporate that into your design philosophy when you're building the product and you're adding new features, how does the human element play in that scenario? Yeah, I mean, it's funny. The data-driven moniker is coming these days and Tableau's a big believer in the power of data. We use our tools internally, but of course no one really wants to be data-driven. If you drive your company completely based on data, say hello to the cliff wall. You will drive it off a cliff. You really want people, intelligent domain experts, using a combination of fact and intuition and instinct to make data-informed decisions, to make great decisions along the way. So although pure data mining has some role in the scheme of analytics, frankly it's a minor role, what we really need to do is make analytics software that as I said yesterday, is like a bicycle for our minds. This was the great Steve Jobs quote about computers at their best are like bicycles for our mind, effortless machines that just make us go so much faster than any other species with no more effort expended, right? That's the spirit of computers when they're at our best. Google, Google is effortless to use and makes my brain a thousand times smarter than it is, right? Unfortunately over in analytics software, we've never seen software that does that. In business intelligent software, there's so much development weight and complexity and expense and slow rollout schedules that we're never able to get that augmentation of the brain that can help lead to better decisions. So at Tableau, in terms of design, we value our product requirements documents, say things like intuition and feel and design and instinct and user experience. They're focused on the journey of working with data, not just some magic algorithm that's going to spit out some answer that tells you what to do. Yeah, I mean I've often wondered where that BI business would be, that traditional decision support business if it weren't for Sarbanes Oxley. I mean it gave it a new life, right? Because you had to have a single version of the truth that was mandated by the government. You know we had Bruce Boston on yesterday who works for a company that shall not be named. But anyway, he was talking about, okay Bruce in case you're watching, we're sticking to our promise. But he was talking about intent, desire and satisfaction. Those are three things, intent, desire and satisfaction that machines can't do. I think the point being you just, you know the old pro mind, you can't take the humans in the last mile. Yeah, I guess, yeah. Do you see that ever changing? No, I mean I think, you know I once knew a friend of mine, I just haven't seen him in a while, a friend of mine once said, he was an artificial intelligence expert. Had done his PhD in a professorship in AI and once I naively asked him I said, so do we have artificial intelligence? Do we have it or not? We've been talking about it for decades, like is it here? And he said, you're asking the wrong question. The question is how smart are computers, right? So I just think where analytics is going is we wanna make our computers smarter and smarter and smarter. There'll be no one day where suddenly we flip a switch over and the computer now makes a decision. So in that sense the answer to your question is, I keep, I see things going as they're going now. But underneath the covers of human based decision making, it are gonna be fantastic advancements in the technology to support good decision making, to help people do things like feel and chase findings and shift perspectives on a problem and actually be creative using data. I think there's gonna be a great decade ahead of us. So I think part of the challenge, Christian, in doing that and making that evolution is the way the economy and a lot of jobs work over the last century is you're a cog in a wheel. This is how you do your job, you do it the same way every day and it's more of that kind of almost assembly line type of thinking. And now we're shifting, now we're really the, to get ahead in your career, you've got to be, as Seth put it, an artist, you've got to create, you've got to make a difference. Is the challenge, do you see a challenge there in terms of getting people to embrace this new kind of creativity? And again, how do you as a company and as a provider of data visualization technology help change some of those attitudes and make people kind of help people make that shift to more or less of a cog in a larger organization to a creative force inside that organization? Well, mostly I feel like we support what people natively want to do. So there are some challenges, but I mostly see opportunity there in category after category of human activity, we're seeing people go from consumers to makers. Look at publishing from 20 years ago to now, self-publishing with blogs and Twitter and this network. Exactly, I mean, we've gone from consumers to makers. Everyone's now a maker and we have an ecosystem of ideas that's so positive, people naturally want to go that way. I mean, people's best days on the job are when they feel they're creating something and have that sense of achievement of having had an idea and seeing some progress, their hands made on that idea. So in a sense, we're just fueling the natural human desire to have more participation with data, to ideate with data, to be more involved with data than they've been able to in the past. And again, like other industries, what we're seeing in this category of technology, which is the one I know, we're going from this very waterfall, cog in a wheel type process to something that's much more agile and collaborative and real time. And so it's hard to be creative and inspired when you're just a cog stuck in a long waterfall development process. So it's mostly just opportunity and really we're just fueling the fire that I think is already there. Yeah, you talked about that yesterday in your talk. You gave a great FAA example. The Mayan writing system example was fantastic. So I just really loved that story. You in your talk yesterday basically told the audience, first of all, you have clarity of vision. You seem to have certainty in your vision, a passion for your vision. But at the same time, you said, you know, sometimes data can be confusing and you're not really certain where it's going. Don't worry about that. It's okay, you know, it was like, all will be answered eventually. But what about uncertainty in your mind as the chief executive of this organization, as a leader in a new industry? What things are uncertain to you? What are the potential blind spots for you that you worry about? Do you mean for Tableau as a company? For people working with data, generally speaking. So for Tableau as a company? Oh, I see. Well, I think there's always, you know, I'm not sure if this is the spirit of the question, but we're growing a company. We're growing a disruptive technology company. And we want to embrace all the technologies that exist around us, right? We want to help to foster data-driven decision-making in all of its places and forms. And it seems to me that virtually every breakthrough technology company has gone through one or two major external technology transformations or technology shocks to the industry that they never anticipated when they founded the company. Okay, probably the most recent example is Facebook and mobile. I mean, even though the mobile revolution was well in play when Facebook was founded, it really hadn't taken off. And that was a blind spot. Facebook was founded in 07, right? And look what happened to them, right, after, and here's the, as new as the company you can get, it was founded in 07, right? So most companies, I mean, look how many companies were sort of shocked by the internet, or shocked by the iPod, or shocked by the emergence of the tablet, or shocked by the social graph, you know? I think for us in Tableau's journey, if this was the spirit of the question, we will have our own shocks happen. The first was the tablet. I mean, when we founded Tableau, like the rest of the world, we never would have anticipated that a brilliant company would finally come along and crack the tablet opportunity wide open. And in a blink of an eye, hundreds of millions of people are walking around with powerful, multi-touch graphic devices in there. I mean, who would have guessed? People wouldn't have guessed it in 06, let alone 03. And so luckily, that's what that's, I mean, so this is the good kind of uncertainty. We've been able to really rally around that. Our developers love to work on this area. And today we have probably the most innovative mobile analytics offering on the market. But it's one we never could have anticipated. So I think the biggest things in terms of big categories of uncertainty that we'll see going forward are similar shocks like that, and our success will be determined by how well we're able to adapt to those. So why is it, and how is it, that you're able to respond so quickly as an organization to some of those tectonic shifts? Well, I think the most important thing is having a really fleet-footed R&D team. We have just an exceptional group of developers who we have largely not hired from business technology companies. We have something very disruptive going at Tableau. Yeah, one of the amazing things about R&D team our R&D team is when we decided to build just this amazing high wattage cutting edge R&D team and focus them on analytics and data, we decided not to hire from other business intelligence companies because we didn't think those companies made great products. So we've actually been hiring from places like Google and Facebook and Stanford and MIT and computer gaming companies. If you look at the R&D engineers who work on gaming companies in terms of the graphic displays and the response times and the high dimensional data, they're actually hundreds of times more sophisticated in their thinking and their engineering than some engineer who was working for an enterprise BI reporting company. So this incredible horsepower, this unique team of inspired zealots and high wattage engineers we have in our R&D team, like Apple, that's the key to being able to respond to these disruptive shocks every once in a while and really seize them as an opportunity. Well, they're fun too. I mean, they saw them on the stage yesterday and wearing funky hats and very comfortable in front of the audience. Yeah, there's never been an R&D team like ours assembled in analytics. It's been done in other industries, right? Google and Facebook, famously. But in analytics, there's never been such an amazing team of engineers. And Christian, one of the things that struck me yesterday during your keynote, or the second half of the keynote was bringing up the developers and talking about the specific features and functions you're going to add to the product and hearing the crowd erupt at different announcements and different features that you're adding. And it's clear that you're very customer focused at Tableau. You're responding to the needs and the requests of your customers. That's clearly evident again in the passion that these customers have for your product, for your company. Well, first off, how do you maintain that? Or how do you get to that point in the first place where you're so customer focused? And as you go forward, being a public company now, you're going to get pressure from Wall Street and quarter results and all that, that comes with the territory. How do you remain that focused on the customer as you're going to be under a lot of pressure to grow and drive revenue? How do you keep that focus? Well, there's two things we do. It's always a challenge to stay really connected to your customers as you get big, but it's what we pride ourselves on doing. And there's two specific things we do to foster it. The first is that we really try to focus the company and we try to make a positive aspect of the culture, the idea of impact. What is the impact of the work we're having? And in fact, a great example of how we foster that is, we bring our entire support and R&D team to this conference, no matter where it is. In this case, we literally flew the entire R&D team and product management team and whatnot across country. And the time they get here face to face with customers and hearing the customer stories and the victories and actually seeing the feedback you just described really inspires them, gives them specific ideas literally to go back and start working on, but it also just gives them a sense of who comes first in a way that if you don't leave the office and you don't focus on that, really doesn't materialize in the way you want it. The second thing we do is we are big followers of, I guess what's called the dog food philosophy of eat your own dog food. You could say drink your own champagne if you prefer. And so one of our core company values at Tableau is we use our products. It's literally a stated value of the company. We use our products. And so in every group at Tableau in tests, in bug regressions, in development, in sales and marketing and planning and finance and HR, every marketing, marketing is so much data these days, every group uses Tableau to run our own business and make decisions. And what happens, what's really nice about a company because we're getting close to 1,000 people now. And so keeping the spirit you just described alive is really important. It becomes quite challenging. That does leagues for it because when that's one of your values and that's the way the culture has been built, every single person in the company is a customer. Everyone understands the customer's situation and the frustrations and their future requests and knows how to support them when they meet them and can empathize with them when they're on the phone. And is a tester automatically by virtue of using the product. So we just try to focus on a few very authentic things to keep our connection with the customers close as possible. I'll say, Christian, your company is a rising star. We've been talking all this week of the similarities that we were talking off camera about the similarities with ServiceNow just in terms of the passion within the customer base. We're tracking companies like Workday, great companies that are being built, new emerging disruptive companies. We put you in that category and we're very excited for different reasons, different business altogether. But there are some similar dynamics that we're watching. So as observers, as independent observers, what kinds of things do you want us to be focused on watching you over the next 12, 18, 24 months? What should we be paying attention to? Well, I think the most important thing is Tableau ultimately is a product company. And we view ourselves very early in our product development life cycle. I think people who don't really understand Tableau think it's a visualization company or a visualization tool. I don't really understand that. Well, you talk about the viz a lot, but okay. We're sure we do visualization, but there's just something much bigger. I mean, you asked about people watching the company. I think what's important to watch is that as I spoke about in the keynote yesterday, Tableau believes what is called the business intelligence industry. What's called the business analytics technology stack needs to be completely rewritten from scratch. That's what we believe. It's a do-over. It's a do-over. It's based on technology from a prior era of computing. There's been very little innovation. The R&D investment ratios, which you can look up online of the companies in this space are pathetically low and have been for decades. And this industry needs a Google. It needs an Apple. It needs a Facebook. An R&D machine that is passionate and driven and is leveraging the most recent advances in computing to deliver products that people actually love using so that people start to enjoy doing analytics and have fun with it and make data-driven decision in a very, in a way that's just woven into their enjoyment and work style every single day. So the big series of product releases you're going to see from us over the next five years, that's the thing to watch. And we unveiled a few of them yesterday, but trust me, there's a lot more coming. That's a lot of applause. Kristen, that was awesome. You can see the passion that you're putting forth, your great vision. So congratulations on the progress you've made. I know you're not done. We'll be watching you. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for hosting me. I appreciate it. Really a pleasure. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We're going wall to wall. We got a break coming up next and then we'll be back this afternoon. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back.