The following interview is a conversation we had with Saket Saurabh, CEO of Nexla, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $15 Million Raised to Build the Future of Data Operations
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey everyone, and thanks for listening. Today I’m speaking with Saket Saurabh, Co-Founder and CEO of Nexla, a data operations platform that’s raised over 15 million in funding. So, Ket, thanks for chatting with me today.
Saket Saurabh
Happy to be here, Brett.
Brett
Yeah. So, before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Saket Saurabh
Yeah, so, as you mentioned, I’m the Founder CEO at Nexla. Background wise, I’m actually an engineer by Background, several years working out here in the Silicon Valley area in companies like Nexla and always had the entrepreneurial drive. Ended up going to business school and then did my first company in the mobile advertising at Tech Space, and then went on to start Nexla, which is bringing together my experience on the Compute technology side at Nvidia and the data experience side in my previous active company. Nice.
Brett
Very cool. And two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. Is there a CEO and Founder that you are studying the most now? And if so, why?
Saket Saurabh
So I’ve been so enamored by entrepreneurship. In fact, I feel like the reason I even moved to the US back in 1999 was I knew that there is a Silicon Valley there and people go and build companies and bring their ideas to life. And that’s what drove me to come here right after my undergrad. So, absolutely, I think of like, two entrepreneurs. There’s different things I admire about different entrepreneurs and I study them. One of them, I would say, was the CEO of Nvidia, where I worked at Jensen Huang. And I was really impressed and amazed by how deeply Jensen understood the technology and the market that were in and was incredible in his ability to go learn and understand every single function of the company.
Saket Saurabh
So he had a very deep down understanding of everything from hardware to software to marketing to sales to channels, everything. And I thought that entrepreneur spirit that you have as a Founder, combined with that deep know how and the ability to learn and the confidence to sort of take bets is what helped Jensen take nvidia. From a small company to a public company to a billion dollar company to a multi hundred billion dollar company all through constant innovation. So I really admire that.
Saket Saurabh
But then if I also look at some other entrepreneurs or founders or CEOs, I find that the more recent trend, driven by Microsoft CEOs at Canadella and then some of the folks like Google CEO, is sort of bringing a different style of leadership in the company, which is very driven by the aspect of empathy driven leadership, aspect of servant leadership and really putting people at the front and center and how we work with them and how we treat them. And that’s another part from a cultural perspective that I really admire about Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, and feel like that’s a great place for all of us to learn in how to build a giant company, how to grow a company, but at the same time take the team, the people and everybody along with you.
Brett
Nice. I love that. And could you take us back to, let’s say, the year 1999 when you moved to Silicon Valley? What was it like back then and what was it like for you personally? Did your family think you were crazy for moving here? What was that like?
Saket Saurabh
I was a computer science grad from IIT Kanpur india, which was one of the best computer science programs in the country. And for me, the only thing that drove me was I want as complex or difficult a challenge as possible to work. And I was like, this is where all of this is happening. I was fortunate enough to get here. It was not straightforward. I think my family had probably seen me as being fairly driven as far as learning, so they were pretty good with that. Silicon Valley itself was an amazing place at the time and it still continues to be, but it was crazy. I mean, it was a time when people would register a.com domain, raise money, and then immediately start talking about going public. And that craziness was odd and weird in many ways.
Saket Saurabh
I had just come out of college and knew nothing about what revenue is and why that matters. And funnily enough, 99 I come in and if you remember, the Y two K bug was just hanging out there like something big is going to happen on January 1, 2000, right? Because who knows what will happen to the traffic lights or the bank accounts. Nothing like that happened. But what did happen was in, I think, March or April of 2000. At that time, I had already quit my first job in just three months and gone into straight into a startup.
Saket Saurabh
And we had the major.com crash that triggered in April and we had just raised $3 million right before that as a Series Aim, which looks small from today’s standards, but there was a Series A at the time and ended up going out of business a year later. Very predictably actually, in that market.
Brett
Interesting. And another question for you on that, just because you’ve been in Silicon Valley for so long. So I’d love to find out more about your view there. So obviously the media narrative right now is that Silicon Valley, San Francisco is kind of on the decline. People are moving to Miami or Austin. Are you bullish on the long term standing of Silicon Valley as the leader of innovation or do you think that’s going to continue to decline?
Saket Saurabh
Look, you and I are both in the San Francisco area and there’s a good reason for that. I think what’s amazing is that so many more places have understood the importance of investing in technology and innovation. So many more areas have come up now. Of course, from San Francisco was this one big peak or Bay Area was one big peak and everybody was not even paying attention to technology innovation. Of course a lot of places are, but I don’t think that while that changes the distribution of startups, I think the Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area still holds a very important place innovation. And this is something that I sort of always wondered why is the case and eventually concluded that there’s this sort of two things that help make that happen.
Saket Saurabh
One is that there is a very openness of culture with the love of innovation where you can reach out to anybody in the Bay Area who’s working on technology. And I have found that people are willing to talk to you. Even when I was exploring my ideas and I met more than 100 people before starting NextLab and they’re all willing to talk. And I felt like there was such a sort of paid forward mentality if you say or openness to talk to people saying yes without knowing what is in it for them. And then I would meet people and say, hey, you should meet that other person and they would happily make an intro and that person would meet with me.
Saket Saurabh
So I think that’s one big part of Silicon Valley which is great and hopefully gets emulated and replicated in other places and then it’s a nice critical mass of experienced people across all functions, whether it’s product or marketing or sales, as well as a good set of buyers in this area, right? So you build technology. You can sell to hundreds of companies here, even for today, for a lot of technology companies, like even as big as Snowflake, there’s a big book of business that runs in the Bay Area. So it’s a great place to have that initial product, get that mindset, get that advice, and get the initial customers. Now things have gone remote. People work remotely for sure, but we are seeing some of that actually coming back. I mean, the pendulum swings to one extreme and then it comes back again.
Saket Saurabh
And right now I’m finding that more and more the people we are hiring are excited to be in office at least once or twice a week, meet with the people they work with, build that relationship of trust that happens when you just sit with people and have a coffee or a drink with them. So I think Silicon Valley and Bay Area and San Francisco will continue to have an important place. But equally importantly, there are so many more places coming up, which is nice. More innovation, right?
Brett
Yes, agreed. Yeah. As were talking the pre interview, I recently moved here to the Bay Area and my only regret is that I didn’t do this ten years ago. I think it would have been a very wise decision to have come here ten years ago, but for my view, this is the absolute best place in the world if you want to be a tech Founder. The energy here, the investors that are here, the experienced players who brought ideas to market successfully, it’s just hard to find that quantity and that density anywhere else. So that’s my advice to any of the other founders that I’m speaking to now, is just move to Silicon Valley. Don’t worry about what you read in the media. It’s not that bad. It’s still the best place to be.
Saket Saurabh
Yeah, right on.
Brett
Nice. Well, let’s talk about the origin story a bit more. So walk us through how the company started and then can you give us the high level pitch on what you do?
Saket Saurabh
Yeah, so let’s start with the pitch. The mission for the company has been that we want to empower anyone and everyone to work with Data. Because so many functions on almost every job that you are doing, you need to look at data, understand data and use it and do that effectively. So how do we do that? Our approach to that is in order to use data to take advantage of it, you do depend on data engineering to make that data useful or ready to use for you. And we are bringing automation into data engineering. So making it possible for the real sort of under the hood things like integrating, preparing, monitoring, validating data to be done much more easily in a much more automated fashion, so that anybody who wants to work with data can get to it and do it on their own.
Saket Saurabh
And that’s a big part of what we are doing. And at the same time, I think we are enabling the real experts, the actual data engineers, to use our technology as a component of what they’re building and then get to things that they want to do faster and easier and much more scalable. Then that takes me back to the origin story of why did we even do this? And we felt in. This is 2014. I had taken my startup Mobsmiths to an acquisition and we had gone public in 2014. And that was a good sort of culmination of that journey. I did not particularly enjoy working in advertising business, to be honest. So that’s one of the reasons I was like, okay, I want to do something which is much more aligned to my own goals. And data was a big part of Active.
Saket Saurabh
We were processing over 300 billion records of data a day. My co-founders was running that infrastructure. So the big thing was that, look, the amount of data applications is going to grow tremendously. And even now I would say that if we do ten things where we are using data, we’ll probably do 100 in a few years. So what we felt was that more and more people need to work with data. That’s a given. Data itself is getting more complicated. Okay, that’s understood. So how do those two reconcile? In between that user and that complexity is all the technology of data engineering. If we can make that more intelligent, smarter, more automated, then it becomes possible for more people to work with data. And that was the big driving factor behind saying that, okay, this is a core problem.
Saket Saurabh
This is something that everybody in every industry will face and see. And sure enough, today we are delivering our technology and solution to companies across sectors. Financial Services is JB. Morgan Chase Pharmaceutical is JNJ. Today in retail and ecommerce, it’s like companies like DoorDash and Instacart and all of these amazing companies in cybersecurity, Sentinel One, these are amazing companies that are today using our technology and applying it to increase their pace of innovation as far as leveraging data.
Brett
And those are some very impressive logos to land. What’s the secret there? How are you landing these big, huge logos as a startup? Because that’s always the challenge of the startup, is get the big companies to trust in your product and believe in your product. So enlighten us, what’s your secret? How are you guys doing it?
Saket Saurabh
Absolutely. I think the main reason I would say is that as a second time founding team, we spent the first three years or so really honing down the product. And the core problem that we are solving and the way we approached it, we realized that our technology is able to solve some of the most complex problems out there for which there are almost no solutions. To give an example, right, when we see how DoorDash uses Nexla, we know we all get deliveries from them, right? But to have the data of which store has what products and how many units are available and that’s information, that changes multiple times in the day. Right? And there’s a lot of data behind that. That sort of data connecting to so many different merchants and stores and all that is extremely complex.
Saket Saurabh
It takes coding because there’s nobody out there with a packaged solution for that. What we found was that and what our customers found was that Nexla was able to actually automate even that piece and make a shift that work from writing code to being no code, and shift that work from the engineers to people who actually know the data, like merchandising teams. Which means that now you can get to a scale that wasn’t possible before. I mean, coding is great, but we all know that it takes a lot of time and effort and maintaining it. If you have to go back to hundreds of such pieces of data engineering code that you have to maintain it’s very hard. So the reason we started landing some of these very large customers was we actually built an enterprise grade product.
Saket Saurabh
We said, how do we handle, for example, hybrid cloud environments? How do we handle very high security situations like JNJ? Our product gets used alongside clinical trials, data, and that’s highly sensitive. So how do we support those things? So went and solved those problems. We made it possible to do a lot of these things with no code ease of use. And the enterprises really, when you go to someone and you really appeal to a problem that really matters to them, that’s really hurting their business or that’s really impacting their opportunity, they will buy. They looked at us and they said, well, you’re a really small company. You don’t have that much funding. How can we bet our business on you? And we work with them. We earned the trust, and it’s all been coming along really nicely.
Saket Saurabh
And eventually what happens, Brett, is that once a few of the early adopters take a bet on you, then the others get more comfortable. And actually, I was thinking about one of the questions you asked me about the books, and I kind of almost always keep going back to Crossing the Chasm. Right? Talking about this. Yeah.
Brett
And where are you guys on that journey of crossing the Chasm?
Saket Saurabh
That’s a great question. In fact, that’s a book that I first was bought actually was the recommended course book at one of the courses I’ve taken at Stanford in the Management Science program back in 2004. And I feel like I keep rediscovering the layers and layers of interpreting that book every year. Okay, so where are we in Crossing the Chasm? That’s a great question. I would say that we’re still not in the mainstream yet. We are still in those early adopters, those early believers who really care about a problem and are willing to take a bet on a solution that makes sense.
Saket Saurabh
I think that in certain markets, for example, within the broader ecommerce retail world, we, I think, got into the other side because we have so much evidence of companies using us that even the mainstream is saying, yeah, I can go work with you because I see all the other companies that are using your product. I think I’m ready for that. So that’s I would say, like an alternative way of thinking about product market fit in a way, and then in other sectors, it’s happening slowly. People are saying that, oh, you are solving this hard problem at this big company. You’re doing this for pharmaceuticals. That’s amazing. I think we can look at you as well. Got it.
Brett
Super interesting. And for these early adopters, are they going out and searching for a data operations platform? Like is that an established category or what category are you currently in? And what category does Gartner place you in? Because I saw you guys did win the Cool vendor award, right?
Saket Saurabh
Yeah, I mean, one thing if I can say about the data space is that we’ve as an industry confused our customer base with terminology, right, left and center, okay? With data operations, with data mesh, data fabric, data products, all that sort of stuff. And interestingly, every one of these terminologies was created to address or solve for a certain market challenge. Right now, Gartner actually places us as a cool vendor within the data fabric segment. The data fabric segment is about technologies that are leveraging metadata or the underlying information from data systems to make the regular data operations easier. For example, making it easier to integrate with data. How do we make it more intelligent and capable? We auto generate connectors. That’s a big deal. Every tool out there has a list of connectors it contains and that they have built and optimized.
Saket Saurabh
But you go try and go beyond that. You have to wait on them to do the development using metadata. Applying that data fabric sort of approach means that’s a non problem. Why most of these companies use us is because nobody else has a solution to connect to that uniquely complicated enterprise system that they have with the next slide. They can just go use that out of the box. So I think we would sort of from a technology approach, we abide by the intelligence, like unlearn from the system, observe the information and then automatically try to do things, which is a data fabric approach. From a collaboration perspective, we do create these entities called Next Sets, which are data as a product sort of entity that allow collaboration. So we certainly do that. And then from an overall operations perspective, it’s all about bringing scale.
Saket Saurabh
Can we apply data to hundreds of use cases and do that at scale and be able to do that in much shorter time than we did it before? And we are sort of enabling that. But it’s a combination of the underlying approach which brings that. For example, at Bedpath beyond, there are several thousand data flows on next level process, trillions of records. And the reason that becomes possible is these underlying components are making it easier. So for a customer, they are not necessarily looking at a data operations platform. They have a specific need. They are like in order to deliver groceries from stores, we need this data. How do we solve that? They are thinking of it from that perspective. Almost always data is just the means to the end. So it cut ties down back to some business problem.
Saket Saurabh
A JPMorgan is like how do we bring machine learning and AI to all parts of our organization? And make it easier for people to do that across lines of business. So usually it’s that and then when they look in, they say, oh, I need X, Y and Z pieces to get there.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And one thing that I commonly hear from founders, especially first time founders, they’re kind of against the idea of Gartner and their entire existence. It seems like you took a different approach and you built a relationship with Gartner, I’m guessing. Could you walk us through that process of becoming selected for the cool vendor and just what your overall thoughts are on the importance of analyst firms like Gartner in the enterprise buying cycle?
Saket Saurabh
Yeah, see, enterprise buying is putting a lot of faith and trust in adopting a technology where you put a lot of effort into it, bring that thing in and you’re hoping that it solves your problem. Right. And having the trust on technology and the vendor and both of those things. Right. So the very important role that analysts are playing in there is sort of helping the buyers of technology know what is out there, what makes sense. Right. And then for companies like us to make sure that what we are looking at and how we are approaching a problem is understood and interpreted and communicated. Now, the reason people don’t like this is almost in all situations, we don’t like an in between person, like a broker, if you will.
Saket Saurabh
I would love to buy my house without having to pay a broker in between or stuff like that. But we also know that they create a very important value of bringing the two parties together. So I’m not calling Gartner that, but from a knowledge perspective, they are the broker of that knowledge. So the way we worked with Gartner was very early on, we started to just discuss and tell them, hey, we think this is a big problem and we are approaching it in this way. And I have found the Gartner analysts to be extremely high degree of curiosity, intellectual curiosity, in understanding what you are doing and how you are solving the problem.
Saket Saurabh
So one of the things that helped us was that these conversations were done by myself or one of my founders where we could talk at every level of business and technology problems with them. So our conversations were not at a very high sort of marketing level, if you will, but deeper at the technology level. So we found that they were very willing to listen to us. However, like any messaging, it takes multiple iterations and sharing the same thing many times in different angles. That helps people finally understand and build a picture on it. So that’s how it happened. It took quite a bit of time, over two to three years of working with analysts and sharing with them, hey, this is what we are seeing on the field. This is the problem that happened. This is how we’re approaching it.
Saket Saurabh
What do you guys think about that? We think that this old approach that you talked about in this other magic quadrant or market guide doesn’t work anymore. These are the reasons why. Let me show you a quick demo of how it’s all of those things, but it helps them synthesize that information and really see through like okay, there is something happening here which we are willing to talk about. And I think like any responsible analyst, they have to feel confident and comfortable about your technology to start to write about it. And it is seen as a validation by the enterprise buyers to say, okay, somebody took a deep look at it, understood that and also understands my problem. Remember, Gartner and analysts spend a lot of time working with the technology folks in big enterprises to learn what problems they are looking at.
Saket Saurabh
So it’s helpful, I would say, from that perspective. But Gartner, I think part of the reasons is that some of these things are very expensive for startups and you have to make a very deliberate decision. Are you willing to invest in that yet or not?
Brett
And do you think, are there some enterprise deals that you’ve landed that wouldn’t have come if it weren’t for the Gartner validation?
Saket Saurabh
Attribution is extremely hard, Brett. I mean, in any of these things. I do think that it has helped us at an occasion when somebody’s looking at us and saying, hey, you’re a small company, how can I trust and how can I buy from you? Are you really better than others? And we say, hey, you are more than welcome to talk to these Gartner analysts and ask them what their independent opinion is because they have spent a lot of time learning about what we do and maybe that will help you think through some of these things. So that way it helps. But I wouldn’t clearly attribute like, hey, if we didn’t have analyst relationship, we could have done this deal. It’s much harder to get to that.
Brett
Yeah, I guess it’s not a consumer buying experience, right, where they just go to Gartner and then click check out and the order is done.
Saket Saurabh
Yeah, but so many things influence, right? I mean, it could be your blog post about things. It could be maybe this podcast will influence somebody to go take a look. Oftentimes in the buying cycle, it’s appealing to the right person at the right time and that’s why you have so many places where information is available, ideally makes sense.
Brett
And in terms of the go to market motion, are you product Led or is this sales Led?
Saket Saurabh
This is sales led. I mean, we actually took a very deliberate decision building the company that especially for data problems. If we create a product that is targeted at smaller companies, then we will never have the architecture to take on complex big enterprise problems, right? So we took a decision that will go the hard path. We’ll approach the large enterprise and then build the necessary security, infrastructure, architecture and all of that to be able to solve enterprise grade problems, but be able to give a very easy interface to that. So that was the needle we’re trying to thread. So went very enterprise first, but with a very easy way for people to try the product and get a workshop and use that. But trust me, it still takes a long time for that to happen.
Saket Saurabh
So we are very sales led in that way and slowly we are moving in the direction of certain product led characteristics in how we are bringing the product to market. So we now have a few partners who are able to bundle Nexla. For example, Oracle NetSuite is a partner of Nexla and they are able to bundle Nexa with their own NSAW analytics product. Right? So we’re slowly getting to the place where we are bringing our product, which already is enterprise grade, which already is easy to use down to both price points and also adoption mechanics that are more friendly to smaller companies. And that’s the evolution of our product. So we’ve gone sort of reverse motion, if you will, make sense of the market. Yeah.
Brett
And as I’m sure you’ve experienced on this journey, going to market with an innovative tech product is not an easy thing to do. What would you say has been your single greatest challenge and how do you overcome that challenge?
Saket Saurabh
Yeah, I think especially, and I think that’s true for probably all spaces, but data space has so much technologies. Some of these things have existed for more than 30 years. So I would still say that the biggest challenge becomes you have such little opportunity to get the attention of someone and have them listen to you. That getting our message across and creating our differentiation and explaining it to people and having them trust and believe it. When we started first talking about, hey, we’re bringing automation to data engineering, it was like, oh, you can automate my job away. Like, no, like every function out there, automation is going to help do that job better and that’s essential. We can’t scale without that.
Saket Saurabh
So I would still say that getting in front of people and sharing our message with them and creating awareness has been one of the hardest challenges. I’m not underestimating the technology challenge, but as product technology people, as founders, we knew how to work and solve that problem and the go to market even, inevitably becomes the bigger challenge that every company has to work on.
Brett
And it seems like that’s a reoccurring pattern that I’ve seen, at least with tech founders or engineers, they often seem to have this, I wouldn’t say belief, but they operate under this idea that just building a great product is enough. And if they get the technology right, if it’s super innovative, that’s going to. Be enough to break into the market and transform the market. But the reality I think they eventually see is that rarely happens. You do have to have very good messaging, very good positioning and very good marketing in order to make that happen on top of building a great product.
Saket Saurabh
Oh, yeah, I mean, always, right? I mean, build it and they will come has been used as a phrase for decades to sort of say that, well, that doesn’t really happen, to be honest. Right. And that’s because people have so many options and more things kind of vying for their attention. Ultimately distilling that message and getting in front of people is extremely important. And buying these complex, buying complex enterprise technology that’s going to run a big part of their business or operations is not just the same as going online and buying an iPhone. Right. The amount of investment effort risk is much higher. So it does take deliberate effort to go out there and sell again. In an ideal world, we feel like there should be seamless frictionless marketplaces, but they’re hard to get create.
Brett
And if we zoom out into the future, what’s the five year vision for the company? What do you hope to achieve? And what’s this company going to look like five years from now?
Saket Saurabh
Yeah. So we’ve charted the company journey into what we call as an epic with three different stories that come one after the other. We’ve first gone at the core data work that happens no matter what technology you use. You have to ultimately integrate the data. You have to prepare it, you have to monitor it, you have to validate it. That’s an essential set of function that you do. The first thing we have been doing is how to make those things much easier, more scalable, much more approachable to people. Okay, so that’s the first part that we have been doing a byproduct of doing. That is we create these logical data entities called next sets. These are, think of them similar to containers for Compute, a logical compute entity that makes it easier to do computation jobs.
Saket Saurabh
So these next sets are the byproduct of this first phase of the company. Then the next phase is when it becomes easier for people to collaborate around next sets, go find them, connect it to their catalog, exchange the data around and all of those things. So that brings the second order of capabilities into our product. Some of our customers are already taking advantage of that. But that’s the second sort of phase. And then we go into beyond that. We think that, for example, today if I have to connect payments to my application, I simply go put in a few lines of code from Stripe. I have to connect SMS or Communications, an API or two from Trillio. Eventually for data, it will kind of be like that as well.
Saket Saurabh
And we feel that will be another path that our technology, which is there today, will eventually expose to people is that building an application, you need to read some data, write some data, connect to it, move things around. It can be as simple as making a few lines of code or API or whatever to do that and that’s kind of eventually where we are headed into. So our vision is that we kind of make it so much easier for people to work with data. We sort of discard or move away from the legacy approaches that have existed that are very limiting for people like Connectors and so on. And that creates a new sort of wave of innovation. And of course, broadly speaking, we are, as I mentioned, starting from the enterprise, but bringing this to the entire market over time.
Brett
Nice. I love it. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap up. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Saket Saurabh
Yeah, I think definitely go follow us or follow me on LinkedIn and come over to our website to hear about what we are doing and that’s the best place to see what’s the latest.
Brett
Sounds great. Well, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story and sharing your vision. It’s really exciting and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Saket Saurabh
Thank you, Brett. It’s exciting journey and we’ve been truly enjoying the impact we are creating across so many customers and types of businesses and the issues and challenges that they face with data.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Well, thanks again and let’s keep in touch.
Saket Saurabh
Yeah, thank you.
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