Imagine if everyone within a company could easily understand the data that drives the business.
After a 2019 $2.6B acquisition, Looker is now part of Google Cloud, helping thousands of organizations make sense of their data. But back in 2012 when First Round led their seed round, the business was still taking shape.
Here are the key lessons and milestones on Looker’s journey from first line of code to category-defining company — along with its actual data from across the years:
From waiting to raise funding and building in a crowded market, to earning customer love and scaling company culture, this founding team's journey from a single customer to a $2.6B acquisition is filled with counterintuitive moves and tactical insights.
After building internal data tools for different companies as a CTO, Lloyd Tabb knew there had to be a better way to make all of the data organizations were swimming in useful. His 216-word pitch email to First Round partner Bill Trenchard captures the bets he was making with Looker.
"All hat, no cattle" wasn't Looker's style. Instead of relying on dummy data in sales demos, they asked prospects for their actual datasets to build a proof of concept during a free trial period — only asking for money once there was clear usage momentum. While some trials ran long, this approach led to almost no early customer churn.
I had no qualms about sinking a disproportionate amount of resources here. In SaaS, focusing on making your customer successful is everything. You can't skimp there at all — it's a retention strategy, not a cost center.
“Our early mantra was, ‘We'll be successful when we have 1,000 true fans,’” says Lloyd. By the end of Q1 of 2013, Looker had unlocked nascent PMF, emerging from stealth with a 9-person team, 15 customers, and off-the-charts satisfaction. Super early “Look&Tell” customer events and warm intros (many of Looker’s first were First Round companies) were most effective here.
When Looker hit developing product-market fit with $1M in ARR, Lloyd made an unusual move. Rather than trying to build the sales machine himself, he brought in Frank Bien as CEO. "Keep the instrument you’re best at, and give the rest away," advises Lloyd.
The team passed the $5M ARR and 250 customers mark, hitting strong PMF. “We were doing an inside sales motion of Palantir’s forward-deployed engineers. That could have been an incredibly risky move, but we knew the margins on the costs we were sinking into it made sense. We thought we could do $100M in ARR with 2,000 customers. And we were pretty spot on — we exited at 1,700 customers, actually a little bit better than we predicted," says Frank Bien.
"Creating models to drive valuation is one of the biggest company-killing moves you can make. Go faster where you can, but don’t stray too far. Blunt force makes your team feel like they’re drowning."
By the end of 2016, Looker had achieved what few startups reach: extreme product-market fit. Revenue grew to $27M with nearly 800 customers and 141% NRR. But what really stood out was their planning accuracy. In seven years, the Looker team never missed a bookings plan, achieving a rare 28-quarter streak of pure execution.
Imagine if improving disability insurance claims processing with AI helped more people return to work.
Imagine if buildings protected the people inside using consumer technology.
Imagine if business intelligence combined the consistency of a shared data model with the speed and freedom of SQL.
Imagine if government and utilities could easily provide payment assistance and relief to eligible households.
After three decades of leading data teams, Looker founder and CTO Lloyd Tabb's biggest learning isn’t what you would expect — or want to hear: You’re measuring the wrong metrics. We all are.
Looker co-founder Ben Porterfield talks about why most startups miss the mark on their analytics and provides a formula for nailing it the first time around.
Colin Zima is the co-founder and CEO of Omni. Prior to starting Omni, Colin was Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker where he stood up its high-touch customer support arm, which turned into a cornerstone competitive advantage for the company.
Jennifer Rettig brings her recruiting expertise from Target, Apple, Yahoo, and Looker, to share the tactics that will find your company the best executives.
Looker founder and CTO Lloyd Tabb shares how to best recognize and channel the abilities of your most extraordinary engineers.
Nick Caldwell's resume includes Microsoft, Reddit, Looker and Twitter. He shares his biggest lessons from each for a crash course in finding success across different company cultures, scales and functions.