Courage and fear in a changing world

<This is my keynote from ThoughtSpot's 2020 annual user conference, Beyond. With everything we've been through this year, I thought that a laissez-faire vendor CEO keynote was inappropriate. You can watch the recording of the session here>

=======================

Monday, May 4th, 2020, was one of the most challenging days for our young company and me as its CEO. That was the day I told approximately 10% of my colleagues that they would no longer be working here. 

A few months into the COVID crisis, we realized that this pandemic isn't going to just vanish. Every company in the world was reeling from the impact of the virus. Distributed workforces, empty offices, and restaurants became the norms everywhere. 

Facts on the ground were changing by the hour. Companies threw away their monthly reports and annual plans and started remaking projections and contingency plans using real-time data. 

Meanwhile, the public was glued onto social media feeds to learn the news.

People with their own agendas knew that fake-news could rule supreme and serve their purpose. All they had to do was pump out more noise into the world to drown out the signal. Opinions were flying unencumbered by facts because facts were significantly harder to find and share. 

8 years after founding, the ThoughtSpot business was doing very well; we were growing well above 80% YoY. We had more than a quarter of a billion dollars on our balance sheet and a fast-growing list of Global 2000 customers who were champions of our products and the company. 

ThoughtSpot's purpose of making the world more fact-driven has become more relevant than ever before. Then, why did I have to get up in the morning and face the unfortunate task of laying people off from our company?

Business case studies often romanticize the action of making changes. They wax poetic about how Adobe, Apple, Microsoft all went through transformations that made those companies what they are today. 

But as a CEO, the first emotion I felt on that fateful morning was fear. Fear of letting people down, forcing people out of their livelihood and healthcare in the middle of a pandemic. 

But, on that day, I also learned that you just might be your strongest when you are most afraid. 

I know this isn't starting as a typical conference keynote by a vendor CEO. Trust me, my first version of this speech would have hit that mark, full of optimism, bravado, and superlatives. 

But this year isn't like any other year. This year deserves more authentic reflections and conversations since you were kind enough to give us your time and attention from your homes. 

Every business is dealing with changes at an unprecedented pace. In the data analytics industry, changes are related to the cloud and technology and organizational and cultural. No matter the stress and personal heartbreaks, you are expected to keep moving forward. 

I wanted to share what I learned about the process and the cost of making change in all its gory details. I wanted to talk to you about fear and courage.

This year, we saw doctors, nurses, and medical professionals who slept in their own garages for fear of infecting their families but had the courage to get up and go to the hospitals every morning to treat the people who are infected by a virus, for which we have no immunity. 

This year we saw small restaurateurs and the wait staff fear for their future because of the economy but show the courage to face the future and adapt by renting cars and delivering food to their customers' homes. 

This wretched year reminded us, just like how there's no light without shadow, there's no courage without fear. 

A brief history of ThoughtSpot. 

Before I tell you about all the changes we made at ThoughtSpot this year, allow me to share a bit of our history for context. ThoughtSpot was started by a group of entrepreneurs who were inspired by what Google did for written text. Anything, anywhere, if it's written, Google will find it for you. 

Could we do for facts what Google did for opinions? 

We decided that our purpose was "To make the world more fact-driven." 

It's deceptively simple because there are two inherently vexing issues in that idea. 

• Facts, unlike opinions, are not fungible. While everyone is entitled to their own opinions, there can only be one set of facts on every occasion. Unlike Google, ThoughtSpot can only show one answer to every question, and it better be 100% correct. 

We knew that search is the answer to solving this issue. We pioneered AI-driven search as the interface for accessing large scale structured data. To date, our differentiation in this area is unchallenged, despite multiple attempts from our much-bigger competitors to imitate us. ThoughtSpot alone can do an unconstrained, intent-driven search on a vast amount of complex data schemas and deliver precise answers with accuracy. No ifs and buts about that. 

• The second part in the sentence, to make the world more fact-driven, is that the "world" means everyone. We intended to make facts available to people with data analysis skills or executives with their own BI teams and everyone. 

Unlike executing on search, ThoughtSpot didn't get everything right on this issue. 

The idea of disintermediating "experts" is something we've embraced in our everyday life. Yelp did that with hotel concierges, bank apps did that with tellers, and TripAdvisor did that with travel agents. 

While we nailed search as the solution for finding more facts, we ran into some hiccups when delivering it to everyone; Around performance and user experience.

• Performance: When an end-user is directly interacting with data, response time is everything. Imagine you are searching for a restaurant because you are hungry, and every search takes a minute. You won't be using Yelp for long. 

In 2012, when ThoughtSpot started, though cloud-computing had taken off for data center infrastructure, almost all critical business data lived on-premises in Oracle, SAP, and other databases. These DBs were designed for centralized application access and didn't perform well when many concurrent business users did ad hoc searches.

For search to work, we built an in-memory caching layer called Falcon. Falcon sat in between our app and your database. It is blazingly fast and can scale to petabytes. But it was complex to deploy and needed a lot of computing and memory resources.

In the simplest terms, it didn't add to our purpose as a company; rather, it was a necessary detour we had to take to deliver on our goal. 

In 2020, Cloud-native data stores completely changed this picture. Today, ThoughtSpot can sit on top of Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, Google Big Query, or Microsoft Synapse and deliver the elastic performance needed to satisfy even the hungriest of business users by directly connecting to them. 

But to deliver agility for you, we had to pivot away from the on-prem software business. We had to change our technology and revenue models to become a cloud-native subscription Software as a Service company. 

It was the right thing to do because by focusing on cloud-native datastores, we can now dedicate more resources to our core value-creator for you; AI-driven search. 

We can now spend more resources focusing on the reason you choose us instead of how we do it.

• User experience: This is the second area we had to recompose. Consumer-grade user experience is vastly superior to what business users expect from enterprise software. Think, Instagram vs. Concur. 

If we truly wanted to make the "world" more fact-driven, we had to do much better than what we had done in this area. While our search was a sea change from traditional static dashboard-driven apps, the bar here was not set by Tableau or PowerBI, but Pinterest and Twitter. 

Facts and insights for everyone

To reach that bar set by consumer apps, we needed to answer a few hard questions. 

1. How could we enable you to start the self-exploration journey into business data when all you have is an intent and not even a fully formed question? 
2. How could we elevate the data analysts from a mere creator of dashboards to a strategic partner to the business user and a teacher of data fluency to the entire organization? 
3. How could we break political silos of data within the companies by making it easy for people to share best practices, insights, and charts as we share articles and memes on social media? 
4. How do we help democratize access to insights by promoting the smartest data experts in your company by making them popular like TikTok influencers for your company's knowledge? 
5. Finally, how do we not force you to log in to yet another application, no matter how pretty, when you already have more than enough apps on your Okta home page? How could we let you taste the fruits of ThoughtSpot's labor accessible wherever you hang out? 

The most challenging thing to change is the mindset.

While it became clear that change was necessary for our business to meet your emerging needs, executing that change was far from easy.

Engineers love their designs and obsess over details that can't be changed overnight. While our customers may want to move to the cloud, many have recently deployed on-prem software that they need to keep running in production while they migrate.

ThoughtSpot is a good company. We are known for our culture and empathy. But empathy doesn't mean walking away from facing the curve-balls thrown by the world. 

We believe that our purpose towards our customers, you, is the north-star, and turbulence mid-course will not shake our belief system. 

We trusted that our culture would be more robust because we did the right thing for our customers instead of taking opportunistic short-cuts. 

On the weekend before the fateful Monday morning, I remembered reading a line by Taleb that a stoic transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. 

During that weekend of solitude, when the courage to go all-in to do the right thing for our customers, employees, and investors came, it was almost natural. 

I guess when the bravest moment happens, and sometimes you may be the only audience you have. 

We had individual conversations with every affected employee that morning. We didn't hide away from our responsibilities; we told them where we went wrong. We took care of their short-term financial and healthcare needs and ensured that all of them walked away with ThoughtSpot stocks. 

Where we are going

7 months later, ThoughtSpot is an entirely new cloud-native data analytics company. A stronger company because of the change in direction. 

I know that most of you are amidst changes within your own organizations. Some of you may be farther along than others. 

The case for going all-in on Cloud for everything is simple. For you, it allows you to focus on your customers and leave the rest to us. If you are a bank, focus on banking; let us deal with databases and upgrades. If you are a retailer, focus on serving your consumers better during these holidays without worries about query performance. If you’re a hospital, focus on saving lives instead of worrying about data compliance.

The cloud gives us an incredible advantage in delivering more capabilities to you faster than ever before. We can centrally operate all of your instances securely and implement the best practices we learn from our collective experience. 

In both cases, you, our customers, win. 

I request that you do not embark on this journey half-heartedly. If you decide that the Cloud is your future, go all-in with a modern stack that's purpose-built for the new world. 

If you are implementing a cloud-native data warehouse or data lake, go all-in with ThoughtSpot. Commit to making your organization more fact-driven with a modern analytics solution that can scale and delight not just your employees but your customers too. 

It may feel like it's a step too far, but remember, every step towards the right destination is a step worth taking. 

As you will hear from our customers today, who've taken these journeys with us, all it takes is a single person to act with courage, conviction, and clarity. No matter your job title, you are more capable of doing that than you sometimes give yourself credit for. Your customers are counting on you.

Sitting at home, watching our presentations, you are the one who could make that happen for your company and your customers. 

Remember that sometimes when the bravest moment happens, you may be your only audience. 

We have a brilliant show prepared with bold people and innovative technology coming up. 

I wish you a year filled with brave moments ahead. 

=======================

<You can watch the recording of the session here >