>>Live from Seattle, Washington. It's the queue at Tableau conference 2014 brought to you by headline sponsor Tableau.. >>Here are your hosts, John furrier and Jeff Kelly. >>Okay, welcome back. And when we hear live in Seattle, Washington for the cube, this is our flagship program. We go out to the events, expect to see with the noise. I'm John furrier, my coach Jeff Kelly, analysts that we bond.org and we'd love to go talk to the senior leaders of the companies that are hosting the event, the Tablo data 14 conference and Kelly, right EVP of sales for Tableau software. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So, uh, you're under the, you're in the pressure cooker seat. So sales is everything, right? You know, you guys are a public company and you have to perform. Performance is happy customers, they pay you money, you collect the cash, you put it in the bank and invested into your business and do it again and again. Um, you've done very well as a company. You guys have been great. So I got to ask you, um, about where Chad blow is today. Share with the folks a little bit of the history. Um, you know, we've been big fans of the company actually. We are, uh, you know, me personally being an entrepreneur, I love when companies get built by the founders and don't have to raise money to start the company. They get critical mass and take the extra growth capital. And you guys have done that. You've been in real big success story is an entrepreneurial venture. So share the culture and kind of where you guys are now and with the customer base, the culture. >>Oh, that's a lot of questions all in one. Uh, well thank you for having me. It's a pleasure being here. You know, you asked about what it's been like on this whole journey and a lot of the people that were here at the beginning, we're all still here, right? So I was the first salesperson at Tableau. I joined a month before we started version one. And I've seen how things have changed and evolved. And the truth of the matter is we have a lot more people. We have more customers, but the culture of the company has stayed really sound from the beginning. We were a bunch of people who were very, very passionate about this mission to help people see and understand data. And that's still our mission today. So from the day I started to now, it's all been focused on empowering people to answer their questions more. And so the culture of the people that started were very passionate, really excited about the mission, really a group of company builders who wanted to roll up their sleeves and go make things happen. And yes, we're a bigger company now. Now we're a public company, but we're still just barely, barely scratching the surface. I mean, they're 55 million companies out there in the world. We have 20,000 customers. So we have a long, long way to go. >>I love that you're a senior lead as a company. You've been there as the first is awesome. So I've got to ask you, I mean there's always a moment in time where you go, Oh, will we make it? Or that moment where you going? We've the flywheels going. Could you share just some color around because startups are very hard. Think they're easy all yet. Anyone can do that. So share with a moment where you go, Oh my God, it's gonna be tough shipping where they're shipping a product or hiring or personnel or, and an aha moment where you said, Oh my God, we're doing it. Well, >>when, when you're in this company building mode, it's just you put your head down and you go and you're just go, go, go. And it's always about going and finding the next customer, making sure that customer is excited, ecstatic, hiring more people on the team, making sure that culture is still vibing. And we really just took the focus of doing things one day at a time and treating each customer like their goals. And that's still what we do. Our customers are our lifeblood, right? And that's what's keeping us going. So there were certain times at during during the whole journey, I mean, I remember 2009 when the economy was slowing down. Tableau actually still grew at a really healthy clip, but it was harder. But there was really no time that I felt, Oh, this is a huge uphill battle. I, it was an uphill battle all the time. >>We're still kind of the underdogs, right, where there's tons of customers to help. We haven't helped tons of them yet. And it's just doing things to make sure that we're building good products, empowering people to you go, wow, we're really doing this well. Did you take a break and pause and say, Hey, we're doing it, we're making it. Well, you know, I think one of the moments that really resonated for me is we worked so long to say is Tao, is Tablo gonna make it just keep doing what we're doing and believe in what we're doing. Believe in that mission. And for a long time it was, can we make it to be a public company? Can we ever get to that moment? And I remember the day, it was May 17th last year, 2013 when we were on the floor of the New York stock exchange. And we had brought tons of customers. I mean not customers. We had a lot of employees. So we had over a hundred employees filling out the floor. And in that moment when we had the management team and Christian was ringing the bell, just looking out at all these people who had helped us build Tableau and get to that day. I think that was a moment of real. A lot of pride. And it's funny talking about it right now because where I just came from is gesturing in the bell again at the, at the closing bell. So >>cause that's a lot of those steps are very hard. I mean Jeff and I talked to special all the time. We'll get a big pile of money from the VCs. Four or five guys. >>Well we didn't get a big pile of, >>I know, I just, why I was thinking why it's such a great story because the pilot money could complicate it. Being hungry actually is motivating. So, and then having that customer product successes is a great testimony. So we, I mean I think you guys are a great testimonial to successful startups. Thank you. So let's dig into the sales strategy a little bit. So as you've grown up Tableau, when you started off you really, this is you know, this very nimble underdog. You were kind of going in there with really disrupting the old guard BI players. A lot of, more of a kind of I think a desktop focus, a single user kind of focus. You've expanded, you've got enterprise licenses, now you've got cloud, now you've got mobile. How has the sales strategy evolved over that time period to, to adopt or to adjust to these new, uh, Kevin, the new ways of reaching your customer? >>Well, you know, our model is actually really quite simple. I'll go back to what I had talked about before. We help people see and understand data. So everything about what we're trying to do is to help people to be able to answer their own questions and to empower them with flexibility and agility and self service. And as we add additional products, it's really just extending the number of people that we can help. Some people want to work in the cloud, so Tableau online's better. Some people want to do it on their desktop so they're doing it more with tablet, desktop, some people out in the server and so as long as our salespeople are are looking for what is the best way that I can help this customer to be able to be more self sufficient in answering their own question and then we really hear what's the customer's use case. >>Then to answer that we have different products that actually fit that in. So in terms of how our sales strategy is working, the sales strategy is the same as it always is so we don't really focus on what to do with this product line versus that product line or this product line or small customers versus big customers. It's really all in this landed expand, let the customer buy as big or as little as they want to get started. We'll work with them very closely to make them successful and then as they're successful, they'll come back to buy more. And we have all these different ways that they can buy software and types of software that they can buy to be able to address their needs of self service agility and answering their own questions. >>The buyer, the profile of the buyer changed at all. So I know obviously Tableau is all about the end user, the person who's interacting with the software interact with the data as you'd like to focus on. But as you move to larger accounts, larger enterprises, are you still dealing directly with that user when you sell? Are you dealing with essential it more often? Right, right. >>And I guess that was kind of my question. You evolve to that, you know, I think that's a great, it's a great question because if I were to roll back the clock to almost 10 years ago when I was starting, we were, we were actually interacting mostly with the business user. So the end user and over time we're interacting with the C level, the C suite, we're interacting with the VP of it, we're interacting with the business users. And actually we're, we're working with both groups a lot. So what happened early on was we'd start with the business and over time as they bought more and more and more, they would bring us into it. And now actually we're seeing a shift that sometimes it's the it and the C suite that's coming to us and they're saying, Hey, we want to be able to empower our user community answered their own questions, but we need to be able to do that in a more secure governed control type of way. >>And is there a way that we can balance with Tableau? So we see it happening in both. I think one of the interesting changes that we're seeing is there is a cultural shift that's going on right now and companies are now starting to realize that the way that the past is very different than the wave of the future. So the wave of the past was if you had a question, you threw it over the fence to this central group that was report writers and these report writers knew how to code and they were very, very specialized. And the user that had the question, they had absolutely no idea how to operate those systems well. Now that companies are saying as data's coming in at such a fast clip, it just takes too long. They have to empower people to be able to answer their own questions, otherwise they end up being at a standstill. And so as we start having more discussions with the enterprise in the C suite, those folks who are in it and the CIO who realize, Hey, there's a shift that's going on and we need to be doing things in the way of where the world is going, not the way that we've done it in the past. It makes that conversation quite a bit easier. And so now we're seeing more and more conversations that are along those lines of how are we going to keep our organization to be competitive going into the. >>So I've got to ask you about the international expansion. We were talking earlier with your colleague Dave Martin, um, and also move at the HP big data event. And I had also had a conversation with Dave, CEO firearm, huge international. He says, John, my big growth happened. He's public company. You got you guys, he says international huge growth opportunity for us. So you have a Tam, then you have 55 million customers. You have one of those unique products at all customers need. So that's good. Check growth is on the horizon. How are you going to attack that new territory? I mean international and to grow, I mean channel strategy, indirect big part of it. I mean you guys are enabling people to create value. That seems to be the formula for a great indirect strategy. You've built a successful direct sales force graduations, but that's can take time. >>Yeah. Well you know, our model for international international is a huge opportunity for us. So we are putting a lot of resources and time into expanding internationally. We have our headquarters over in AMEA, we have headquarters over an APAC. We're now just w we opened up offices in Japan and in Germany we opened up operations in India. We are opening up another, a bigger office in, in Australia and even in Latin America, Brazil and Mexico. There's a fair amount going on now as we're going to market. It actually is pretty similar, so we're building direct sales force in all of those regions. But international, as you start doing more international, the channel becomes even increasingly important and it is, we're focusing a lot of time and energy on the channel here in the States. But in places like AMEA and certain locations over an APAC and and certainly in Latin America there is just the way of doing business tends to be more around the channel. >>Equalization has always been a nice thing of having in country operations. So that's always been kind of the international playbook. But with data I can be complicated. So having people in country, in a channel delivering value, is that the preferred way you guys, is that what you're saying? Is that, is that kind of? >>You know what I th th well the interesting part about Tableau is as we talked about, it's agnostic. Anyone can use it. And so when we go into a new country, there's two ways that we can go in. We can go on with our directing and we can go in with empowering our channel. And we actually have customers in over a hundred countries throughout the world, right? And we have partners operating in a large number of those. So our partners often are the ones that are the local feet on the street. They're going and they're having the conversations and, and they're providing the local support in the language and in the culture that it is now. When we actually open up offices in those different regions, we try to be very aligned, not only just putting our salespeople in, but having our entire company all lined up behind it. So we have our sales team, we have our marketing, we have our product. So when we go into Japan, for instance, we want to be able to have the website in Japanese. We want to be able to have the product localized in Japanese, we want to be able to have support staff that can help. And, and then of course having the partner ecosystem where the partners are able to help us make those customers all realistic. >>Flip yet in the U S I mean, as you guys get the channel going, has there been some channel conflict on order orders and who owns the accounts? >>Yeah, well you know what, our channel, we were developing a lot in the channel, but we're still pretty early in the, in our channel development and we're spending a lot of time to make sure that our channel is really successful as well as our, as well as our customers being successful. And the truth of the matter is we can't, we can't go and help all the people that we want to help without embracing the channel. And they're system integrators that they're in there and they're doing huge multi-year projects and we're working closely with them. And when we talk about the channel, we're working with resellers but also OEM and technology partners and system integrators. So lots and lots of channel activity going on. >>Yeah, I think you just touched on, well I think is one of the going to be one of the challenges for Tableau is that you can't, as you expand so fast, you can't keep your finger or your pulse on the customer quite as quite as closely as maybe you'd like. You've got to, you've got to count on the channel to do some of that. So that, and Tableau is of course known for being very customer focused. I mean the show here, you know, the crowds are cheering and Christian as he's giving his keynote and different visualizations are being demoed on stage and the crowds standing on their feet, you know, to keep that kind of customer focus as you expand. I think it's a challenge. It sounds like you really got to focus on those relationships with your partners and your OEM partners, et cetera. So they kind of understand that the Tableau approach is that, yeah, >>I I, I totally agree. Actually. I think you can even see at the show today, if you go down to that partner expo hall, there are so many partners, you're way more partners than we've ever had before. And when I was checking in with them, even yesterday where the show hadn't even started, they're getting a huge number of leads that are coming in and they're, there's so many opportunities for us to work together with our partners. In fact, this year, not only did we build of being really growing our partner sales team, but we had a whole series of partner summits this year and we traveled around the world. We had one in AMEA, one in APAC, one here in the States of being able to really train and enable our partners not only how to sell Tableau, but to work with them in a conversation of what's the best way that we can engage with them and make them really successful. So when we think about our ecosystem, it's not just about our customers, it's now about our customers and about our partners. And we're all part of the Tableau >>here. So obviously one of the things that you guys have done, you do a great job because you're such walking testimonials as customers. Um, what channel partners do you have as customers and that are top references now that you're showcasing and what end users are you showcasing here at this event? Can you name names and? >>Yeah, well I think you can, you can actually go downstairs and look in the partners of who we are and we're doing Watson, lots of, uh, partner with, with whether it's Vertica or with Alteryx or with data, uh, where we're doing joint sales and a lot of those, a lot of the that you'll see here, they're using Tableau internally in a pretty big way. And then in terms of customers, and we have showcases all over the place. I think we have a hundred customer speakers that are here. So there are there hospitals, we have Barnes, Jewish and Seattle children's who are talking about how they're using Tableau actually in the operating rooms and with nurses. And to be able to help save lives. We have education institutions who are using Tableau for how they can teach better in school, how the teachers can have their administration going. Uh, and we also have a number of corporate customers who are helping with that as well. >>So one of the things that we always talk about when we talk about startups, you guys want to start certainly, but company building is a great team. You guys are on that next generation of building out. Um, you always get the question, um, high touch sales, indirect low cost, our automated self-service if you're, you know, kind of a platform, um, inside sales is a great strategy for expanding out growth. Um, but it's hard. Um, do you guys have an inside sales organization? You, are you building it out? Is that a big part of your increase in your customer service? Cause a lot of you got great fans. Loyalties, high products is good. So are you building out? >>Yeah. You know, we actually, we got predominantly with inside sales, so we started with inside sales and then enterprise sales came later. And with our inside sales, we still have a very, very robust inside sales. We have kind of both models, some customers prefer to be interacted with field, face to face. And so we have field folks that are all over, uh, in our, all our major regions and we have a lot of inside folks. And the same is true when we look at how we're going to support them. So we have technical folks and services folks in training folks that will go out and meet the customer on their site, help to enable them setting up center of excellence, all that. And then we have a large number of that is that is done remotely. The benefit we have at Tableau is actually tablets, pretty easy to use. >>And so we don't always have to sit down and do it beside them. So how about sales compensation, if you will? Not with numbers, but like, I mean culturally is it, is it, we're hiring you killed like in the early days of Cisco sales guys were making zillions of dollars. Um, there's Tableau have, um, the kind of product pricing mix where you guys have a lot of like huge compensation, uh, rewards. So how does that work? You know, what we focus on having our salespeople be really excited about working here, having it be a very good as you know, right. I mean, compensation drives behavior. How do you guys, we have a lot of salespeople that have been here for a very long period of time. So we have a huge opportunity and we focus on the opportunity to help more customers and then the opportunity to have a really good career progression path. >>You know? Yes. I'm not going to answer your question, but you can keep on top a little bit about the competitive landscape. So, and again, maybe you know, because you've been with Tableau since the beginning, how has it evolved again, when you guys started, you were very much the disruptor going in. Yeah. Let's name some names, the disruptor, SAP business objects. You had Cognos, Hyperion, you guys are going in there and say, no, that's the old way. This is the new way. Um, since then you've now that some of those old players are started, they're focusing now on you know, being very self service, kind of emulating a lot of the things top load yet now you've got also kind of even newer companies, newer startups out there that are coming, even some are maybe mobile focused or cloud focused. What's the competitive landscape look like for you and from a sales perspective, again, how do you adapt as you got to come in from, you know, from the, from the new guys, you've got to come in from the old guard, you guys are targeted. >>When you're this successful you're always going to be a target. What it's like from your perspective. You know what, one of the things that we actually really focused on at Tableau, cause we talk about this a lot internally with our team is we can only control what we can control. We can control what our products are, we can control what our customer success is, we can control how we engage with our customers. And so we spend a lot of time just focusing on what it is that Tableau can do. And as we're now talking more about data discovery and agile and analytics and self-service, there's a lot of noise out there. A lot of other players who are saying that they can do the same thing and that they can do it as well. And our strategy is really, if you think you can use that, so why don't you go download their product and download our product and see how long it takes. And we actually encourage people to go out and test it out and try. And what we find is when someone is really interested in self service and helping people to answer their own questions, then the answer to them becomes really clear when it is an a question of we just want traditional old pixel perfect reporting you have. There are a lot of people that can play in that game. Uh, but we're finding the conversations changing quite a bit when they really want self-service. Then we actually feel like we're, we're pretty well positioned competitively. >>So are your lottery, your deals going up in, you know, competitive environments where you've got Tableau lined up against business objects against, I don't know. Good data against whoever. Is it a lot of that or do you have a lot of, you know, people who are trying the product love it and just say, Hey, we want to go with Tableau. >>You know, there's both, but the majority of our deals are actually when we're competing against the status quo, they actually aren't even looking at other business intelligence. They might have it in their company but it's not solving their need and their requirement. So a lot of people are just using what is already commissioned on their computer. Now there are situations where there is a competitive bake-off and we love competition. I mess with salespeople. Do we go and compete? Uh, but we're finding that the conversation is shifting and where we tend to really focus our time and energy is with those companies that are really looking for the new way. >>Kelly, you got to get the, I got to get the hook here, but I want to ask you two final questions. One is an easy one. What's it like working with Christian? >>It's great working with Christen. You know what? We've worked together all for so long and it's, it's really, we say it's like we're a family, right? We, we know each other, we know each other's families, we know each other's kids and it's pretty much the same as it was when I started almost 10 years ago. Nothing's really >>the second question. Share with the folks out there watching what is the culture of Tablo, if you could. Every culture has their own little weird tweak that makes them so unique. Intel, it's Moore's law. What's Tableau's cultural? >>Well, you have to go ask all the Tablo people if they think our culture is weird, probably not like a unique tweak that makes them so successful. The Moore's law was first called the weird, you know, people that work here are really, really passionate about what we do. We're passionate, we're mission focus and people have a lot of fun at what they do. They work hard and they play hard and it's, it's a very fun place to be. But we go fast. Yeah, certainly not weird, that's for sure. I didn't mean that, but I want a good way, a good thing. And it's usually the, it's the ones that the best deals are the ones that no one sees that doesn't look like it's going to be. And you guys were certainly a great winner of our hiring, so everyone in the world were hiring. We couldn't get the sales comp out of her, but we, you know, we tried our best, uh, Kelly, seriously, thanks for coming on cue. Really appreciate it. We know the journey you've been on has fantastic. It's a >>whirlwind now. You just got to go to the next leg of the journey, which is build a global 50 million customer business. Congratulations. Thank you for having me. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break live in Seattle, Washington to the cube. Thank you.

okay we're back this is Dave Volante with Jeff Kelly we're with Ricky bond on organ this is the cubes 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 christiane sabo is the CEO the leader the spiritual leader of of this conference and of Tablo 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 you know differentiators they can talk about what they sell you talked about why you're here was awesome so congratulations I appreciate that yeah so um so why did you start then you and your colleagues tableau well it's how below really started with a series of breakthrough research innovations that was this seed there are three co-founders of tableau myself dr. crystal T 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 on 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 and so you gave some fantastic examples them in the way in which penicillin you know was discovered you know happenstance and many many others so those things inspire you to 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 you just feel like it could 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 not everyone has been in that situation if nothing else with the spreadsheet full of stuff like your readership or the linkage the look the the traffic flow on on the cube website everyone can relate to that idea of 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 you know sometimes I did I did tweet out they have a two-front war yeah what'd you call it the traditional BI business I love how you slow down your kids and you do that and then Excel but the point I made on Twitter in 140 characters was you it will be longer here I'm a little long-winded sometimes on the cube but you've got really entrenched you know 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 problem solutely talked 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 the 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 are used to hearing when it comes to enterprise bi technology our names like Business Objects and Cognos and MicroStrategy and Oracle Oh bi and big heavy complicated develop 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 worlds 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 theirs their complication and expense and development pull and so usually what we end up doing is just bringing the power of easy analytics and dashboards and visualization and easy QA with data to people who have nothing other than maybe a spreadsheet on their desk so in that sense it's actually a little easier than it sounds well you know I have to tell you I just have a cio consultancy and back in the day and we used to go in and do application portfolio analysis and we would look at the applications and we always advise the CIOs that the value of an application is a function of its use how much is being adopted and the impact of that use you know productivity of the users right and you'd always find that this is the dss system the decision support system like you said there were maybe 3 to 15 users yeah and an organization of tens of thousands of people yeah if they were very productive so imagine if you can you can permeate the other you know hundreds of thousands of users that are out there do you see that kind of impact that productivity impact as the potential for your marketplace absolutely I you know 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 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 top management to consult some data before making a decision I want all of our people all the time Consulting data before making a decision and that's the real 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 absolutely data-driven if you don't have the tools to be able to visualize the data absolutely so Jeff if 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 it's oh well the 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 you know adding new features how does the human element play in that scenario yeah I mean it's funny dated the data driven moniker is coming these days and we're tableaus a big 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 act and intuition and instinct to make data informed decisions to make great decisions along the way so although pure mining has some role in the scheme of analytics frankly it's a minor role what we really need to do is make analytic software that as I said yesterday is like a bicycle for our minds this was the great Steve Jobs quote about computers that 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 an analytic software we've never seen software that does tap in business intelligence software there's so much development weight and complexity and expense and slow rollout schedules that were 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 gonna 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 by the government here we had Bruce Boston on yesterday who works over eight 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 things those are three things intent desire and satisfaction that machines can't do like the point being you just you know it was the old bromide 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 I went to a friend a friend of mine I just haven't seen in a while a friend of mine once said he was an he was an artificial intelligence expert had Emilie's 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 and we've been talking about for decades like is it here and he said you're asking the wrong question the question is how smart our computers right so I just think we're analytics is going is we want to make our computers smarter and smarter and smarter there'll be no one day we're sudden when we flip a switch over and the computer now makes the decision so in that sense the answer to your question is I keep I see things going is there is it going now but underneath the covers of human human based decision making it are going to be fantastic advancements and the technology to support good decision making to help people do things like feel and and and chase findings and shift perspectives on a problem and actually be creative using data I think there's I think it's gonna be a great decade ahead ahead of us so I think part of the challenge Christian in doing that and making that that that evolution is we've you know in the way I come the economy and and a lot of jobs work over the last century is you know you're you're a cog in a wheel your this is how you do your job you go 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 you know we're shifting now we're really the to get ahead in your career you've got to be as good but at an artist you've got to create B 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 you know provider of data visualization technology help change some of those attitudes and make people kind of help people make that shift to more of less of a you know a cog in a larger organization to a creative force inside that organ well mostly I feel like we support what people natively want to do so there are 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 come a few blogs and Twitter's 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 id8 with data to be more involved with data then 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 is 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 very you know you have clarity of vision you seem to have certainty in your vision of passion for your vision but 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 no it's okay you know I was like all will be answered eventually what but what about uncertainty you know in your minds as the you know chief executive of this organization as a leader in a new industry what things are uncertain to you what are the 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 general resource for tableau as a company oh I see well I think there's always you know I got a trip through the spirit of the question but we're growing a company we're going a disruptive technology company and we want to embrace all the tall the technologies that exist around us right we want to help to foster day to day data-driven decision-making in all of its places in forms and it seems to me that virtually every breakthrough technology company has gone through one or two major Journal 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 even though mobile the mobile revolution was well in play when when Facebook was founded it really hadn't taken off and that was a blind Facebook was found in oh seven right and look what happened to them right after and here's that here's new was the company you can get it was founded in oh seven yeah 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 a tablet right or shocked by the social graph you know I think for us in tableaus journey if this was the spirit of the thought 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 that a brilliant company would finally come along and crack the tablet opportunity wide open and before in a blink of an eye hundreds of millions of people are walking around with powerful multi-touch graphic devices in their I mean who would have guessed people wouldn't have guessed it no six let alone oh three know what 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 there are 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 distributed going a tableau yeah one of the amazing things about R&D key 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 there are actually hundreds of times more sophisticated in their thinking and their engineering then 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 rule and really sees them as an opportunity well they're fun to I mean think of something on the stage yesterday and yeah we're in fucky hats and very comfortable 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 what struck me 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 gonna add to the product and hearing the crowd kind of erupt at different different announcements different features that you're adding and it's clear that you're very customer focused at this at tableau of you I mean you're responding to the the needs and the requests of your customers and I that's clearly evident again in the in the passion that these customers have for your for your product for your company how do you know first I'm happy how do you maintain that or how do you get 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 gonna get pressure from Wall Street and quarter results and all that that you know that comes with that kind of comes with the territory how do you remain that focused on the customer kind of as your you know you're going to be under a lot of pressure to grow and and you know drive revenue yeah I keep that focus well there's two things we do it's a 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 we take we fly I mean 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 face to face with customers and hearing the customer stories and the victories and actually seeing the feedback you just described really inspires them it 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 and the way you want it the second thing we do is we are we are big followers of I guess what's called the dog food philosophy of eat your own dog so drink your own champagne and so one of our core company values that tableau is we use our products facility a stated value of the company we use our products and into an every group at tableau in tests in bug regressions in development in sales and marketing and planning and finance and HR every sip marketing marketing is so much data these these every group uses tableau to run our own business and make decisions and what happens Matt what's really nice about a company because you know we're getting close to a thousand people now and so it's keeping the spirit you just described alive is really important it becomes quite challenging vectors 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 the feature 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 customer as close as possible I'll say christen your company is a rising star we've been talking all this week of the similarities that we were talking off about the similarities with with ServiceNow just in terms of the passion within the customer base we're tracking companies like workday you know great companies that are that are that are being built new emerging disruptive companies we put you in that in that category and we're very excited for different reasons you know different different business altogether but but there are some similar dynamics that we're watching so as observers it's 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 lifecycle I think people who don't really understand tableau think it's a visualization company or a visualization tool I don't I don't really understand that when you talk about the vision a lot but okay sure we can 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 makino 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 to do over it's a do-over it's based on technology from a prior hair 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's a Facebook an RD 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 driven decision in a very in a very in a way that's just woven into their into their into their enjoyment and work style every 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 that's you a lot of applause christina is awesome you can see you know the passion that you're putting forth your great vision so congratulations in the progress you've made I know I know you're not done we'll be watching it thanks very much for coming to me I'm really a pleasure thank you all right keep right there everybody we're going wall to wall we got a break coming up next and then we'll be back this afternoon and this is Dave Volante with Jeff Kelly this is the cube we'll be right back