How to leverage intuition, customer support, and raw effort | Colin Zima (Omni & Looker)

In Depth

English - October 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - ★★★★★ - 51 ratings
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Previous Episode: Building Zapier from first principles | Contrarian takes on growth, hiring, fundraising | Wade Foster (Co-founder & CEO)

Next Episode: The business of growing and monetizing an open source product | Ashley Kramer (GitLab CMO/CSO)

Colin Zima is the co-founder and CEO of Omni, a business intelligence tool that has raised over $26.9m. Prior to starting Omni, Colin was Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker, which was acquired by Google for $2.6b. Colin was an early employee at Looker, and stood up its high-touch customer support arm, which turned into a cornerstone competitive advantage for the company.
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In today’s episode we discuss:

Lessons from Looker

When, why and how to invest in white-glove customer support

Tactics for scaling high-touch customer support

Colin’s intuition-based approach to product

How Looker hit their goals for 24 quarters in a row

The founding story of Omni

Colin’s hot takes on picking startups, hiring PMs, and more

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Referenced:

BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery

Hotel Tonight: https://www.hoteltonight.com/

Omni: https://omni.co/

Tableau: https://www.tableau.com/

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Where to find Brett Berson:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/

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Where to find Colin Zima:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/drinkzima?lang=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinzima/

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Where to find First Round Capital:

Website: https://firstround.com/

First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital

This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast

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Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(02:30) Colin's unique entry into Looker
(04:35) How Colin talks to users
(08:20) How Colin's scope at Looker expanded
(10:53) Why and how to provide white-glove customer support
(20:25) Which companies should invest heavily in customer support?
(22:49) Hiring for and hiring from customer support
(27:40) The #1 thing for making customer support effective at scale
(29:32) The culture of customer support at Omni
(32:57) Insights on product strategy
(41:33) The role of intuition vs data in product decisions
(44:25) The merits and downsides of an intuition-driven approach to product
(48:36) Insights from hitting every goal for 24 quarters straight
(55:07) The founding story of Omni
(58:10) How Colin maintains intellectual honesty as a founder
(60:02) How Colin thinks about what to copy vs not copy from Looker
(63:25) How to pick which startup to join
(66:07) The most underrated trait in early stage startup employees
(68:11) Colin's take on founder-market-fit
(69:42] Unpopular opinion on how to hire good PMs
(72:28) The people who made an outsized impact on Colin's career

—

In today’s episode we discuss:

Lessons from Looker
When, why and how to invest in white-glove customer support
Tactics for scaling high-touch customer support
Colin’s intuition-based approach to product
How Looker hit their goals for 24 quarters in a row
The founding story of Omni
Colin’s hot takes on picking startups, hiring PMs, and more

—

Referenced: