S7E5: Kashish Gupta and Hightouch Leverage “Reverse ETL” When Building Your Modern Data Stack

We're really excited because the more people start seeing their data warehouse as an operational layer rather than an analytics layer, the more they'll become familiar with the fact that they can use it kind of across their business and not just out of their team. That's something that Hitech has been evangelizing for the past couple years. The data warehouse should not be a walled garden just for the data team. It's owned by the data team and built by the data team, but to help the rest of the business.

Welcome back to the 7th season of The Room Podcast. If you've been here for a while, you might remember Claudia and me have been on a journey to navigate our early 20s careers in Silicon Valley. We started this podcast about 2 years ago now, which is pretty wild, in the middle of a pandemic, recording from our bedrooms. Since then, a lot has changed, both in the macro economy as well as in our own jobs and careers. So let's get you up to date on what's going on with us. Since 2020, Claudia has left Uber and become a full-time co-CEO and founder of Priv, a startup unlocking and disrupting recurring revenue for e-commerce brands.

And Madison is now a partner over seed investments at Defy VC, an early-stage venture firm in the Bay Area, totally crushing it. And I'm so lucky to have her as an investor in Priv. We're two women navigating our careers and asking the people who inspire us to shed light on their stories. Unlocking Access starts with a conversation and context. We open the door to moments in technology history that traditionally happen behind closed doors. Mads, can you tell us what to look forward to this season?

Absolutely. This season you can expect a really exciting 8-person roster of founders that you've definitely heard of. First up is Spencer Raskoff and his journey to building Zillow. Second, we have Kelsey Millard and her vision for the future of primary care, which is being empowered by the Sitka platform. We also have a look into the future of the modern data stack with Kashish Gupta, the founder of Highspot, where he's going to share his belief in the need for reverse ETL. And amidst a backdrop of a lot of macroeconomic turmoil, our guests are going to bring you into the room where they're making important decisions on navigating a downturn. In real time. Claudia, where can people find more about our key themes and guests each week?

Great question, Mads. Every week we launch a newsletter and related resources alongside the episode that helps our listeners get tactical. If you're local to SF, hit us up. We have an exciting schedule of in-person events, fireside chats, and pop-ups where we would love to meet you. Well, sounds like we're ready to open the door to this week's room.

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Welcome back to The Room podcast. In today's episode, we sit down with Kashish Gupta, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch. It's been a busy few years for the Hightouch team as they have built a product that redefines data access on top of your data warehouse. With Kashish, we start at the beginning. As a boy, he moved early from a small town in India to Atlanta, Georgia, where he learned core life skills from his father, who ran a local gas station. He was a curious kid who started engaging in the Atlanta innovation ecosystem while in high school. This penchant for learning brought him to UPenn, where he completed two separate degrees, one in economics and computer science for undergrad, and a master's in machine learning and robotics.

He learned through his college startup, Mama's Cooking, the challenge regulation can have on your go-to-market.

But after undergrad, the entrepreneur bug never went away. And when COVID hit in 2020, he and his co-founder were forced to pivot from their initial product, which at the time was an AI travel booking service, to what is now Hightouch. This was only after completing YC and taking on their initial funding. For a completely different business. And what a pivot it was. Hightouch has gone on to raise $50+ million in venture financing, with their last round valued at over $450 million just shy of a year ago. So what is Hightouch? In short, they sync customer data from your data warehouse into tools your business teams rely on. They sit on top of a company like Snowflake, and extract, transform, and load your data into upstream systems. They call this reverse ETL, and they sit alongside Fivetran, dbt, and others in what many are calling the modern data stack. In today's episode, we explore insights and themes such as what is the modern data stack and what does it mean for your business, how to scale your founding team, and what the future holds in the age of democratized data.

Kashish, thank you so much for joining us on The Room Podcast.

Madison, thanks for having me.

We're really excited to have you here to dive in deep on the story of Hightouch. But like with all of our conversations, we like to start at the beginning, getting to know the founders behind the product. If you could share a little bit more about where you grew up and how that has shaped your view of the world.

I was actually born in a small town 4 hours north of Delhi in India and moved to the United States when I was 5 years old, but I didn't learn English until I was in first grade. And because of starting to learn English so late, it definitely shaped my view of the world. Started off as an introvert, only really became extrovert properly in 8th grade, and was super focused on academics earlier on and disengaged from the more academic world and became more of a business person around that time. Learned what being entrepreneur meant, met some entrepreneurs locally in Atlanta. Atlanta is where I spent most of my childhood, and they shaped my view of what was possible. One thing I really value and I think affects everyone is that your worldview changes over time as you move to different places where you're exposed to new possibilities, right? So growing up in India in a small rural town, my worldview was I pretty much have to do what my dad is doing and that's really how the world works. In Atlanta, there was a different worldview where there was a certain definition of wealth and certain definition of impact and breaking out of that, seeing what entrepreneurs in Atlanta were accomplishing, then eventually going to school in Philadelphia, my worldview kept changing, like, by orders of magnitude every few years. And that's just something I'm very thankful for.

Totally can resonate with the idea of your surroundings and how that impacts your orientation towards what your goals are. Seattle obviously had a lot more technology innovation happening, which brought me really into that. And then moving down here to San Francisco, just probably a compounding effect since.

When you grow up a certain way, and especially as an immigrant in the United States, you have nothing to lose. And there's studies about this, how a lot of immigrants start businesses because fundamentally the worst that can happen to them is they can go back to where they're from and start back in the previous situation that they were in. And that mentality of all upside is really what motivates both me and my co-founders all the time. That like, what's the worst that can happen? We go back to doing our jobs. The best that can happen is that we build a crazy large business. And so we're going to go for the best. We're not going to go for like mediocre.

I love that goal and that mindset. And today, shooting for the moon is part of your founder journey. But when you were growing up, did the idea of becoming a founder feel closely tied to your identity?

It did, starting in 10th grade. I won't say that I was trying to be an entrepreneur since I was 5 or 6 years old. It really did start in 10th grade. I was exposed to this entrepreneurial community in Atlanta called TYE, the Young Entrepreneurs. And it was all about exposing high schoolers to entrepreneurship, helping them build a business plan. And that was actually the first business plan I ever built. It was a wireless charging business to provide long-distance wireless charging in airports. Whenever you get to an airport, you just pick up a little dongle, plug your phone into the dongle, and all around the airport, you're wireless charging everywhere you go. And that was the first idea that we ever came up with in a team of 6. And ever since then, I knew I wanted to become an entrepreneur, but everyone around me was doing engineering. And so I was always torn between those two things and ultimately did end up doing both, but it was always the big push and pull between those two in my life.

Awesome. That's not even on your LinkedIn. That was maybe your first startup back when you were in high school. So cool to see how from a young age innovation was core to who you were, but you allude to getting some of the skillset that is required or really used today to become a builder, become a founder through UPenn where you studied both economics and computer science and then also went on to obtain a master's in robotics. Robotics and machine learning. Maybe talk us through how these degrees, the learnings that you gained from that impacted what became maybe your second or third startup, Mama's Cooking.

Much more important than like what you learn in school is really the people that you meet and the way they change your perspective. I would say that learning computer science was critical to enabling how I think about technology and how I think about using technology as a way to solve problems, but Business sense actually came much more so from my dad who ran a small business. He ran a gas station for 14 years while I was growing up. And so he always taught me about like taxes, margins, marketing, like how to get more people to come to his gas station than the gas station next door. And it was from a very small business lens, like it was very different from what you learn at Penn, but it just gives you like the fundamental sense of I need to focus on revenue and profit. And those things stay consistent between every single business in the world. So those are actually pretty fundamental. While at Penn, unfortunately the minority of students were like this, but there were several there that were focused on, I can do anything. I'm not here to specifically learn, I'm here to meet people, grow my network, become the person I want to be, and then really just go accomplish my goals. And so for me, studying business at Penn really just helped me think of like more fundamental concepts like finance, accounting, marketing, and just understand how business works. And then computer science was more foundational, but both of those two things were really like frameworks or ways of thinking. They helped me most like today working with other execs, right? So, if I'm working with our VP of engineering, the computer science background can help. And if I'm working with our VP of finance, the finance background helps. But personality and like everything else you learn along the way helps a lot. And I know Claudia probably experienced the exact same thing. As a founder, you learn most things on the job, not before the job.

Truly. It's funny how a lot of my friends are like, "Oh, I'm gonna work another few years in this big tech company so I get more experience to become a founder." And, you know, it doesn't quite sound right from that at face value, but until you're a founder, you really learn that really has no bearing on your success. I am definitely in the highest learning period of my life thus far, and it's certainly not in school. So, there's nothing like just getting your hands dirty and then being forced to figure it out.

It feels amazing to be in that learning mode. The one thing I always tell founders whenever they ask me, hey, like, I want to become a founder, how do I do it? I'm always like, hey, the day you decide that you're ready to become a founder, is the day that you're ready. It's really simple. And unless you can tell me out loud with conviction, I'm ready to do this, you're not ready. Like, it's just a binary. You decide for yourself, and then that's it. Simple as that.

I remember when Claudia thought she was ready. We were having weekly conversations about ideas that she had, conviction she was gaining on what to build. And I was sitting there being like, I think you're crazy. Like, this is a lot of work. And she was like, no, like, I've got this. This is it. And when she and her co-founder settled on their idea, I could see it in her eye from a distance with a mask in the middle of COVID that like she was going all in on this.

I'm one of those people similar to you, Kashish, who like at 4 years old, I did not go out and say, I'm going to start my own business and be an entrepreneur, but I definitely have those tendencies and it really like crystallized in college, but I joined Uber after graduation. I wasn't quite yet ready to take the leap and I had a bit of an identity crisis or I'm like, does this mean I'm always going to be in big tech? At what point will there be a pivot where I do start a business? Because I had these inklings that I wanted to start something on my own. And I think what I realized was not to put pressure on myself to what you're saying. It will be right when you feel it and you'll get so much conviction. You won't be able to do anything else. It's just so obvious. I think what you're saying certainly resonates with at least my experience. Madison kind of alluded to this before, but after school, Mama's Cooking. Tell us a little bit more about this startup and ultimately how Mama's Cooking really set you down the path. Where there was an aha moment in 2018 around Hightouch?

There was definitely a distinct gap between Hightouch and Mama's Cookin'. That business that I started during college was actually identical to the business Shef that exists today, spelled S-H-E-F. And they're a food delivery platform where home chefs cook food at their homes and they sell it to people nearby via delivery. So there's actually no difference between that business and the one I started. The only difference was that back in 2016, food regulation did not allow legal sale of home-cooked food. It had to be built in a commercial kitchen. And therefore, the business was actually just illegal to operate. And that's why it actually didn't pan out. So, I shut down that business probably like a year later in 2017. And only 2 years after that, Shump was founded and became quite successful doing the same thing. So, I think there was a lot of lessons learned in terms of how to move fast and how to test. When we were doing Mama's Cookin', we just had 6 people sign up to cook food in college dorms. And then we had 20 people signed up to buy their food that same day. And we would aggregate all supply and demand on one day, on Sundays, where it's like the most common for people to buy food. So there's definitely some learnings in terms of testing things, moving fast, finding out that, well, not only is it illegal, but consumers are also scared of food safety when they buy food from their friends. But the good thing is that we didn't actually go into like crazy amounts of software development or like financial planning or anything in order to start that business. We would just Bootstrap did got it running and got the feedback.

Just a hair too early. It's always so interesting, especially with other guests on the podcast, how many of them had ideas that are table stakes, like part of the fabric of 2022 today, but it was just right idea, wrong time. It's really cool to hear your perspective on that. So there's a bit of a gap between shutting down Mama's Cooking because of regulatory reasons and pivoting into the world of SaaS data. Can you tell us what happens in that gap between Mama's Cooking and Hightouch?

I moved to San Francisco in 2018. At the time, I was working on a travel startup, and that's actually the travel startup that Hightouch was founded out of. For the first 8 months, like, we were really bootstrapping what we called an AI travel agency. So, it was a regular travel agency that you'd call over the phone, but instead, you would text us or message us over Slack, and we would book all your corporate travel for you over Slack. And the idea was that we can give you better rates than the rates you see online. So compared to the online rate, you could save 20% on hotels, all automated over Slack. And that was the business that we like first raised our pre-seed for, did YC with. It was me and my co-founder Tejas. And ultimately when COVID happened, we had to pivot the business because the travel industry had completely gone away for a few years. And so the actual insight that led to Hightouch happened in 2020. At that point we had 3 co-founders. Now it was me, Tejas, and Josh. And Tejas and Josh worked at a company called Segment based here in San Francisco, which is like the number 1 customer data platform. And so we were doing discovery in the customer data space to understand like which customer data problems are still yet to be solved. And every time we talked to a company that was sufficiently big—Nike, Turner Media, Walmart—they had all said, hey, we used to use Segment, but we churned Segment because we actually now use our data warehouse. And we heard that same phrase over and over. They said, I used to use X, but now I don't use it anymore because data warehouse is the place where I do all my customer data. Because we heard that theme so many times, that was really the aha moment that led to the origin of Hitouch, where we said, oh, interesting, it looks like folks have switched to the customer data warehouse as their source of truth for customer data. And that instead of having a bunch of different databases where they're storing customer data and they're each used for different things, there's just one central one now. And that's like basically the panacea, like the utopia of SaaS. For 20, 30 years, people have wished that there was one place to store all your data. And they never really had it until Snowflake and BigQuery really made that possible. And that has only panned out in the last few years. We then got introduced to the data engineering persona that is really like our core ICP today. And they described to us how they're using the data warehouse, ETLing data into the data warehouse, transforming the data when it's there, and how they're basically building this source of truth for companies. And at that point, what we said is, hey, let's build them a dashboard. You need a dashboard on top of your data warehouse to see your data. And everyone said, no, that's just BI. We already have BI. We already have Looker. We don't need that. And so we kept asking them, what do you need? And they said, my salesperson would love to see this data on Salesforce. and my marketing person would love to see this data in Customer.io or Marketo. And we said, that's something that we literally did at Segment. We did build those pipelines, but in a very different way. We didn't build it on the data warehouse and we didn't build it as customizable as it is in Hightouch. And so that's really the day that we invented like what we call now today reverse ETL. And the reason it's called reverse ETL is because people think of ETL as getting data into their warehouse. And so the phrase reverse ETL really resonated for getting data out of the warehouse. That's super helpful.

We're super small compared to your target ICP, but definitely the lack of easy data access and like parsability across different platforms, whether it's engineering, sales, CS, is something that we're even facing at this stage. So would love to get a sense of what is a classic customer journey of one of your ICP customers? How do businesses get up and running with HighTouch and how does that flow through the different orgs?

Most often what'll happen is that they'll have some data team or ops team that is currently building API integrations into something like Salesforce. So, the cool thing is that pretty much every business in the world needs data in their CRM, no matter who you are. And the only question is really how do you get there? Do you use something like Segment? Do you use something like Zapier? Or do you write the code yourself? And usually it's a combination of the three. And usually it would take like several months of engineering time in order to make that happen. Retool was one of our first customers and they use us now for lifecycle marketing. Where they'll get all their data into HubSpot and then run all their email marketing in HubSpot. What they would do in the past is they would wire up a bunch of small scripts in Python, or they would wire up a bunch of Zapier to get the data into HubSpot. And instead, when they discovered Hightouch, they were able to get data into HubSpot up and running really quickly in a matter of a couple hours in a sustainable way. So the core insight that we had with the Hightouch was this work needs to be done. Pretty much everyone is trying to do it at some point in the lifecycle from a data warehouse to a SaaS tool. And the core abstraction that we built was, why don't you give us a SQL query and we'll map that SQL query to your SaaS and then always sync that data correctly. So it's a very like nice interface where you simply give us a SQL query, we'll map the columns in SQL to the columns in your SaaS tool. So it'd be like first name to first name, number of logins, rows consumed, some sort of like metric. And those metrics would flow then into your CRM or your marketing tool correctly over time. And you would just say, I want this data to be fresh every 5 minutes. And Hightouch would make sure that would happen.

Pretty important, especially in this world of just data-driven decision-making and the fact that any startup, any company really needs easy access to it to make better decisions, run orgs efficiently. So thank you for walking through a standard customer journey and just how your clients interface with Hightouch. I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into the founding team, Tejas Menonar and Josh Curl. Tell us about your journey to becoming co-founders.

It's pretty cool actually. So me and Tejas did YC together in May of 2019, and that was for the travel business. We met through living together in a house in the Mission in San Francisco. We live in like a weird 10-bedroom house. Me, Tejas, and Josh actually all lived together before any of us were working on startups. And at the time, me and Tejas started working on Carry Travel together, and Josh was our housemate, and he brought Tejas into the house because they worked together at Segment. So the connection goes, Tadeusz and Josh worked together at Segment. Tadeusz came to the house via Josh, and then he and I started working together on Carry Travel. We did YC together in 2019 summer. Josh did YC in 2019 winter with his own company, Deviceplane, and that was an IoT company. And when COVID happened, both companies were pivoting at the same time. And that's when we decided to merge together and say, hey, like, we always wanted to work together. It didn't make sense when we were doing two completely different industries. But now that we're all interested in this customer data space, Why don't we all three merge together and work together as co-founders? It really was like serendipity and like kind of fate that it worked out that way. And then 2020, in the peak of COVID is really when we did a lot of our customer discovery, raised our Series A, got our first few customers, and built out the early team.

An example of when timing did go right, at least for the founding team finding each other. I think one of the most common questions that I get asked from aspiring founders is, how do you think about the composition of a co-founding team? How do you divvy up responsibilities? Do you need to bring on someone that's a business person? Walk me through how you guys thought about the 3 co-founders starting Hightouch.

The good thing— the true thing is there's just always so much to do. And as long as you have a lot of trust between each other, it's pretty easy to figure out how responsibilities change over time. We said go-to-market is going to be a really big aspect of this, and product actually comes easier to us because we're all engineers. Josh is going to focus on product engineering. Jade is going to focus on sales and I'll focus on marketing. And that's how we split up the responsibilities that we have, like the unscoped areas have key owners and then the more scoped areas also have a key owner and we all help each other in our areas. And that's helped us scale for a long time. Most companies are either sales-led or marketing-led and we have a really strong sales and marketing team. Up until very recently, all of our leads have been inbound. And the reason we've been able to do that is because a lot of our growth has been marketing-led.

A lot of the teams that I work with have multiple founders, which is I think incredible for teamwork, but then at the end of the day, sometimes there does have to be an ultimate decision maker. And so if you could share an instance where you guys were debating something, but then ultimately someone had to make an executive decision, how that process went.

At the earlier stages, I don't believe in things like, hey, let's vote. Usually a decision-making framework between founders should be a little bit more like, A, unanimous and a little bit more one-way door versus two-way door, right? So like our decision-making framework, most of the time is if I think my co-founders will disagree with this, instead of making a decision here, I'm going to take it back to them and discuss. If I think they'll agree, I'll simply make the decision and then let them know. For example, me and Titus are co-CEOs, so that's even more interesting in terms of being able to make decisions. We're pretty knowledgeable about what the other person cares about and disagrees with, and so most of the time we can act pretty unanimously for each other. And then when there's doubt, things like pricing model, things like messaging and positioning, product area focus, we'll bring it back to the team and we'll include Josh in those decisions as well. And then we'll timebox and say, hey, we want to make this decision, we want to commit together where we all are like committed to it and we wanna have clarity around it. And then we'll usually think of things as one-way doors or two-way doors. So if it's a two-way door, we'll try to spend minimal time deciding, figure out how to test, and then move on. If it's a one-way door, then it'll usually take longer, but it's pretty rare that we have those one-way doors. And when we do, we can usually parse it out into a step-by-step decision. And then the good thing is that we have trust in each other's areas. On product, for example, I'll trust Tejas and Josh more because they've been in the customer data space for a long time. And so, Just choosing upfront where you're going to trust your co-founders versus where you're going to want to have discourse helps a lot too, because everyone should in the end of the day feel empowered to run their area of the business.

I think that's a super helpful framework, having a very collaborative decision-making process, but also having clarity on swim lanes. I think just having a unanimous decision as the burden of proof for having a decision be well thought through makes a lot of sense. And not everything has to be votes or super contentious. If it is contentious, it probably means that the team hasn't got to like the true right decision. Better spend time focusing on what something is that really ultimately makes sense. So thank you for sharing that. I think it'll be really helpful to a lot of our listeners. One thing I wanted to mention, which you touched on previously, is the marketing versus sales. I think that's such a misunderstood motion, especially in the SaaS startup world. Personally, we were really convinced that our sales motion was going to be purely outbound, that was going to drive all the revenue. And it was only until recently we really looked at all the data, where all of our revenue was coming from and what was the source. And we realized that our inbound motion, despite really not investing in marketing, was so much stronger than our outbound. And so now we're pivoting into focusing a little bit more on kind of that marketing piece. Talk to us a little bit around like how you experimented with figuring out what part of the go-to-market you guys are going to continue investing in.

Early days, every business, usually first 10 or so customers were us networking and figuring out how to bring those in ourselves. And then we found a community of data people that were really focused on building a modern data stack that involves Snowflake and BigQuery and dbt and Fivetran. And that's what really showed us that there's a path to evangelizing this community that's already really aware of doing data in a new way. So in the beginning we set our eyes on, hey, like We could go after all the big companies that use Snowflake. That's going to be really difficult for us at our stage. On the other hand, why don't we just educate the market on reverse ETL? And so we took this kind of like missionary, like education type of approach of just saying, hey, like our job is just to teach people that they can get data out of their warehouse. Most companies have never really done that before. They only get data into their warehouse. So that itself should be novel and striking enough that people want to listen. And for the first 6 months, like that's really what our sales cycle looked like. People would talk to us and they'd be like, yo, what's this reverse ETL thing? Why would you want me to get data out of my warehouse? We would teach them about it and they'd be like, all right, I get it. I'll talk to you later. And then 3 or 6 months later they'd come back and then they'd be like, all right, I'm ready to buy. Here's my use case. Can you help me onboard? And it was awesome. Everyone you educated that had just purchased Snowflake or BigQuery in the last 6 months would pretty high chance come back and buy the product 6 months later. And in that process they'd even tell us, hey, like the reason I'm buying from you is because you didn't try to sell me anything when I didn't need it. You educated me, you taught me about the thing, and then you let me come back 6 months later when I had a real use case and a real need. And that's really how we trained the sales team early on too. It was very much like evangelize and teach anyone that we can that this product exists and how they can use it, and then let them come back with use cases and a really strong need. So that education DNA and like evangelism DNA was kind of like built in to the early days. And we really focused on just those core Snowflake, dbt, and Fivetran users in the beginning to evangelize. I recommend to other founders, find ICP fit. In a really granular way. So folks will say my ICP is every e-commerce company in the world, and that doesn't mean much because there's just so many of those, right? So think about employee size, think about like tech stack. For example, do I focus on Shopify stores or stores that have now gotten off of Shopify and something more mature? There's a big divide between that. Having like really granular ICP makes a huge difference, and that's like what a lot of good go-to-market leaders will say, that first thing they do when they come into a business as a CRO is segment out the market into what is really high velocity sales and what is like longer term sales.

Super helpful advice. I'd love to spend a little bit of time on fundraising. Definitely like a key juncture in any early founder's life. You mentioned your Series A a little bit earlier. You mentioned YC. Today you've raised multiple rounds of financing, starting with YC Batch Summer 2019, and most recently a $40 million Series B at a $450 million valuation. First of all, congratulations. We're curious, who was the first person to say yes to investing in Hightouch?

Honestly, it's so long ago now. It's actually before Y Combinator. The very first person was Dorm Room Fund, and I think there was like a $20K check that was just absolutely game-changing because I went from being in debt about $8,000 to finally having like a corporate bank account with money in it for the first time. And then there were two angel investors that were like mentors of ours, Felix Feng and Ashwin Murali, followed by Again, before YC, Afor Capital was the first institutional, and they wrote a $300K check before YC even invested in Hightouch. And that was like the acceleration point. Once we got Afor in, then we got another huge list of angels in, including like the Segment co-founders and a bunch of others. And that's really when we started operating like a real company and hiring. The earliest supporters give you like the greatest conviction that you can keep going. At that time, we were still working on a travel company, right? But having them at least give the head nod that they believe in this really made it a lot easier to keep going. I'll always gonna be super thankful for their support and especially Afor Capital. Like it wasn't until we were properly doing reverse ETL that we raised the next round, which was the Series A. And so Afor was really a good thought partner throughout that experience.

I love the highlight of the younger funds or even just the people who said, I believe in you and I believe you're going to figure something out and highlighting how transformative checks, even under $100K, can be to a founder when what makes the headlines is the grandiose moments of macro millions and billions of dollars of success. But it always starts with someone saying, here's a little bit of money, I hope you figure it out, I believe in you. We've talked, Kashish, a bit about the market that you're building into, the core product that you're solving for, and really the evangelist work you've done about the reverse ETL. Could you talk a bit more about why the time is now for a company to embrace their data warehouse?

And it really comes down to the progress that Snowflake and BigQuery have made from a technology perspective. We all saw Snowflake IPO as the largest tech IPO, but there's a really strong reason for that. And it's that now is the time in technology where storage is really cheap, so you can store unlimited amounts of data. And then run your queries on it ad hoc and only pay for those queries when they're running. So that was what Snowflake pioneered, right? It was this concept of, of like separation of compute and storage. So I only pay for my query while I'm running it. Once it's done, my data is just sitting there for free, basically. That's pretty novel because now I can store all of my data in one place and not pay for tons and tons of storage or tons and tons of compute costs just to keep the database running. Pretty much any other database that you have, you pay more as you store more. That's actually like the fundamental reason why the data warehouse, the cloud data warehouse specifically, has become so popular as like the place to replicate all the data in your company. And as a result, now you can do joins between all those data sources all in one place and manage it and do transformation after it's already there. The underlying technology and the underlying separation of storage and compute really is what powered a lot of these other companies to exist, like TPT and Hightouch. Furthermore, there's just way more SaaS in the world than there was before. So if you go to a typical enterprise, especially like a Fortune 500 or Global 2000, you'll see they're using like 10 or 20 different marketing tools. And in fact, they'll have each business unit using their own completely independent marketing stack and their own independent marketing database. So especially as you go to enterprise, you see multi-business unit, multi-teams working on different databases. So the data warehouse is really the only way for those teams to work together and have a shared dataset. So there's many reasons why the data warehouse is timely, and we've seen this like all the time. We have pretty reasonably large customers now in our second year of go-to-market, like Spotify, GameStop, then BA just a couple weeks ago. And so we see like how their data is architected across all the different types of business units they have. They might have a mobile app, a web app, and then like a bunch of other smaller business units. The data warehouse is the only real place to actually manage that. And in the past, you'd have to hire a team of like 10 data engineers or more to manage that for you, full-time staff running your data warehouse for you. So The accessibility that you get from a cloud data warehouse where you simply just say, all right, give me a data warehouse, you get one and you saturate it with data, saves like millions of dollars in engineering spend.

It's a great point around the macro shifts that have occurred to be able to bring increased access to data and then the cost efficiency of having access to that data. And as the architecture behind this infrastructure has evolved, what is your stance on the semantic layer?

For everyone's context, the semantic layer is otherwise known as a metric layer, and it is a place for data teams to define different dimensions and joins between existing data they have as a metric. So that metric can then be used by other folks in the company or other data teams in the company. So for example, you define a metric like revenue, and it would have the definition of like, how do we compute revenue on the different tables that we have, like orders and users, so that we have a central definition of revenue. Right? For a company like Hightouch, actually the semantic layer is incredibly helpful because the cleaner the data is that you have, the more useful it is to then get that data into go-to-market systems, whether it's for sales, marketing, or finance. So we encourage pretty much every company to have like as clean model data as possible, and the semantic layer is only going to make that a little bit easier. We actually have our own small internal semantic layer that people use when they use our point-and-click product. So the way Hightouch usually works is You'll give us a SQL query, which is relatively for a technical user, and then we'll help you get the results of that SQL query into your end SaaS destination. Now we have a second product called High-Touch Audiences that's entirely point-and-click. And in plain English, you can define things like, show me a user that viewed a product but then did not buy, or show me all users that viewed more than 5 products, a customer segmentation like that. And it's all point-and-click, no SQL whatsoever. And it's powered by our own internal semantics there where a data team will define which tables matter to the marketer, which events on those tables are relevant in the marketer's user segmentation, and then expose a UI to the marketing team to build those user segments. At some point in time, as semantic layers get more mature, we would hope to integrate with them and power high-touch audiences based on existing semantic layers.

That's incredible. And I love getting to dive this nitty-gritty into the detail behind the product and then how you've bubbled that up into a go-to-market strategy. I was ferociously reading all of your marketing content and blogs preparing for these questions and the power of how you're defining some of these terms, unpacking where and why the end user should be paying for high touch and how they can even just be leveraging the tools they're already paying for better, just based on the resources you guys are putting out there.

There's tools that are well known, like Fivetran, dbt, Hex, that are clearly part of the modern data stack. And it's a kind of a, when you set up your data stack, you always buy these things or some version of these things in order to get started. And then there's a whole class of new softwares that I think are going to become really large, but we just don't know yet. And then there's a whole debate around should they all be one tool? Should they all be independent tools and different vendors? What's best actually for the end user? That is unresolved. dbt may argue that they should actually own many parts of the stack, including lineage, observability, and the semantic layer. And it's TBD whether they'll be able to execute there, but we're hopeful, right? Like the thing I like about the data stack community is that everyone's success leads to each other's success because we all fundamentally want more people to be in the modern data stack and therefore ready to use the modern versions of tooling. You can compare it to regular developer tooling for software developers. In the early days, it was all open source and it was like very niche, but now it's like super common to have CI, to have any sort of dev tool that you need.

You've mentioned a few companies already, so maybe if you could just reiterate what are the tools that you would most recommend for a company trying to push themselves closely into the modern data stack. And then the counter question I'm going to ask you in a second is where do you think there are still opportunities in the stack?

The first two I would set up if I was buying Snowflake and entering the modern data stack is Fivetrain and dbt. So Fivetrain would help you get data into your data warehouse, replicating things like Salesforce and your production database into the data warehouse. And then dbt would help you organize that data into clean models for other people to consume. And those are really the two. That are strictly necessary, I would say. And again, a little bit uncertain where there's opportunities. I think there's a lot left to be done in terms of productionizing the data warehouse. So usually the data warehouse has been seen as something where you run a nightly job, it takes something like 5 hours for that query to run, and the next day you get a report that helps you understand your business and how that business is doing. That's dramatically changed. The same 5-hour query can now run in 5 minutes on Snowflake, especially once you optimize it. And so there's definitely a lot of room to like productionize Snowflake for the purpose of things like building data apps, for things like compliance. Things like feature flags, A/B testing. And so that's, I think, where like we're seeing a whole new class of data stack tools popping up. And we're really excited because the more people start seeing their data warehouse as an operational layer rather than an analytics layer, the more they'll become like familiar with the fact that they can use it across their business and not just out of the data team. That's something that like Hitech has been evangelizing for the past couple years. The data warehouse should not be a walled garden just for the data team. It's owned by the data team and built by the data team. but to help the rest of the business. And so we want to make that accessible and available for everyone.

It's fun you mentioned feature flags. We're having the founder of LaunchDarkly on later this season, so can ask her some of these questions about what their modern data stack is looking like as well.

Yeah, and we integrate with LaunchDarkly, like we have customers sync data from their warehouse to LaunchDarkly to enable like, should this customer get the pro features in our product or just the free features?

Well, you've given us such a good view into the specific universe that Hightouch is spending their time solving problems for end users in. And it sounds like you're onboarding customers, continuing to double down post your exciting last Series B raise. But the world has changed a bit since November when you announced that raise. We're seeing all-time lows and drops in the stock market and an impending or kind of persisting crypto winter. So the macro conditions have definitely continued, or unfortunately have become more shaky than just a year ago. That, as entrepreneurs and as builders, impacts not only you, but it impacts your team. And so what advice would you have right now for entrepreneurs building in this space on how to continue setting up your growing team for success?

Efficiency becomes really top of mind in a market like this one. So in the past, it was grow at all costs. It doesn't really matter how much you spend as long as you see top line growth, you have a good business. And I think that's the number one thing that founders are becoming more acutely aware of, that I actually have to control spend in the process of making money. For us at Hightouch, we've actually always had that perspective that we're going to respond to what the business is capable of rather than blindly hiring a bunch of people or blindly spending a lot of money on sales and marketing. We're responding to what the market is ready for. We actually only had a team of 4 until January 2021. Now we have a team of 95, but we grew it in that much time. Because until then we weren't really sure exactly where to put the headcount and how to like productively use them to grow the company. Even though we have a team of 30 engineers, we reallocate them all the time to different parts of the product in order to become the most efficient. If we have an infrastructure team of let's say 10 people, an integrations team of 10 people, and a frontend team of 10 people, we might realize that actually like there's much more net new product development on the frontend team. So other companies might go out and hire new engineers to join the frontend team, and we might say for efficiency reasons, we're gonna reallocate our existing engineers instead. Instead. The truth is that like our business has not been affected that much by the market, especially in terms of customer growth. The rate that the market is growing for us is way, way higher than the amount that it's contracting. We really have not stopped growing the sales and marketing team whatsoever. In fact, we keep growing our sales headcount more quickly than we expected to. We just went from 3 sellers in the beginning of the year to 14 now, and so that's like in 8 months, I guess. And I think probably by the end of the year we'll have at least 18 to 20 sellers. And the only reason again there is that we see the pipeline or we see the leading indicators that show that there will be pipeline to close in Q4 and Q1, and then we hire accordingly. Building out sales capacity plans and financial plans and all those things, like, are not so relevant early stage, and they're not so important in a market where there's just free-flowing money. But eventually you do start caring about those things. And so you do want to make sure that every salesperson you hire can be productive and every marketing dollar you spend actually has a return on investment. So that's how we've grown the team for success. But it's really on founders to take on that ownership of making sure they check on those things, because no one else is going to do that for you.

Thank you for sharing how you think through account planning and interesting ways to make sure that there is a pipeline before you hire a salesperson and you have to think about the ROI on your resources. So we chatted a bit about the market macro conditions, but I'd love to get a sense of what's next for Hightouch and what's next for you, Kashish, personally.

We're super pumped to build out end interfaces for business teams. Everyone has a BI tool. That's where they go to see their data. And then they download a CSV in order to operate on that data. Hightouch wants to become the place where every business user goes to be able to take action on their data. So if I'm a marketer, let's say I wanna run an ad, I go to Hightouch, I build my user subset, and then I run my ad directly from Hightouch. I run my email campaign from Hightouch. Same goes for like a sales ops person wanting to create sales opportunities programmatically. Based on like QL scores. All that stuff is stuff that you can do today from iTouch, but building like end user interfaces to make that easier for sales and marketing folks to do, that's something that we've actually already been playing a part in for the last year. Warner Music Group was the first really large customer of our audiences product, and they have like thousands of marketers that will use the audiences product in order to actually run their day-to-day marketing campaigns. And so it's just great to see that we were able to grow out of the specific data end user community. And bring on the other business units in those companies to use the product. And then what we also expect to do over time is build more and more tailored marketing solutions that help us compete with Segment. We were essentially founded out of Segment, but the way their architecture was built and the product suite that they built was pretty different compared to how Hightouch works. And so with the power of the data warehouse, there's actually a lot more that we enable marketing teams to do than Segment allowed them to do because we fit into any data model. You could run a campaign for everyone in a workspace or just for individual users in the workspace, which was not possible before. Or you can see like how effective a campaign was based on the performance that's written back to the data warehouse. There's a lot of exciting things that we're excited to build for marketing teams specifically to displace this old architecture of customer data platforms. And then more personally, it's really just learning. Like for us to grow headcount as fast as we have, we've really had to transform how we think about being managers, How we think about hiring and managing execs. And it really changes our perspective on what's next. It used to be that we would operate day to day and, oh, what are we going to do this week? What are we going to do this month? And now we're thinking about things like 6 months out and thinking about how product helps us beat the market in 2024. And so it just gets like really exciting to be able to focus on the bigger picture and the longer term view. The main thing for me there is like upleveling myself and really just building out sales and marketing to be able to capture the opportunity ahead of us. And then the rest is in that process, trying to keep time for friends and family. I think one of the hardest things to do as a founder is you become so obsessed with your business that it's really difficult to spend time on anything else. And I think that's really dangerous. It's really dangerous because founders' identities will get wrapped up into the business. If Hitech is doing well, then I'm happy, or I'm doing well as a person. And because every single business in the world has ups and downs, it's pretty important to have your own identity and your own life outside of work. Something that we never really prioritized. I don't think any of my co-founders did, and we're probably willing to spend a little bit more time on that now that Hitech is in a good spot.

That's awesome. I can certainly resonate to the being obsessed with work and then also very much looking forward to the day where I can think in 6-month timelines as opposed to 1-week, 1-month timelines. So there's light at the end of the tunnel. You're living proof of it. So we have our final question. It's our hero question for the podcast. That question is, who is a woman who has had a profound impact on your life and your career?

In 11th grade, I met this woman named Karen Robinson, and she was truly inspirational. She won Woman of the Year in Technology, I think back in like 2012 or like 2010, and she ran a business called Nanolumens. It was actually the first place I ever worked as a marketing intern in 2013. And so I was a marketing intern at Nanolumens, and they built the first like flexible display. Half the billboards that you see in airports, stadiums, et cetera, they built those and they sell those all around the world. And it was inspirational to see like the way she would lead people and the way she would talk about management, building companies, and how she described that anything was possible. So for me as a high schooler at that time, it was just inspirational to see that like she was on her third business. I think she had built like multiple businesses over the course of years. She was on multiple boards, spent time mentoring high schoolers. She was really like the kind of person that had it all. So to be able to see that like, hey, Ashi, don't let anyone tell you that you can't do everything. Because I was like, hey, like, I was like, everyone's always trying to say be really good at something and I don't think that's for me. And she was like, yeah, it's not for me either. I was never the kind of person that wanted to be really good at one thing. I just wanted to be good at everything. And if you want to be that kind of person, then just say the thing that you're best at is being best at everything. It's like a little bit arrogant, right? I don't think I am that, but to have the permission to try and the permission to multitask and parallelize is really what she taught me. And I've carried that with me for a very long time. And she's still doing well. I still have— I'm still friends with her and I think she's like pseudo-retired now, but hopefully like she was able to mentor a lot of other high school students over the course of the years.

Thank you so much for sharing that, Kashish. And also thank you so much for just sharing your founding story, everything that's going on with Hitouch. This was such a fun conversation. We've loved having you on the podcast. So huge thank you for taking the time.

Of course. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode Tuesday, 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison McIlwain and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The5EC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.