Creating the Modern CFO Dashboard with the Co-Founders of Mosaic

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SDTechOS with your host, Neil Bloom.

Come on.

Startups get the party. Startups get the.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Thanks to our friends at Cox Business for being an instrumental resource to our startup and tech community here in San Diego. As a partner in San Diego Startup Week, quick pitch and top tech awards, Cox Business has helped our ecosystem grow into the community it is today.

And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host and I am joined today by the co founders of Mosaic, Joe, Bij and Brian. Guys, thanks for being on the show.

Thanks for having us.

Appreciate it.

Stoked to tell the story that a few of us have heard and learned from a few years of getting to know you. And why don't you, Joe, quickly give us an overview of what Mosaic is.

Yeah. So Mosaic, we are building the next generation of technology for the modern day cfo. So we think of ourselves as a strategic finance platform and really what our app does is it connects to all the systems that business uses to run their company on a daily basis and we help synthesize really insightful analytics and financial plans to users that are non technical or familiar with the domain.

Awesome. I know all three of you have some strong finance backgrounds, so we obviously can see where some of this is coming from. So we're going to dive into what Mosaic is in depth. But we want to get to know you guys a little bit. Your backgrounds, how you got to know each other. How are you guys? How's it going building this company in.

Rapid growth right now during COVID It's pretty awesome. I feel pretty fortunate to be waking up down here in San Diego, where I'm from, being close to family, building a company that we're passionate about, that we've been thinking about kind of day in, day out for a decade. And doing it with best friends is pretty cool. So life is good, all things considered, in the world right now. No complaints.

That's awesome. Brian, where is headquarters in San Diego?

It actually was in Encinitas. We had a small, tiny little office for a while, but we just moved down to just off Del Mar Heights. So kind of brand new office. It's pretty awesome. Haven't really used it because we got it a couple months ago. So no one's really coming into the office. But we're excited for Covid to end and get in there.

Yeah. That sounds like you're already getting. Some of you getting in because you're getting vaccinated. Is that right, Joe?

That's right. Doing some hard yards and volunteering, helping the community to get the vaccine.

Good on you. I'm doing that. That's awesome. So back at you, Joe. Are you from San Diego or where are you from originally?

So I'm actually the one guy of the three of us that's not born and bred in San Diego. I'm from the East Coast, New York. Moved out to work at a company called Palantir up in the Bay Area, which is where I met Bij and Brian. And on the weekends, they used to fly me down to San Diego and we would go to Charger games and just hang out in Carlsbad at the beach and just absolutely fell in love with the place. So when we were thinking about where best to start a company, this was, you know, near the top of the list.

Oh, that's rad. You all met at Palantir or. No, it sounds like Brian and Bij. Maybe you guys knew each other even before then?

We didn't, no, no. And actually we didn't know each other, so it was pretty funny when we met at Palantir in 2012. We're working on the same broad finance team together and just kind of clicked from Day one. And so became best friends in and outside of work. And then it was obviously a small world when I found out that Brian was also from San Diego. So when we started Mosaic, got permission from our significant others and had to bring the band back together down here in San Diego.

Got it. Did you find. Were you living anywhere near each other where you grew up in San Diego, or were you pretty far apart in town?

So I was in the Del Mar area in bc. You were in Scripps Ranch, right?

Yep, that's right.

Still in San Diego, but a bit of distance between us.

We did have some mutual friends, but never knew each other.

Okay, well, that's fun. Were you all under the same team at Palantir or you weren't focused on different parts of finance?

So we were all under the same finance umbrella, but the three of us kind of had special unique skill sets. So 2012 was a special year for Palantir. We had just gotten a billion dollar valuation. Palantir for the first time was building out like a true proper finance team. And the three of us were lucky enough to kind of join forces at the same time. And from there, really the rest is history. We grew from billion dollar valuation to 20, grew the team from a handful of folks to more than 50, and got to really experience a lot of really cool phases of hyper growth across financial planning and analysis and fundraising, all the way to accounting and some fun tax stuff as well. As much as that sounds weird, Bij.

I'm sure working on this idea, the three of you, after hours, of course, always like, when did it really start to feel like you were. It wasn't just an idea and you were talking about things, but like, this is something you should jump in and do.

So just to kind of set the stage. Palantir in 2012. We're coming into this finance org. I think I was like the sixth or seventh hire. Joe and Brian shortly thereafter. And we're a global company. We're spending well into the hundreds of millions of dollars at this point. There's no concept of a budget. I built the first one with Brian by hand in Excel. The books haven't been closed in a year. We're on QuickBooks, which is crazy for an international company because QuickBooks doesn't support multiple subsidiaries. So there's just a ton of work going on. And we're getting calls from the C suite every single week. Lights are shutting off in offices because we haven't paid bills, got millions of dollars of ar outstanding thing. There was just a lot of Work to do. And so kind of over the first couple years, it was a lot of kind of shoring up our systems, Moving on to NetSuite, taking advantage of Salesforce, moving us on to workday. And of course, in the background, you've got this business that's just growing like a weed. We're doubling every three, six months in terms of expenses, headcount, revenue. And I think from day one, it was kind of a unique circumstance for us. Typical finance teams, they kind of scale linearly with the size of the org. And so for a company that's hiring 200, 500, 700 people a year, you would expect the finance team to grow proportionately. But for us, it was like, okay, B.C. o', Brien, you guys are getting one hire this year, you're getting maybe two people at the most. How are you going to solve that problem? And so, BC I'll let you chime in here. But it became quite obvious to us that we weren't going to solve it through traditional methods, not through bodies, not by cranking in Excel. We actually had to take a data driven approach and become technical.

Yeah, and I'll jump in there. As Bij mentioned, we built the first budget in Excel, but the company was so massive and growing so quickly that literally just couldn't handle the size of the data we wanted to pull into Excel. So we had to set up our own internal database. And this was when Tableau was really just getting rolling back in 2012. So we set up a database, kind of wrote all our custom code to pull it all together, sat Tableau on top of it to just visualize it so we could actually give transparency to the business, to the C suite, so you can see what's going on. And that kind of like need that came out very quickly at the beginning was like, wow, actually we can get a lot of scale by just doing things. A data driven approach, setting up a database, kind of having transparency to data and actually sending it around to different department heads so they can log in and see their headcount, tracking their budget, how they're tracking against the forecast, real time. So that kind of just started us down this path. And I think over the years we just refined it at Palantir and basically had the entire company logging into an internal version of what Mosaic is today to some extent. Now there's a lot of stuff we're doing now that we didn't do then, but that's kind of how a lot of this idea came about. We were just solving a problem and didn't really think of it as, hey, this is a cool product. In fact, even when we left Palantir, we weren't like, hey, let's go build this company. We were just kind of like this is what you have to do to solve the finance problem at Scale for Hyper Growth Companies. And then we actually left Palantir to be heads of finance at our own kind of other VC backed companies. That's when we really were like, hey, everything we did at Palantir, we need to do it here as well. And that's when it was kind of the idea came to the forefront.

Got it. So you all went off on your own to different companies, still saw that it's big problem, if not even bigger at companies who don't grow even nearly as fast as Palantir. Three strong finance backgrounds. How did you draw straws on who's going to work on what? Or did you find some technical help and that kind of stuff? Like what did you go work on first between the three of you?

Well, the first thing that we worked on was recruiting Brian. So Bij and I came together and we knew that we needed BC he was going to be the missing puzzle piece. So it took lots of steaks and wine dinners to get him to join the company. But Bij and I, we were, we were really good at finding customers, knowing the pain point and getting investors to back the idea while we were still trying to get Brian to join and write some code for us. So we got those things in a really good place, got some backing, made some really good early hires and then found Brian to help.

That's awesome. When did you actually take the leap, pull the band aid off and leave your jobs and say we're all in on this? Was there a specific milestone or did you say we just got to do it to force this to happen?

Yeah, so Joe and I, actually the three of us had kind of started talking about it late 2018. I think I was the first one to actually quit my job in late 2018. Was up in the Bay Area at the time and so moved down to San Diego first with my wife. Early Q1 Joe was still full time at his gig, but we were, we were pretty serious about it and again, the three of us were talking often. Brian had a cliff that he needed to meet at his current gig and so the timing just wasn't quite right. We incorporated the company I think in April and then Brian joined us in June. So really I'd say we started in early 2019, but we didn't really Have a company in any sense with engineers and kind of code until June of 2019. Got it.

Okay. And who were some of the first customers and size of customer and like other kind of little profiles about them that you went after as first users.

So I think it's worth talking about our North Star here at Palantir. By the time we left, the company was almost 2,500 folks. We're doing 6,700 million a year in revenue. And fundamentally with Mosaic, I think we believe that the further up market you go, the more complex this problem is, the more valuable it is to solve. The higher the pain is for the customer. So the more more they're willing to pay. But of course you got to work your way up there. So we started again. It's me and Joe, two non technical co founders. Brian's the only one that can code here. So it was leveraging our connections, just trying to get in the door, trying to get folks to believe that we could. We were planning on building a company and software around the things that we said we could do. So I think they're our first customer. Before we tech, before we had A team was 13 employees. A Series A Andreessenbeck company up in San Francisco. But really, really cool. And we should definitely talk about kind of the progression of the types of customers that we've been starting to go after over the last year and a half.

Yeah. Do you want to touch on that, Joe or Brian?

Yeah. So like Bij was saying, our bread and butter was those Series A customers that were early on, they just raised some money and they needed to figure out how they were going to scale and where that money was actually going to go in a coherent way. Since then, we've started to work with larger and larger customers. So moving more towards mid market Series B Series C customers. We're fortunate enough to be working with a few unicorns today, but that's where the real value lies. Like Bij was mentioning, when those big meaty customers.

I'd say there's another shift too. Obviously the meatier the customer, the more complex the problems, the more they want to slice and dice and just the nuances to their data. But another one too is when you first start out, like we knew every single user and we were just like slacking with them all the time. So we kind of really high turnaround and really just close. And now we have customers that are adding their own users and we don't know who they are. They're kind of doing their own thing, which is truly what you want to get to with software. But yeah, interesting transition as you grow in terms of onboarding users and scale and just the different things that crop up.

Yeah. And different interactions with your customer. Now, right where you used to like, hey, we just loaded this feature. Quickly tell us what you think. Where now it's like a little bit arm's length away, I'm sure it feels like.

Yeah, it's funny that you bring that up. We're just last week actually talking with Steve, our head of CS, and trying to figure out now that we've got 50, 60 some customers, we used to be able to just slack them, hop on a zoom and tell them about a feature. And how do we do that when we're pushing amazing code, adding huge features every two weeks into the app? How do you tell 5060 soon to be 100 customers at scale? An interesting problem to solve and something we're trying to actively figure out right now.

Sure. And I'm sure the business model's got to iterate too. Right now you have enterprise, you've got SMB, and that kinds of things. Have those pivoted in terms of how the customers have utilized and the size and needs as well.

Yeah, I think one of the interesting things there is again, the further up market you go, the more interesting this problem is. So even a year ago Today, I'd say Q1, 2020, really our largest customer at the time was 30, 40 people. And so it's been neat to see as the products matured, we're moving up market. Our sweet spot right now is probably late Series B, Series C on average, where you don't just have a CEO who we were selling into a year ago, but now you've got not just a VP of finance, an entire finance team. And so we're starting to see some pretty interesting use cases that we didn't really think through at the beginning, which is how do you get accountants looking in Mosaic, actually getting visibility into month unclosed before the month is over, using it for their flux analysis to kind of spot outliers and then the business aspect of it as well. I think one of the kind of the fundamental things that we believe is the place that finance is doing their work is the same place that the business should collaborate with finance. And so from day one, typically, onboarding the customer means getting the CEO, getting the heads of different departments in there, giving them real visibility into their area of the business. And so some. Some pretty interesting workflows there that I think are very atypical for any other Finance software that I'm aware of.

And so with the recent round, which congratulations, raising some capital, which not the milestone isn't the raise, it's that you have growth and therefore let's go get some more money to then grow even more. Obviously based on kind of the way that you just said talking about your customer and looking back at your North Star, like what does growth look like over these next few years for you guys?

I think we think about, or at least I think I don't want to speak on behalf of Joe and Brian, but I think about the business through three people, product and customers. And so people is our team and we've made a pretty big push. The team was right around 1112 folks a year ago. Today we're in the high 30s. We had an all hands. I think we had 36 people on the call yesterday, which is pretty neat. We're going to continue to slowly grow the team. I think we'll be somewhere between 50 and 70 by the end of the year. From a customer standpoint, we also want to continue moving up market as well. So would love to be Joe mentioned we've got a couple unicorns. We'd love that to kind of be the typical customer that we're going after a year from now. And then from a product standpoint, finance becomes kind of different. Strategic finance becomes different over time. Goes from being kind of a single player. Hey, me as the cfo, let me interact with the CEO to kind of much more of a multiplayer game that involves the business as the business is scaling. And so there's a whole bunch of product work, not just complexity around subsidiaries, currencies, but more collaboration based features as well that we're going to continue to add in to kind of support us moving up market and following that North Star.

Awesome. I have to ask, do you have any San Diego based tech companies as customers?

We do. Are we allowed to say names, Joe, or.

No, we can't. But we do have a handful of folks that you do know.

Great. Because if not, and for everyone who's not yet, let's call them out or you know, there's a rallying cry to come. Check out Mosaic.

Yeah. And so three come to mind. And the thing I'll say is the San Diego tech community has been amazing. There was a time again we didn't have a product, we didn't have a team. Got one of our first customers who was San Diego based. You've probably talked to him, you've probably had him on your podcast, Neil. And the community is Just so welcoming. And from day one down here, it's just been cool to be a part of it and see it grow. And so really fortunate to have three San Diego based customers. And just cool to see how much the community's grown in the two years that we've been down here.

Yeah, the last two years especially, it's just like the community itself, right? Like talent's moving here, capital's chasing that and companies are just hitting this in these next inflection points. I'm sure that's got to feel good, coming back to hometown to feel that. But you know, being born and raised here, you got your local haunts for eating too. We got to know like where, where are some go to taco spots. I'm going to go to you first, Brian, for sure.

So my go to is Santana's carne asada fries for sure. My favorite.

Okay, good one. Joe, have you found some favorites yet?

I've been hitting them all, I gotta say. And not to be controversial here, but I'm more of a burrito guy than tacos.

Okay.

I love the taco stand on Encinitas Boulevard. I think that one's really good. I'd have to put that up at the top, although the line is a little bit longer than I would want it to be.

Speaking of Encinitas, have you had Los tacos yet?

No, I haven't.

Oh, good one. At Encinos Boulevard and El Camino.

Perfect.

Kind of like the taco stand in their style. Bij, what about you?

Definitely gonna have to check out Los tacos. I'm only a couple minutes away, but I think me, for sentimental value, definitely not the best tacos. But a place that I've been going since I was a kid is Roberto. Specifically the one next to the coast in Solana Beach. Just has a fond place in my heart. So not the best tacos and burritos out there at this time, but love them nonetheless.

Hey, there's the right taco for the right time. You know, we got our late night tacos, we got our high end tacos. That's okay.

That's right.

Well, guys, it's great to have you on here, but really, more importantly, it's great to have you building great company in San Diego. So keep up the great work. We're stoked to continue to cheerlead and be fans of what you guys are building and helping so many of our other companies. So thank you.

Thanks, Neil.

Thanks.

Thank you. Appreciate you having us on.

Thanks for joining us on the tacos and Tech Podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter Neil Bloom as well as Fresh Brewed Tech and Tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

You know we got it.

Hey.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech. We got it.