it’s respectable.” Before Tableau, Chabot was the co-founder (also with Stolte) of BeeLine Systems, a route-mapping software firm that was bought by Vicinity in 2000. Partly as a result of that exit, he spent some time as an associate partner at Mobius Venture Capital. I asked what lessons he learned from his time in VC. “When you work in venture capital for a couple of years, you really get to see the revolving door of American entrepreneurs trying to pitch the next great idea,” says Chabot. “If there’s one theme I observed, it’s that they are way too focused on raising venture capital. Here [at Tableau], we’re focused on customers first and venture capital second.”
Chabot seems satisfied with how Tableau has managed its funds to date. The company was profitable every quarter of last year. “Like VMware and Google, which were similarly capital-efficient, we had the benefit of starting a business of commercializing something with a multi-year research effort behind it…We truly do believe that running a fiscally responsible business, and not spending too much too fast, is the right way to build a growth venture. We don’t have the philosophy that raising money is a big business milestone.”
Nevertheless, the latest round of funding from NEA will allow Tableau to cover larger sales territories and expand its product lines. The startup has 75 employees now, and plans to double its size over the next year. Most of that expansion will be in the U.S. sales force, Chabot says, but it is also building its international sales. “In the greater Seattle area, we’re probably one of the most aggressively recruiting technology companies,” he says. “There aren’t a lot of high-growth technology companies in Seattle with truly interesting technology, extremely large available markets, and management teams dedicated to building a public company.”
As for the competition in data-visualization software, Chabot says, “Where are their products? Tableau’s the one company that actually has a product, you can download it in 90 seconds and apply it to your own data. We’re the Adobe of data visualization. We make the product to allow people to go do something amazing.” Further on the Adobe comparison, Chabot notes that Charles Geschke, the chairman and co-founder of adobe joined Tableau’s board of directors last year. “We sell software to businesses and to people,” Chabot continues. “It’s like Adobe’s business model. The deeper question is how it all works. We do full-function, free trials for everyone. So many products out there that historically help people understand data and create reports, they take literally weeks to get up and running, then weeks to deploy, then to do design configuration, then you need to hire a specialist.”
Who exactly are Tableau’s customers? Chabot says the sales strategy was not to pursue niche markets. “Every single week, we sell to doctors, attorneys, nurses, scientists, sales guys, marketers, three-letter secret intelligence organizations, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo…Early on I was nervous about not having a vertical-industry approach… but it worked.” Now Tableau has tens of thousands of users in more than 35 countries, he says.
Ultimately, says Chabot, Tableau’s goal is to allow customers to “create these unbelievable and beautiful representations of data at your desk in 90 seconds…and share with other people, because they’re succinct, they look good, and they’re accurate.” Tableau also wants to help people and companies serve up their data and “publish live interactive visuals to the Web,” he says. If its brand of data visualization takes off and becomes mainstream, not just business and analyst-oriented, it might just change the way we all look at the world.
