Why I’m so excited to join Chartio
Last week I started a new job with Chartio, a San Francisco based company whose product I’ve raved about for a while. This is the biggest life changing decision I’ve made since I decided to leave Rackspace and I am sure it will surprise many of my friends and former colleagues. I wanted to take the time to write about why I made this decision and why I’m stoked about Chartio.
I’ve spent the last two years consulting for a few fast-growing startups in San Antonio via my connection with Pat Matthews, my friend and former co-founder of our first company, Webmail.us. I spent the most time working at Filestack as a consultant on a number of projects. One of my favorite projects involved working closely with their data analyst on improving their data platform. The first thing I quickly learned was how critical a product called Chartio was to her job.
My first impression of the product was simply ‘wow’. I was blown away at how easy it was to create incredibly sophisticated reports, charts, and dashboards with a simple drag and drop interface. Chartio is not only simple and beautiful, but it is also incredibly powerful. Getting insights use to take hours via programming or Excel copy/pasting, now it can be done in minutes or even seconds with Chartio.
This past spring, after I had been working with Filestack for about a year, Brian Hartsock reached out to me and said his time with Tilt was coming to an end. They were being acquired by AirBnB and he wasn’t going to join. Brian was one of the first engineers we hired at Webmail.us. I worked with Brian for 10 years at Webmail.us and Rackspace. He’s an amazingly talented engineering leader and an even better friend. We began meeting regularly to brainstorm new startup ideas. More than anything, we knew we wanted to work together again.
We founded a new company in June and started talking to as many fast-growing companies as we could. We traveled to Austin, San Antonio, and San Francisco. Our mission was to determine how many companies were having real pains related to their data analytics platform and if we could help in some way. We specifically focused on the backend engineering work required in order to fully take advantage of products like Chartio.
We had two big breaks. The first is that our other co-founder, Bill Boebel, now CEO of Pingboard, needed real help in this area. They were constrained by their current analytics provider and needed something more flexible. We felt we were a perfect fit for what his team needed and were super-pumped that we would find lots of other companies like Pingboard.
The second big break almost didn’t happen. Pat had heard our pitch and immediately wanted to introduce us to Dave Fowler, CEO at Chartio. Pat knew Dave well from being an investor in Chartio. I told Pat that I wanted to meet Dave but didn’t feel like we were ready. We saw companies like Chartio as potentially huge partners. Us powering the backend of the data house, Chartio powering the frontend. But we were only a few weeks into our startup. We had no product, no demo, just a bunch of interviews and a sketch of what we wanted to do. I told Pat I really appreciated the offer but didn’t want to blow the first meeting.
Luckily, Pat went ahead and made the intro despite my concerns. We had an introductory video call that I was really nervous about. I was worried Dave would see us as competitors or tell us why our great idea is actually a bad idea. But the conversation went well and we agreed to fly out to San Francisco to do a face-to-face meeting. Dave was more than generous and agreed to spend a 1/2 day with us at the whiteboard.
A month later we were in San Francisco at the Chartio office discussing our idea and how we could work together. I would say the meeting went OK but was not great. I could see we all believed in the same vision but exactly how to work together wasn’t coming together. I was thinking maybe this was a wasted trip.
But we flew back home with one main takeaway: let’s keep talking. After several weeks of meetings, brainstorming and interviews, Dave made us an offer to put our startup on hold and come work for Chartio full-time. It was an opportunity we simply couldn’t turn down.
So why join Chartio? It was in some ways a hard decision and in others a very easy one. It was only hard because we had made a decent amount of progress with our new company, but the reality is we were only about a month into it and stopping now wouldn’t actually be that difficult logistically. Mentally, however, it’s a very hard choice to make.
The decision is an easy one considering the opportunity in front of Chartio. Data analytics for everyone. Imagine being able to unlock access to data for everyone in the company. Companies today believe they need developers, data scientists, or analysts to get the answers they are seeking. That’s like saying only a few people in a company are allowed to use Excel!
Yet this is where we find ourselves in 2017. Too many companies rely on data analysts within the company to query their data and create reports, charts, and dashboards. What if we changed this and enabled anyone in the company to access their data? This is the opportunity in front of Chartio and it is huge.
This is why I’m so excited to join Chartio. This and many other reasons. I love how it’s a small (30-ish people), scrappy, fast-growing, and profitable company. I’m excited to partner with Brian on building amazing product and engineering teams. You can feel that they are on the verge of something big and need just a few pieces to fall into place to really take off.
One final piece that I’m excited to announce is that we will be building out an engineering team in Blacksburg, VA. This is a big deal for Blacksburg (and Chartio). I’m incredibly bullish on the talent in Blacksburg and hope that we can build a team here on the same caliber as we did with Webmail.us. More on our Blacksburg plans in a future post.
Like all companies, Chartio has its fair share of issues too. It’s far from perfect. But this is also what makes it attractive. A perfect company doesn’t need our help. Opportunity lies in the challenges that need to be overcome. I’m excited to be at a place that I feel like I can come to work everyday and make a real impact. I look forward to growing and building a team that feels the same way.
I’ve just finished my first two weeks at Chartio. I spent the first week in San Francisco learning as much as possible. I have been really impressed by the team. Everyone has not only been super helpful but I can tell they are passionate about making customers happy. This aligns well with my own personal values of teamwork and customer focus, so it has been a really energizing start.
There’s a lot of work to do but I hope to find time every so often to write about our progress and share it here. If you are interested in joining Chartio, email me at kevin@chartio.com!