Census: The Rise of Operational Analytics
By Sonya Huang and Mike Vernal on behalf of Team Sequoia
Today, we are thrilled to announce Sequoia’s partnership with Census.
When we first met Boris, he shared a seemingly simple problem. Let’s say you’re on the Sales team at Figma, and a customer’s account is coming up for renewal. Going into the conversation, you might want to know some facts: How many of their team members are using Figma and how many files have they created and shared? Who are your account champions and power users?
But Boris knew finding those answers wasn’t easy. The sales team tracks accounts in a CRM tool, and a product team tracks users in their analytics system. There’s no bridge between the two.
And as the Census team dug in, they realized this problem was getting worse. Due to proliferation of SaaS apps, business data was increasingly fragmented. And while data teams were unifying this information in the cloud data warehouse, it wasn’t making its way to CRMs, ERPs, HRIS and more — where it truly mattered.
Thus was born Census — the platform that brings critical business information from your data warehouse back into your operational systems.
The Last-Mile Solution for the Modern Data Stack
Today, most analytical data eventually flows from a cloud data warehouse into a business intelligence dashboard. But most users — sales reps, marketers, customer support agents — prefer to use their own operational tools instead. We believe Census can solve this last mile problem by syncing data directly from your warehouse into these systems.
Enterprises ingest analytical data from source systems using an ELT tool like Fivetran; they store that data in their Cloud data warehouse like Snowflake; they transform it from raw material into clean, useful information using dbt; they dashboard it via BI tools like Looker and Tableau. And now, they can operationalize data insights using Census.
Data practitioners often refer to Census as “reverse Fivetran.” Fivetran makes it easy to get your operational data into your warehouse with fully managed connectors. Census makes it easy to get that data back out into your operational systems.
The Rise of Operational Analytics
By closing this loop, we believe Census is creating a new category of operational analytics, where data analysts not only support internal analytics, but power the operations of the business. For data practitioners, Census is a breath of fresh air. After decades spent creating static dashboards, they now have an opportunity to use analytical data to drive core operational processes such as account lead scoring, account champion identification, support queue prioritization, financial billing automation and more. As Tristan Handy of dbt so aptly articulated, the rise of operational analytics unlocks “the ability for data/business analysts to program the entire business.”
Census is already taking off among the data-driven, product-led-growth companies inside and outside the Sequoia community. Figma is using Census to integrate product usage data into Salesforce for better bottoms-up selling. Loom is using Census to create a full 360-degree view of customer support tickets in Zendesk. Notion is using Census to score leads and segment their users directly in their sales and marketing tools. As bringing data to the teams that need it — where they need it — becomes a competitive necessity, we expect more and more enterprises to follow suit.
If you’re interested in trying the product, you can book a demo or start a free trial. And if you’re interested in joining the Census team, they are hiring across Engineering, Product, Marketing and Customer Success. We are thrilled to welcome Boris, Sean, Brad, Anton and the entire Census team into the Sequoia portfolio, and to support them as they create this new category and ensure data that once went stale in dashboards will be not only used, but very much alive and pulsing through the veins of operational systems.
