How to leverage intuition, customer support, and raw effort | Colin Zima (Omni & Looker)

Colin Zima is the co-founder and CEO of Omni, a business intelligence tool that has raised over $26.9m. Prior to starting Omni, Colin was Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker, which was acquired by Google for $2.6b. Colin was an early employee at Looker, and stood up its high-touch customer support arm, which turned into a cornerstone competitive advantage for the company. — In today’s episode we discuss: Lessons from Looker When, why and how to invest in white-glove customer support Tactics for scaling high-touch customer support Colin’s intuition-based approach to product How Looker hit their goals for 24 quarters in a row The founding story of Omni Colin’s hot takes on picking startups, hiring PMs, and more — Referenced: BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery Hotel Tonight: https://www.hoteltonight.com/ Omni: https://omni.co/ Tableau: https://www.tableau.com/ — Where to find Brett Berson: Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ — Where to find Colin Zima: Twitter: https://twitter.com/drinkzima?lang=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinzima/ — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:30) Colin's unique entry into Looker (04:35) How Colin talks to users (08:20) How Colin's scope at Looker expanded (10:53) Why and how to provide white-glove customer support (20:25) Which companies should invest heavily in customer support? (22:49) Hiring for and hiring from customer support (27:40) The #1 thing for making customer support effective at scale (29:32) The culture of customer support at Omni (32:57) Insights on product strategy (41:33) The role of intuition vs data in product decisions (44:25) The merits and downsides of an intuition-driven approach to product (48:36) Insights from hitting every goal for 24 quarters straight (55:07) The founding story of Omni (58:10) How Colin maintains intellectual honesty as a founder (60:02) How Colin thinks about what to copy vs not copy from Looker (63:25) How to pick which startup to join (66:07) The most underrated trait in early stage startup employees (68:11) Colin's take on founder-market-fit (69:42] Unpopular opinion on how to hire good PMs (72:28) The people who made an outsized impact on Colin's career