Not an oxymoron: how the founding team built a $6B data company on scrappy principles
Portfolio | Writing | Data Teams | Business Intelligence
February 2024
Business Intelligence
The founding team at Tableau came out of Stanford University and moved to Seattle amid its tech boom with genuine foresight. They developed a drag-and-drop tool, later named VizQL, that combined the query and visual aspects of analysis. Today, the company makes up more than a fifth of the $30B business intelligence market.
Scrappy
The founding team at Tableau had few preconceptions about building a business. The group bootstrapped for nearly a decade until the company's IPO in 2013. As founding CEO Christian Chabot said in a recent interview, they had a "great skepticism for building a company and then selling it to money people." So they adopted principles like "thinking creatively, doing less with more, having to prioritize in a brutal way that actually creates healthy start-ups." None of those founding members were used to working at VC-funded start-ups, where you could throw money at problems. "None of us were been-there-done-that, public company, scale-at-size kind of people," according to Elissa Fink, the company's first marketing lead. Despite the self-imposed restrictions, the team thrived. "We had great team energy. We were this new team each trying to achieve something that was important. And we reinforced each other and encouraged each other through hard times," said Chabot.
Low Drama
Another key attribute of this team was their low-drama style. Bucking the trend common to some modern analytics teams, the founding team at Tableau never fought. Chabot remarked he "can't think of one instance where we had a fight." That was primarily driven by their mission-oriented culture. "That thrill of working in a team of extremely talented people with very low drama and very high ambition toward a goal we thought was important — that's one of life's greatest journeys."
Longevity
One other notable hallmark of the founding team at Tableau was their tenure. The several people that started with the company stayed on for 8–10 years. Christian and the founding team clearly hired for that. They also brought on young people with no more than 10–15 years of experience. Another way the team stayed together was by following data on how other start-ups grew. Chabot famously built an early Tableau dashboard of IPOs, allowing him to tell stories about their strategy — another notable trait of successful analysts: storytelling with data.
I admit I am taking a bit of a license here. The founding team at Tableau was not technically an analytics team. You could also credit their success to simply being in the right place — Stanford, Seattle — at the right time, when money was cheap after the financial crisis of 2008–9. Not to mention that these hallmarks faded as the company grew, eventually selling to Salesforce in 2019.
Regardless, the founding team at Tableau does exhibit some of the characteristics found in the best data teams: interdisciplinarity, scrappiness, and long tenure. As the early developers and marketers of VizQL, they probably have more in common with today's analytics teams than many give them credit for. Either way, the founding team at Tableau excelled thanks in part to their scrappy, low-drama style and their commitment to each other. It's a story of business intelligence.
Sources
- Tableau. (2021). Analyzing the History of Tableau Innovation. Tableau Blog.
- 6sense. (2024). Tableau Software Market Share.
- The Logan Bartlett Show. "Ep. 86: Christian Chabot (Co-Founder Tableau) on Operating Lessons from Scaling Tableau." (2023). Spotify.
- Built in Seattle. (2020). Spotify.