SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders 708: $35M Raised to Tell IT Departments What Alerts Are Important
Jul 2, 2017
26:57
Assaf Resnick. He's the founder and CEO of BigPanda, an algorithm-make IT operations platform that turns IT alert noise into insight, unifies fragmented operations and enables digital enterprises to attain dramatic or pretty high service levels. Prior to founding the company, he was an investor for Sequoia Capital where he focused on early stage companies across enterprise software, SaaS and the internet sector.
Famous Five:
- Favorite Book? – The Goal
- What CEO do you follow? – N/A
- Favorite online tool? — Salesforce
- How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5
- If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "Start a company early"
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 01:17 – Nathan introduces Assaf to the show
- 01:52 – Sometimes, Assaf would still ask himself why he left Sequoia
- 02:00 – Assaf spent 6 years in Sequoia and it was an opportunity of a lifetime
- 02:19 – Assaf started in Sequoia when he was 29
- 02:36 – Assaf was bitten by the entrepreneur bug, so he left Sequoia
- 03:30 – Assaf's stayed in Sequoia for personal career growth
- 03:43 – Sequoia is different from other VC firms
- 04:31 – For Assaf, Sequoia expresses the combination of opportunities in the market
- 05:33 – Assaf is proud of the deals that he had made with Sequoia
- 06:00 – Assaf found Snaptu to be an interesting deal they invested in
- 07:00 – BigPanda automates the ability of human-beings and IT operations to keep up with data centers that are radically evolved
- 07:50 – The big part of IT spending usually goes to the engineers
- 08:00 – In the data centers, they have to keep the software and infrastructure that is radically transforming running
- 08:40 – A data company needs to have a handful of tools, data centers and servers
- 09:15 – One of BigPanda's clients is a Fortune 50 and a large networking company
- 09:30 – The company now has SaaS offerings and gives the SLA (Service Level Agreement) that they promise to companies
- 10:15 – The company has teams of engineers in Ukraine, California and India that use 15 monitoring tools to see what is happening
- 10:37 – The company has 70K data points they need to keep track
- 11:05 – The amount of data engineers they need has become an issue
- 11:27 – The problems in the war room can be both preventative and reactionary
- 11:45 – BigPanda uses a lot machine learning and dynamic classroom instruction to get through the noise
- 12:10 – An alert can be a problem with the server and something that you can just leave out
- 13:31 – One should examine if the "if/then statements" are dynamic
- 13:45 – The "if/then statements" vary day by day, then variables change quickly
- 14:13 – BigPanda was launched in 2012
- 14:20 – BigPanda is a SaaS company which charges annually
- 14:45 – Pricing average
- 14:51 – BigPanda caters to very large companies
- 15:20 – Team size is 60
- 15:28 – BigPanda has raised almost $35M
- 15:46 – BigPanda has done a regional series B
- 16:08 – BigPanda partners with Sequoia, Mayfield and In Battery
- 16:28 – At the end of 2015, people started devaluing some unicorns
- 16:59 – When Assaf saw rain clouds forming, he thought it made sense to get a winter coat from a capital perspective
- 17:40 – BigPanda had plenty of pipelines
- 18:02 – Half of the company is based in Palo Alto and half is in Tel Aviv, Israel
- 19:03 – Half of the people are in engineering and product, the other half is marketing
- 19:49 – BigPanda is very disciplined with their model
- 20:39 – BigPanda has around 25 companies from Fortune 500
- 22:20 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
- If you've committed to always being there for your client, you better follow through on that.
- No matter how many engineers you have, there's always a chance of them missing a lapse in the data.
- Start your business as early as possible.
Resources Mentioned:
- The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
- Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
- Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
- Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
- Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
- Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives