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.

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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

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Referenced:

• BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery
• Hotel Tonight: https://www.hoteltonight.com/
• Omni: https://omni.co/
• Tableau: https://www.tableau.com/

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Where to find Brett Berson:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/

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Where to find Colin Zima:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/drinkzima?lang=en
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinzima/

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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

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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