Fivetran was born out of co-founders Taylor Brown and George Fraser’s passion for building a product that is sensitive to the needs of data analysts in the real world. At first, the two wanted to “build a better BI tool,” but quickly found that they could instead disrupt the entire ETL market. In 2013, Brown and Fraser founded Fivetran out of Y Combinator.
With Fivetran, Taylor Brown and George Fraser built a tool with a unique ability that allows organizations to “effortlessly shift their business data into a cloud warehouse of their choice, removing the need for data replication, coding, maintenance and complex schemas.” Several companies have already embraced the tool and its ability to simplify tasks and processes for large organizations. These companies include Lime, Strava, and WeWork.
Taylor Brown says that loves building, and Fivetran is one of his many creations. For his work, he believes that the “three pillars of a great company as the customers, the employees, and the product.” At Fivetran, he and his team have built a “simple yet powerful product that is truly innovative and actually helps users solve a hard problem.”
Previously, Taylor Brown worked as a designer at North Social. Then, he became a member of the Y Combinator, out of which he and George Fraser started Fivetran. Brown is the Chief Operating Officer of Fivetran.
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Jerome Knyszewski: Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Taylor Brown: I co-founded Fivetran in 2012 with my longtime friend George Fraser, who is our CEO. I was raised in Boulder, Colorado and George grew up in New York, but we would see each other every summer. Our families share a cabin on a beautiful lake in Wisconsin. It’s an amazing story dating back four generations — all the way back to 1922. Every summer our families go on vacation there together.
Before Fivetran, George was a neuroscientist and I was a practicing artist, after earning my college degree in fine arts. It was actually an advantage that we didn’t know anything about data integration as it allowed us to think differently and come up with an entirely new approach to solving a very complicated business and technology problem. Legacy data management providers had built really complicated tools, and we wanted to do something the exact opposite. Our mission is to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity — and we are well on our way. It all goes back to how we built our technology platform in the early days.
Shortly after we decided to go into business together, we applied to and were accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator incubator program. We worked hard to determine our product market fit and started building our network, which proved to be invaluable — especially when it came to finding our initial investors.
We started with the idea to build a vertically integrated data analysis tool. We built many iterations of this product over the first two years and realized the huge unsolved problem that no one had figured out was the data integration component — and how to automate it and make it ridiculously simple for customers. So, we stripped everything else out and built our automated data integration tool, growing from a single customer in late 2015 to more than 1,600 today.
Jerome Knyszewski: Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
Taylor Brown: The toughest days were the early days, when we didn’t get much sleep. We had a “desk” made of boxes in the garage where we did our initial software coding. As for Y Combinator, it is ALL work. We found a funky, short-term rental in Mountain View (Silicon Valley), that we affectionately called the Moon Cottage — complete with shag carpet! George used to set our heater thermostat to 80 degrees to wake us up at 6:30 AM after crashing every night about 1 AM — we would literally wake up sweating! It’s still a ton of work today — but it’s a labor of love as we know we have built something special — that customers desperately need. And once they try Fivetran, they are “hooked” and end up increasing their data consumption with us.
Jerome Knyszewski: Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
Taylor Brown: We made lots of mistakes along the way to building Fivetran so there is no one mistake that stands out. There are small mistakes, which we learned from and moved forward. Learning was the key thing that helped us succeed at this time.
One example that comes to mind is, early in our journey it was difficult to find product-market-fit. We didn’t ask prospects if they would spend money on the product ideas we had. As such, we always got lukewarm positive affirmations that we were going the right direction. Once we asked if people would pay for our product, we got much better feedback and direction. Had we started doing this sooner, we would have accelerated our product-market fit by at least 1 year or more out of 2.5.
There is a great book about this called “Monetizing Innovation.”
Jerome Knyszewski: Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. The title of this series is “How to take your company from good to great”. Let’s start with defining our terms. How would you define a “good” company, what does that look like? How would you define a “great” company, what does that look like?
Taylor Brown: Honestly, I would suggest reading “From Good to Great” or “Built to Last” by Jim Collins. He has amazing directions of what are the key things to do to go from good to great, and in which order, with amazing examples.
Jerome Knyszewski: Extensive research suggests that “purpose driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. Can you help articulate for our readers a few reasons why a business should consider becoming a purpose driven business, or consider having a social impact angle?
Taylor Brown: Yes! Early on, when we were small, we had more of an unspoken purpose that was just part of our collective knowledge. This came from years of working together, and talking daily about our approach towards helping our customers.
Once we were larger, we realized that this collective knowledge was breaking down because we had 3–4 offices worldwide, and 150+ employees, so we sat down with the executive team, and spent a day writing down our Core values, core purpose, BHAG (big hairy audacious goal), and flywheel. Everyone on the team read the books “Good to Great”, “Built to Last”, and “Turning the Flywheel.” The output of this exercise was a really great core purpose statement that has been a north star for the business. That statement is: make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity. There are a lot of similarities in what we are doing and what the energy companies did in the early 19th century.
Jerome Knyszewski: As you know, “conversion” means to convert a visit into a sale. In your experience what are the best strategies a business should use to increase conversion rates?
Taylor Brown: In my experience, increasing conversions is really a science, and can vary widely by channel or segment. In all cases, the key is to really understand your customer’s buyer journey, their needs, their role at the company, and the things that they need to know before moving to the next stage. If you can really understand all of these things, then you can work to deliver all of the right things at the right time to increase conversions. This is a very high leverage and important task when optimizing any funnel, and scaling a business.
Jerome Knyszewski: Of course, the main way to increase conversion rates is to create a trusted and beloved brand. Can you share a few ways that a business can earn a reputation as a trusted and beloved brand?
Taylor Brown: I’m not a brand pro and it varies from industry to industry and B2C vs B2B, but in general, having a strong brand means having a recognizable, trusted, and motivational brand.
Being recognizable is key to capturing your audience’s attention at the right time. Trusted means that your audience believes what you are telling them. Motivational means that your brand somehow motivates them to envision a future with your product that is somehow better for them. This could be a razor company where you have purchased razors your entire life, so you trust it, and know that your face will be perfectly smooth in the future. Or this could be an automated data integration company like Fivetran, where you know that you and your company will have reliable, and accurate access to your data in the future to drive data-driven decisions that ultimately helps you to outperform your competitors.
Jerome Knyszewski: How can our readers further follow you online?
Taylor Brown: You can find me on Twitter, @taylorwcbrown, or on LinkedIn.. Another great place is Fivetran’s website, Fivetran.com, or our blog at Fivetran.com/blog.
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring and informative. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this interview!
Taylor Brown: Thank you!
