Why did we raise now ? CEO Backstage Call 📞

0:00hello Jordan speaking here what can I do for you Jordan it's ducking awesome to have you here mother duck launched its private beta in June and the public beta last September what have we learned since these two launches yeah sure um yes I'm I'm excited to try out this uh this new format this should be this should be fun uh so yeah we've been

0:20public for I guess it's a few months now and uh you know we really kind of wanted to be sort of building in public we launched the thing that we thought was sort of the minimum minimum viable minimum like interesting useful useful product and uh we've been trying to get feedback so since the you know since the

0:37launch we had uh we had about 2,000 users by kind of the end of September you know a lot of those people were just kicking the tires they're like a lot of those people were sort of using um you know lightweight dashboarding you know simple simple analytics stuff uh especially so are what we what we kind of launched initially is is uh is kind

0:57of suited suited for that we have you know stable ize the product and and uh and improve on it we have a lot broader Ambitions as well are some of the interesting use cases around people sort of building applications that uh their end users they needed to show they needed to show data to their end users and uh I think mother duck works really

1:16well with with that and we have some real differentiators for that you know including like our hybrid um our hybrid architecture where we can actually push data down to the end user um because you know if you if the uh execution is on the in the user's own browser then you know the latency is going to be much

1:38better for the user so the user is going to be happier and you know you basically don't have to pay for cloud resources while you're while you're doing that so like you know it's it's great for the for the vendor as well so we have a number of initial design Partners we've been working really hand inhand with

1:51those design partners and you know just trying to build in their feedback andove the robustness of the system uh about a month ago we did our series B announcement and after that series B announcement we got another another thousand users so we now have over like we just crossed the 3,000 user Mark uh a couple days ago and at the same time you

2:10know we also announced um quietly announced our pricing just because we we we'd heard some people being like hey this seems really cool but uh I can't really use something that I have no idea what it's going to cost me because like it might be incredibly expensive and in that case not a non-starter and so we kind of announced you know this is how

2:28the pricing model is going to work and I think that was did a lot to reassure people that this should be you know very inexpensive compared to other other options regarding the series B specifically why did we raise now are we hiring more ducks or mother duckers um good question we you know we have you we raised we raised a decent

2:48amount of money uh you know previously and we've been pretty conservative with how we've been deploying deploying that like we raised um you know our series a in November and we still had almost all of it we um we had six years worth of Runway actually in in May but we you know a couple of VCS approached us and

3:10and said hey you know we'd love to do your series B been saying like no no no we're not raising we're not raising we're going to wait until you know probably next year but kind of the the terms were what we would have wanted to get had we waited till next year and so like taking the money while it's

3:25available you know makes makes sense um if of the valuation that you that you'd want and it's with a good partner and it's with you know somebody that you can that you can trust and really the the thing that's going to allow us to do is it's going to allow us to just go faster the opportunity here with you know with

3:43duck DV and with you know sort of building a a new type of data warehouse is is enormous and there's lots of pieces of that and there's just a lot of stuff that we know that we have to build and so um this lets us sort of go go faster and with more with more confidence into you know into the future

4:01it makes things harder down down the future down the road because we you know in order to get to series C you have to sort of get you know have have even have even more but I I I do think that you know we're building an infrastructure product it's it's expensive to build an infrastructure product um you know

4:18somebody I I I saw a quoted the other day said you know it takes $10 million to build a to build a database um you know to build a database as a service probably takes another another you know 1010 million dollar so the other companies out there have have a ton of money in order to sort of play that game

4:35you kind of it helps to have have a pretty you know pretty Deep Pockets um even though we you know we still do have to be Scrappy we still want to be conservative in how we're how we're approaching approaching things but you know we're growing we're probably doubling our our uh our engineering team in the next uh in the next few months

4:53you know which you know has its own set of challenges and how do you uh you know how do you scale an organization thanks for these insights last question what's the one thing you are looking forward for the next coming months I think the biggest thing is just figuring out how like how to get to the next level of scale obviously we need to

5:15solve problems of how do we make this thing you know something that customers need customers love you know customers are like hey this is like this is we this is amazing and and uh and that we want us to talk about mother du the way people talk about duct Deb and um and

5:34you know there's there's stuff to figure out in in that area but I think that the kind of the more the kind of the more critical thing is just okay we're gonna we're going to be at 50 50 people and in just a few months some of the processes and the way we do things and the way we

5:49the way we work are they're harder to scale I think it's more important to sort of be really C crystal clear about strategies and Phil philosophies of you know just how we do how we do things at mother dock how we make decisions and it's sort of the getting the like kind of codifying the how of what we're doing I think is is is

6:12actually really important to me because there's a number of decisions that you start to make and they lead to the next decision they lead to the next and it's like as soon as you take a step on a certain path sometimes it like you just get LED down you know much further and I think you we want to we want to recog

6:29ize it at the early stage like okay if we do this this means this means X and we should be doing things for sort of principal reasons and to sort of give an example of that just from the UI and this is sort of just a minor example is like there's two ways of doing sort of you know multiple queries in a UI one is

6:48you sort of tabbed queries and one is sort of a notebook style and we went with a notebook Style just because I like be able to to be able to sort of reference reference previous previous things but as soon as you start doing that it's like well I like okay well the next thing people are going to want is

7:02persistence and the next thing people are going to want is multiple notebooks the next things you're going to want is sharing and the next thing they're going to want is people to run other other languages in the in that notebook and um and you just have to recognize that okay like where are we actually going and so

7:17we don't just sort of get pulled down the path uh without actually without actually making a a concrete decision to to just to sort of you know sum it up a little bit I you know I think we just need to ify some of the the the the high level philosophies and strategies that are going to help us you know grow the

7:35team and grow the team without sacrificing kind of the the the culture uh and the momentum that we've that we've already built