The Value of Embracing the Ecosystem
Meet Sam Gutmann, the CEO and Co-Founder of OwnBackup - the top-ranked backup and restore ISV on the Salesforce.com AppExchange.
(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Inside the O'Hanna.
I'm Dan Darcy, Chief Customer Officer at Qualified.
And today I'm joined by Sam Gutman.
Sam, how are you?
- Excellent.
So excited to be here.
Thanks, good to chat again, Dan.
- Yeah, good to see you.
So I wanna dive right into our first segment,
O'Hanna Origins.
So how did you discover Salesforce, Sam?
- And I've been in Salesforce user actually
since my last company, I think all the way back in 2006.
So started learning a little bit about the, you know,
simple CRM side of the technology.
My eggs of that business over a decade ago
was in venture capital for a bit.
And then on vacation in Israel with my family
in late 2014, met a couple of guys
that were starting a project called on backup.
And it was all about backing up,
protecting and managing SaaS data.
And the biggest customers they had
were backing up Salesforce,
which was and still is the largest B2B SaaS ecosystem
out there in early 2015.
Joined that project.
And step one was let's make an actual company here.
So our company on backups and rounds in March of 2015.
And, you know, getting more and more ingrained
in the O'Hanna and the ecosystem ever since.
It's been a wild seven and a half years.
- Yeah, so that's awesome.
I mean, you know, as you used it as a user back in the day,
I'm curious as to, you know,
what was your initial impression of Salesforce
just as a pure user?
- You know, I'm a tech guy at heart.
And it was interesting.
I think I barely remember it back in those days,
but I was a CEO of that company.
So I was more looking at dashboards and reports.
And I very dangerously tried to pretend to be an admin,
which I learned quickly,
I should leave to actual admins.
But, you know, it definitely helped run a business.
And it was a heck of a lot better
than the spreadsheet I was getting the week before.
- Yeah.
And, you know, let's, you know,
pulling on that thread a little bit more too, you know,
as, you know, thinking about own backup
and starting the company as, you know,
Salesforce becoming, you know, the, you know,
a lot of companies needed that backup, it's in storage.
How, what was your first initial impression
about really even diving into Salesforce as a partner?
- You know, I didn't know much about the ecosystem
when I joined own backup.
I knew that the, it was big and I knew that, you know,
it was obviously that by far the number one player
in the category, I didn't know how big of a platform it was.
And it was really eye-opening.
I mean, my first dream force was back in 2015.
And my mind was blown in many directions.
One, it was much bigger platform than I ever imagined.
And it was not just a CRM tool that some, you know,
rogue director of SalesBot, but a real platform
that businesses were trying to, you know,
manage their digital transformations on.
And the other thing that blew my mind was,
the community was nothing like I had ever seen
before in technology.
In fact, it's almost like a cult, you know,
you don't go to any other tech trade show
and see both technology demonstrations
and stuffed animals walking around.
And it was eye-opening and in the first bit
kind of head scratching and learned a lot.
And I was a little skeptical at the beginning
and said, "Wow, you know what?
Maybe if we leave this skepticism aside
and we really dive in here with both feet,
we can get a lot out of it."
And it's been an amazing journey
through the ecosystem over the last seven years.
- And diving you have, I mean, it's incredible
to see own backup success, you know, since 2014.
And I know, you know, we've known each other since then
and you would, you know, be at those partner summits
and it was always great to catch up and see you
and now see the success that own backup has had.
And so I want you to brag a little bit
because since you've been part of the ecosystem
for the last, you know, seven years,
I mean, tell us a little bit about the success
you've had partnering with Salesforce.
Like what is that success that you've seen
and like what are you most proud of thus far?
- I think what I'm most proud of in the ecosystem
is the number of five-star reviews we have.
And, you know, by far, I mean, like four or five times
are our next closest competitor.
But if you sort the entire app exchange by any app
and just based on the quality of reviews
and there's now like six or 7,000 apps on the app exchange,
we were in the top 50.
And that continues to move.
And what is really exciting for me,
and I've never seen this at any other software company,
you know, typical reviews are, you know,
the product is great or it does what it says in the box.
What I'm really proud of is our reviews
often mention a person.
The product says what it does and it got me out of a jam,
but John in support was phenomenal.
Or what it really gets me going is I love the product,
but even, you know, my sales rep was amazing
and didn't try to oversell me.
I really felt that I own backup
and this particular person was acting as a partner.
And I've really never seen that in software before.
So I'm really proud of the way we built the company,
really kind of embraced the culture and values
and really do want to help and partner with our customers.
So, you know, that's by far, by far number one.
I think another exciting thing is if you think back
to those demo jams, which if you're not familiar,
there's three minute and only three minute,
not a second longer kind of demo of your app.
We did our first, I think in 2016
and we've now won more than any other partner
in the ecosystem ever.
I think we're pushing 30 plus in fact,
at some point Salesforce asked us to stop participating
'cause it wasn't fair.
So, and now it's cool.
Every office has different trophies.
So you get to see those trophies all around the world,
visiting our seven different offices, which is really cool.
And I think lastly, as you kind of alluded,
last year we were the number one ISV partner by dollars.
And, you know, it took us a while to get there
and there were some really, really big companies
that are great partners as well,
but it was pretty, pretty damn exciting for us to be number one.
- It's great to hear, you know,
it sounds like your team is driving true customer success,
right, from the sales side to even the success side
in what you're delivering upon.
So, amazing to hear.
Now, let's take the opposite side of the spectrum.
What would you say is one of your biggest lessons learned
in terms of being a partner with Salesforce?
- You know, I think not coming into it,
not really understanding the ecosystem,
the partner ecosystem, the app exchange,
I didn't really know what to expect.
And the by far number one lesson learned was invest.
We very early on learned from some other bigger partners,
you know, we needed to invest in the relationship.
So we built an alliance team,
we had someone all the back in 2017
that was solely focused on a relationship
between own backup and the Salesforce partner team.
That team is now almost 15 people.
We needed to invest, you know,
I think a lot of companies come to the ecosystem,
all right, I'm gonna list on the app exchange
and I'm gonna expect Salesforce to just bring me business.
That is definitely a recipe for failure.
The app exchange is awesome, we get a lot of leads,
but it's our investment in doing it.
We invest a lot in it and it's building individual relationship
with AEs and RVPs and how do we get them trained
on our product and we wanna make it easy for them.
I think Salesforce AEs have like 150 different products
to sell, you know, why are they gonna care
about us or other partners?
And, you know, we need a different messaging to Salesforce
folks as we do to customers
and really investing in that relationship
and setting the right expectations is by far
the number one lesson learned.
- And I mean, that's a great lesson
for a lot of the different app exchange partners
that are out there listening to this.
Now, if you think about this,
if you could go back to, let's just call it the early days
of even, you know, starting own backup
within the Salesforce ecosystem,
beyond investing in the partnership
and then relationship personally as a founder,
what advice would you give yourself?
- Ooh, I think, you know, one died in,
you know, coming out of a different tech world
and used to going to an Oracle show or a Salesforce show.
I mean, it's weird.
I mean, it is weird seeing cartoon characters
and stuffed animals and people that, you know,
really get excited.
It's, again, park cult almost feels like religion
and, you know, there's one of our great employees,
just won the Golden Hoodie.
Like, who cares about a Golden, I mean, sweatshirts?
I think kind of understanding that this is a business run,
but kind of leaving some of that skepticism behind
and realize you have to dive in.
In a bit also, we continue to grow the business
and, you know, we're not just 100%
in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Now, how do you balance that
with the other ecosystems?
We're also great, but Salesforce is very unique.
Absolutely. I mean, if you could see right behind me,
I've got the Golden Hoodie myself too.
I was one of the first employees to get it.
I mean, and you're absolutely right.
It's one of those, you know, okay, just go with it.
And at some point, it'll, you know, come to fruition
and you're not sure what exactly it is, but here you go, you know?
So that's interesting 'cause that leads me to my next question,
which is, you know, everyone thinks about this,
the term Ohana differently, you know,
and Mark talks about this that, you know,
we're a big, one big family and at Dreamforce,
it's a family reunion.
So I wanna ask you what you feel like
is the meaning of Ohana, like, and what does it mean to you?
It's a unique ecosystem.
It's a group of people that really care about,
you know, not just using it as a technology platform,
but care about a lot of other things.
Some great, some I agree with, some not.
But it really, you know, families don't come to other,
to, you know, tech shows and I think there is that community.
And, you know, it's one of the things really cool for us is,
you know, we've had a number of admins
that have bought our tool at one company and left.
There's such a demand for sales force talent
that, you know, moves around more than sometimes we'd like,
but, you know, they'll bring us one company in the next
and that is a very tight knit group of people as big as it is
and it's just one of the slides they shared
at the partner executives on it was for,
and I think this is probably for every dollar of revenue
that sales force generates.
It actually creates $6 for the greater ecosystem.
- Yeah, and that's an IDC report.
I mean, I know that exact slide too.
It's the same thing that we use all the time.
So that's-
- Perfect.
- Yeah, no, and that's your spot on with that.
So that's great.
Now, you know, building upon those, you know, the Ohana
and before we get into our next segment,
I would love to understand if there are any special stories
or Ohana moments that are special to own backup
that is a little behind the scenes
that you would wanna share.
- So the last, I was three, four, I was 2019,
the last in person one.
You know, we try to, we were a member of the pledge 1%
and we were supporting a great organization
called PEP UP Tech and it's a great example of an organization
and really comfortable supporting because it's doing
a lot of good in the world, but it's also great
for our business.
It's designed to help train, you know, underserved communities
but get them trained for real jobs.
You know, we have hundreds of job openings
and we need more admins, we need more talent.
So, you know, I'm comfortable.
There's a great business use case also,
but it does a great job.
And we were at a karaoke bar.
We were the, I don't know, platinum,
we're the biggest sponsor of this event.
And I despise karaoke personally, but, you know,
Brett Taylor got up and was not singing and said,
"Look, I will not participate,
but I'm gonna personally make a $5,000 donation
to the organization."
And I was actually talking to our employee
who was helping support the organization
and just won that golden hoodie and said,
"Look, watch this."
And I got up on stage and said,
"Look, I'll match Brett's donation personally
if he actually does karaoke."
So he forced me to do it with him,
which I don't know he really appreciated,
but they got a big donation.
I mean, that's, but that is actually a perfect Ohana moment
because that is exactly what the Ohana is.
It's hard to describe, but here you are, you know,
helping the community and helping,
I mean, I love Peppa Ptek and what they do.
And it is, it is great for business.
And then the fact that obviously you got Brett
and everyone involved, that's awesome.
So let's get into our next segment, What's Cooking.
Sam, obviously you are the CEO of own backup.
I want you to talk about how you got to where you are now.
And I know you embellished,
you told us a little bit around the story with, you know,
you met them in Israel, the other founders.
But what has your journey been to get to your current like role?
I started my career super early on doing small business.
I did consulting, realized many years ago
when I was in high school, frankly,
that none of my customers had an effective way
to back up their data.
So figured there had to be a better way.
So started one of the first online backup services
where software would run on a server of 20 person law firm.
Every night it would take their data
and krypton compressed it.
And we stored it in two different data centers.
It was before anyone called the cloud.
And back in the early 2000s, you know,
convincing a law firm, for example,
to trust someone else with their data,
like, no way am I giving you my documents.
That's my business.
That was really, really hard.
Obviously everyone has stuff in the cloud now.
So it's changed quite a bit.
But ran that business for almost 10 years,
had a great opportunity to exit.
This is my unrelated.
Spent a couple of years as an angel investor
and a venture capital fund.
We were solely focused on investing in female founded
or female sea level exec led companies.
And that was super interesting for me
to learn the other side of being an entrepreneur.
We almost invested in an Israeli startup
that fell through for some tax complications.
And it kind of bummed about that.
But a few months later I found myself going to Israel
on vacation with my family.
I said, oh, while I'm here, let me check out
the startup ecosystem I had always heard so much about.
So I had a network of like zero people
and that got me no meetings and realized
that an ex colleague of mine, Ori,
who had actually worked at the venture fund
who invested in my first company
and then came to work for me.
And then went back to the VC.
He had quit his job, traveled the world for a year,
wound up settling in Israel with his fiancee.
And I called him up and said, hey, I'm coming to Israel
in a couple of weeks.
Let's catch up over a coffee or a beer.
But by the way, I'm a math adventure fund
looking to meet some startups.
You know any.
And he said, yeah, I just moved here a couple of weeks ago.
I'm meeting with tons of startups and looking for a job.
There's a couple of guys that have started a backup company.
If you want to tag along in my unofficial job interview,
you're more than welcome.
So I was with my family somewhere up
in the northern part of the country.
And on our way back to our hotel in Tel Aviv,
I asked the Torvan driver to pull over in the city.
I had never heard of a cold hurts Leah.
I get out of this, what I thought, random coffee shop.
I meet my buddy Ori.
I meet our founding CTO, Ariel, and two friends
that had started this project called on backup.
About halfway through the one hour coffee,
they turned to Ori and said, please stop selling yourself.
We're not hiring a sales guy.
And they turned to me and said, we actually
are hiring a CEO.
Are you interested?
And that one hour coffee completely ruined
the rest of my vacation.
But seven and a half years later, here we are.
So it was interesting when I joined,
we actually had four different products.
We had backup and recovery for Salesforce.
We had a product that covered a couple different social media,
like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Gmail.
But really, I'm a consumer side.
Looking at those businesses.
One, there's different things going on with those ecosystems.
But no one's really willing to pay to backup their Twitter
account.
And my philosophy on startups is that most startups
fail because they fail to focus.
So we said, you know what?
Let's focus on one product, one ecosystem for now.
Salesforce is the biggest B2B SaaS ecosystem out there.
That was where the bulk of our revenue and customers were.
And that was a hard decision.
Why are we giving up other revenue sources?
But no, it's the right thing to focus.
And we totally focused in 2015.
And we went from like 50 to 150 customers, 4X revenue growth.
And it got a Gartner-Cool vendor award.
That set ourselves up to raise a seed round of funding
in the beginning of 2016, which was partially
led by Salesforce Ventures.
So Salesforce Ventures has been behind us
since the very early days.
And we've continued to grow in the ecosystem.
And it took us six and a half years, almost seven years,
where we finally felt we had the resources, the scale,
to expand out of the Salesforce ecosystem.
We believe, and our vision has always
been to be called the single pane of glass
where an enterprise can backup, protect, and manage
all their SaaS data.
And then the average enterprise now
is using 300 different SaaS applications.
So we've now expanded into the Microsoft ecosystem
and soon to be serviced now and another
big SaaS ecosystem.
But I think it was really critical early days
that we wanted to focus until we had the right resources
we could not risk defocusing what was working so well.
I think that's an incredible lesson for the viewers
and listeners is around that focus.
And obviously, that is a lot of where a lot of companies go off.
There's a crisis of prioritization.
So prioritization is such a huge exercise.
And yeah, it's great to see
like that lesson playing out for you guys.
Now, when you think about, obviously,
as you've been in the partner ecosystem with Salesforce
for seven years now, what challenges are you seeing now
and how are you applying anything that you've learned
while working with Salesforce to those challenges?
The challenge of how do you make noise?
How do you differentiate?
We've always wanted to be a great partner in Salesforce,
but we need to stand out as well.
So you've been to Dreamforce.
Our booths have never looked the same as everyone else.
We just want to be different.
And that was particularly hard in the beginning of the pandemic
when those events didn't happen.
I'm thrilled that events are back
and our team is entering a ton of pipeline
for a couple of recent world tours.
But how do we continue to differentiate is hard?
I think most companies that use Dreamforce example
go through kind of a journey where it starts
with a very small booth and it grows from there,
but it really is about how do I just get my name out there?
And then it's purely generation.
And then it's how do I actually generate pipeline?
And then maybe the next year, it's how do I move deals along?
And this year, last year, how do you turn it
into a closing event?
So I think as you grow and scale an ecosystem,
what you're doing and looking at these different events
and even online things, changes as the companies need change.
There's also a limit to, there's not more than one Dreamforce.
How do you continue to scale the company
as there's no more money to spend?
We're doing every sponsorship we can.
So how do you balance and make sure
that your business can continue to grow
as you're doing the kind of the maximum within the ecosystem?
>> So what is next for OwnBackUp
and how are you shaping the future?
>> We're very much growing the company
into a kind of comprehensive platform
where customers can really own and manage
and protect and use all of their own data.
So we made an acquisition at the end of last year,
which is actually another great Salesforce partner
that has a leading SAS security posture management tool.
So really hoping our customers secure
and protect their Salesforce data,
show them who has access to what data classification
and we have another tool there
that helps implement Shield faster.
In fact, we can reduce the time
for Salesforce Shield encryption implementation
by almost 90%.
So really excited about that.
Two years ago, we had one product
in one ecosystem Salesforce.
We have now, you know, the six products
across three different ecosystems.
This time next year, we'll have 12 products
in five different ecosystems.
So we're continuing to grow and realize that vision
at the same time, trying to keep our own internal culture
the same, we're approaching 1,000 employees now.
And you know, it's a balance of how do we keep growing
a great company and continue to expand
as the business gets orders of magnitude more complex.
>> So let's get into our final segment,
the future forecast.
Sam, what do you envision as the future
of the Salesforce ecosystem?
You were just down at the partner executive summit
and I'm sure they showed you a little bit about the future,
but what do you envision as the future
of the Salesforce ecosystem?
>> Bigger, much bigger.
I think it's super interesting.
You know, they've made obviously a bunch
of acquisitions and Slack and it's now what?
70,000 employees and then millions of people
within the ecosystem globally.
And it's changing all the time.
It's hard to keep knowing people
and as you know, Salesforce kind of reorgs
a little bit every February.
So every time I think I learn the org chart,
it changes a few months later.
But it's growing tremendously.
Their vision of the customer data platform
and really understanding everything
about a customer across their product set
is super interesting.
>> Can you give us a prediction of
for where you think the data industry
is headed in the future?
>> Oh, that's tough.
You know, I think there's so much going on
and there's so many companies that have gotten funded
and created over the last two years or even more than that.
But I think, you know, as I go to certain trade shows
and see things, I think a lot of them are features.
So I think they'll be tremendous consolidation.
You know, it's hard to, I mean, interestingly enough,
in Einstein that was announced years ago,
is actually finally getting some real traction.
So I think while, you know, a lot of these data plays
sounds super interesting.
I think it's finding really concrete use cases
that will make it really interesting.
And, you know, theoretically these things
can do great things, but what are they actually doing
for the business?
And, you know, what I'm excited about in our backup is,
you know, our viewers customers have to backup.
For compliance or you have to,
you're backing up all your data.
So our vision is really,
how can we help customers use those backups
and then use the data there,
not just have it in case something goes wrong,
but how can we plug that into, you know,
different analytics tools are back in the tableau
or Einstein and kind of consolidate across all your platforms.
So I'm really excited about how own backup
can help power some of the analytics
that companies are thinking about doing down the road.
- So Sam, last question.
And any advice for an aspiring entrepreneur or CEO
like yourself?
- Yeah, so my number one piece of advice is focus.
I think Apple said at best,
what makes them amazing is not the number of products
they build.
It's the 99 ideas they say no to.
So they build one amazing product.
And I totally agree with that.
You know, get all your, one of my board members,
wood behind one arrow,
get all your team rowing in the same direction.
And the more you expand and diversify,
the harder it is.
And obviously as you grow and get to scale like we are
and bigger, you can't just have one thing in one place,
but the extent you can focus if the time's big enough
and you can grow,
that is absolutely advice number one.
And I think the second thing is,
there's just no substitute for hard work.
I mean, you can get lucky sometimes,
but starting a company being an entrepreneur
and growing a team around that, it's hard.
I mean, it's fun.
I wouldn't trade it for the world.
I love my job.
I love the team.
But, you know, today's the last day of our quarter.
I was up at three o'clock in morning signing deals.
You know, it's a life, kind of your entire life is consumed.
If that's for you, that's great.
It's not for everyone, which is fine.
But those substitute for hard work.
- I love that and it's so true.
Before letting you go, let's have fun with a little,
quick lightning rounds.
So I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions.
And I just wanna, like, what comes to mind?
Right off the bat. - Okay.
- Can't be going back up, but your favorite product.
- I get my iPhone.
- Boom.
Classic or lightning.
(laughs)
- That's funny you asked that.
So definitely lightning, but we have a dashboard
that I get every day.
And for some reason it broke.
And I hadn't gotten it in, like, five days.
And I got it yesterday in classic.
And I was like, what is this?
What have I was really confused?
Like, how did that happen?
- Did I go back ten years?
- Yes.
It was bizarre.
- Yeah, that's awesome.
You call them stuffed animals, but they're not.
- Yeah, I'm not sure.
You call them stuffed animals,
but what's your favorite Salesforce character?
(laughs)
- Um, I guess, Appy, partly because we won the Appy Award.
I think the first year they call it the Appy Award,
which is Effectly Partender of the Year.
So. - Yeah, that's awesome.
Congratulations there too.
That's awesome.
Favorite brand of anything besides Salesforce?
- I don't know, I'm a huge Apple fan, so that's it.
But I think maybe number two would be Legos.
I love building things.
So whether it be building a company like Obackup
or doing an awesome Lego set with my nine year old son,
you can't be a good Lego set.
- Secret skill that's not on the resume.
(laughs)
- Definitely not karaoke.
Okay. - Definitely not karaoke.
I love to cook.
That's also to me about building things,
but I get instant gratification
and I've been told I'm decent enough.
- What's your favorite dish to make?
- I like making some up.
I'll go to a restaurant, go, how can I copy that?
So what did I make the other day?
Some concoction of all kinds of different
colored of cherry tomatoes and kind of reduced that
and some spicy sausage and pasta and some broccoli robbed.
It wasn't the most appetizing to look at,
but it was pretty delicious.
- I mean, I'm about to eat lunch,
so I'm pretty hungry though.
That sounds amazing.
You just won front row seat tickets to your dream event.
What is it?
- Oof. - I'm pretty sure I'm a dream horse.
(laughs)
- Wow.
That is a great question.
We sponsored a Billy Joel concert the other night.
That was pretty exciting.
But I've never been to a Formula One race
and I think I'd like to go check it out.
I'm a car guy, so that might be it.
- So for the account executive for own backup
at Salesforce, maybe you can go to Monaco next year.
There you go.
- I would love that.
- So Sam, this has been so much fun.
Before I let you go, I'd love to let the listeners know
where they can find you
and if there's anything else you'd like
to share or anything to plug.
- Yeah, obviously you can check out us in general
at ownbackup.com, but I have a really tough email address.
I'm [email protected] and I'd love to meet other folks
in the community and feel free to reach out.
- Great, thank you so much Sam.
- Thanks for having me.
It was fun conversation.
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