Tableau's Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence

My aim with this newsletter is to examine the attributes of successful data analytics teams, but sometimes that requires looking a bit more broadly at the business intelligence industry. One example is the founding team of Tableau. Coming out of Stanford University and moving to Seattle amid its tech boom, the three founders had foresight. They developed a drag-and-drop tool, later named VizQL, that combined the query and visual aspects of analysis.¹ Today, the company makes up more than a fifth² of the $30B B.I. market.³

Scrappy

The founding team at Tableau though, had few preconceptions about building a business. The group bootstrapped for nearly a decade until the company’s IPO in 2013. As founding CEO Christian Chabot said in a recent interview, they had a “great skepticism for building a company and then selling it to money people.” So they adopted principles like “thinking creatively, doing less with more, having to prioritize in a brutal way that actually creates healthy start-ups.”⁴ None of those founding members were used to working at VC-funded start-ups either, where you could throw money at problems. In fact, “none of us were been-there-done-that, public company, scale-at-size kind of people,” according to Elissa Fink, the company’s first marketing lead.⁵ Despite the self-imposed restrictions, the team thrived. “We had great team energy. We were this new team each trying to achieve something that was important. And we reinforced each other and encouraged each other through hard times,” said Chabot.

Low Drama

Another key attribute of this team was their low-drama style. Bucking the trend common to some modern analytics teams, the founding team at Tableau never fought. Chabot remarked, he “can’t think of one instance where we had a fight.” That was primarily driven by their mission-oriented culture. “That thrill of working in a team of extremely talented people with very low drama and very high ambition toward a goal we thought was important-that’s one of life’s greatest journeys.” Nice work if you can get it.

Longevity

One other notable hallmark of the founding team at Tableau was their tenure. The several people that started with the company stayed on for 8-10 years. Christian and the founding team clearly hired for that. They also brought on young people with no more than 10-15 years of experience. Another way the team stayed together was by following data on how other start-ups grew. Chabot famously built an early Tableau dashboard of IPOs, allowing him to tell stories about their strategy, another notable trait of successful analysts-storytelling with data. Whether or not that actually was the reason people stayed, but sticking around was clearly one of the keys to Tableau’s growth.

I admit I am taking a bit of a license here. The founding team at Tableau was not technically an analytics team. You could also credit their success to simply being in the right place like Stanford or Seattle at the right time, when money was cheap after the financial crisis of 2008-9. Not to mention that these hallmarks faded as the company grew, selling Salesforce in 2019.

Regardless, the founding team at Tableau does still exhibit some of the characteristics we have already looked at, like interdisciplinarity at Bell Labs. As the early developers and marketers of VizQL, they probably even have more in common with today’s analytics teams than Labs. Either way, the founding team at Tableau excelled thanks in part to their scrappy, low-drama style and long tenure. It’s a story of business intelligence.

Citations

1. Tableau. (2021,12,02). Analyzing the History of Tableau Innovation [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.tableau.com/blog/analyzing-history-tableau-innovation

2. “Tableau Software” (2024, 02, 15). Market Share. 6sense. Retrieved from https://6sense.com/tech/data-visualization/tableau-software-market-shar

3. DataHorizzon Research. (2023, 09,27). Business Intelligence Market Size to Reach USD 55.5 Billion By 2032 CAGR: 7.2% [News article]. Yahoo Finance. Retrieved from https://finance.yahoo.com/news/business-intelligence-market-size-reach-233000628.htm

^{4. The Logan Bartlett Show. “Ep. 86: Christian Chabot (Co-Founder Tableau) on Operating Lessons from Scaling Tableau.” (2023, 11). Spotify. Retrieved from https://open.spotify.com/episode/019Jslw3wNmOJemWTV1mO7?si=cpM0zo6wRJGMUFkowpBLZg}

5. Built in Seattle. (2020, 02). Spotify. Retrieved from https://open.spotify.com/episode/31HpyNBTYdde78RybHqs2N?si=T32jJ_yESk6nmtyB5Sc2cA&nd=1&dlsi=f1fd70c69f3f4821