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:

Amazon Redshift: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/


BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery


Hotel Tonight: https://www.hoteltonight.com/


Omni: https://omni.co/


Ramp: https://ramp.com/


Rillet: https://rillet.com/


Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/


Tableau: https://www.tableau.com/


TechCrunch article on Looker’s acquisition by Google: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/13/google-closes-2-6b-looker-acquisition/


Vanta’s founder on the In Depth podcast: https://review.firstround.com/podcast/episode-86


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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