Product at Apple, The Start of QuickTime, Data Visualization, and the Founding of Tickr
Outsell for Startups CEO Q&A: Tyler Peppel of Tickr
Tyler and I originally crossed paths to discuss potential partner opportunities between Outsell and Tickr. After seeing a demo of their product, I insisted that Tyler join me for an episode of the podcast as soon as possible. So I made my way to San Francisco, met him at WeWork, and had a really wide-ranging conversation.
This was a difficult interview to cut down. We talked about so much — everything from Tyler’s past experience doing product at Apple to product-managing the initial release of QuickTime and to jumping into Tickr and what problem Tyler wanted to solved with Tickr and how Tickr ramped so quickly — now doubling their customer base every single quarter. We jump into how Tickr is taking data, breaking it out of its silos, harmonizing it, and using AI to provide companies with a huge amount of insight, not only of your company’s performance but also insight on how your competitors and market peers are performing as well.
I wish we made two or three of these episodes and just combined them into a series. That being said, we were able to distill quite a bit and pack it into this episode. I really hope you enjoy this far-ranging and really, really insightful conversation with Tyler Peppel, the founder and CEO of Tickr.
Enjoy.
Transcript
I’m out covering a large amount of AI and Blockchain companies. There’s this huge thirst and hunger for data, but on the flip side, if you can’t see and visualize that data and make sense of it, and find the meaning in it, it’s useless. We’re going to dive into that with Tickr today which I’m really excited about because the UI and seeing how Tickr takes data real-time and visualizes it is amazing. Before we even do that though I want to rewind the clock way back to when you were a kid actually and ask if you had an entrepreneurial itch when you were growing up?
Tyler: I guess I did. I have always liked the idea of inventing things and thinking stuff up. Obviously that is kind of a core attribute of an entrepreneur and what leads somebody in that direction. Tech wasn’t nearly what it is today when I was a kid. So as I grew up, digital technology was growing up. PCs were becoming common. The Internet started growing in the late 80s early 90s. So I grew up in the era when technology was becoming a part of everyday life. The notion of loving to invent things was combined with the potential of the tech industry, the internet, personal computing, and seeing all that being born at the same time. I think all that was a huge influence on me and what led me to where I am today.
Do you see parallels? You just talked about growing up with the rise of the Internet, the rise of the PC. Do you see parallels to the time that we’re at today where we’re seeing the rise of AI, the rise of Block Chain. Does that feel similar to you?
Tyler: It feels very different, to me at least. The PC and the Internet are the foundation for all these waves that come after. Digital media, digital video, desktop publishing, social media, and search. So I see wave after wave continuing and I’ve lost track of the years but say maybe around the crash of 2000 people were thinking maybe Silicon Valley was over. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
We’re still here.
Tyler: We’re still here and more and more waves are coming. So that’s part of what makes it exciting to be here now and be in the business I’m in.
You talked about having that inner inventor. That desire to invent and build something new and you wound up in one of the most innovative technology companies, Apple. Was that the start of your professional tech career?
Tyler: No actually it was before that. I got interested in computing in undergraduate school in Ohio. I grew up in Ohio in the Rust Belt. So there wasn’t much career opportunity there as I was growing up, and I got interested in computing in undergraduate school. Went to MIT for graduate school to the Media Lab and this was prior to my time at Apple. The Media Lab if you don’t know the program is really about applying digital technology to communication, not exclusively about technology and not exclusively about meaning, but about how one informs the other. That, to me, was perfectly compatible with Apple. I think of Apple really as a digital communications company. I mean people think Apple UI is great, and that’s really about communicating to the end user what’s going in the machine right? So to explore this idea of communication between machines and people, Apple was a natural destination.
You’re at Apple which is a big company and we’re here today talking about Tickr which is your startup company. Drastically different. How do you feel about that difference? Was it weird coming out of Apple and starting a company?
Tyler: You know it’s not so different … I mean I was at Apple in the mid-90s, so in one sense a long time ago, but really not that different in the sense that I sat in meetings at Apple where people would propose ideas, and passionately defend them and propose that Apple pursue the idea. Some executive points to you and says “go do it.” You put a team together and it’s serious. I did it a couple of times at Apple. You go off to a building that nobody is using, set up shop, and you’re on a leave of absence for a few weeks to put together a business plan. So that entrepreneurial experience within the context of Apple seemed very compatible with doing startups.
This is interesting. Separate building like a satellite office somewhere off the main campus?
Tyler: It would be a building that Apple wasn’t using or an empty floor of a building. So you had your own space. So, in essence, for a period of weeks or months or even longer you’re starting a startup within Apple. It could be weeks, could be months, or longer if the the idea gets traction. You start out by working on a pitch. I think that the requirement at that time was it had to be a billion-dollar business within five years. Now it would have to be a billion-dollar business in six months. (laughs) So you go out and work on a pitch and then if the pitch is successful you can get funding from the company. You pull in engineers and they start building the product and maybe it becomes an Apple product.
Can you talk about one of the products that you worked on while you were at Apple?
Tyler: Yes. I worked at Apple in a group which in other companies would be called Product Management. At Apple, at the time, it was called product marketing. You’re sitting between engineering, and sales, essentially a wonderful place where you’re interacting with all sides constantly. You’re also put in front of customers by the sales team to explain products and work on the product roadmap and all that. I ended up managing a group of managers who were essentially product managers for digital media products, sound manager, optical media, digital video, things like that.
QuickTime was a product that we worked on to enable the notion of bringing media to the Mac. Essentially the Mac OS didn’t have any user-accessible way of marking time, any notion of creating or managing events over time. The UI was built on a static document metaphor — desktops, folders, documents. Obviously, there were timing mechanisms within the OS that programmers used. But there was no way that this sense of time was brought out to the end user in a way where they could manipulate events and time. There was already QuickDraw for rendering static documents, and we came up with the QuickTime concept, which obviously went on to become a popular part of the Mac environment but interestingly really only took off when we made a version for Windows.
Really?
Tyler: Yeah. That was an early example of Apple growing out of isolated proprietary standards and beginning to think more cross-platform.
That’s interesting. I have to be careful because you and I could talk just about Apple for a couple hours and your experience doing product at Apple. I want to jump to Tickr, and I want to start with the problem that you identified. What was the moment you identified the gap?
Tyler: Since I left Apple, I’ve been a serial entrepreneur. Sometimes I will take a break between startup companies and do consulting; it’s a great way to get out into the world, talk to a lot of interesting people about their interesting problems, and get paid to learn. I use that as a way to recharge between startup efforts. I had a consulting practice before Tickr called InfoMotor. We consulted with big enterprise companies, Fortune 500 companies, on their challenges around data. These could be anything from data security to piracy to whatever. It was clear at that time, essentially 10 years ago give or take, that cloud computing was going to be huge, but no one really took it seriously at the time. I thought cloud made a ton of sense for the enterprise. I talked to these companies about their pain points, and they said well, trying to combine all these offline data sources with cloud data into a holistic picture of the business is really challenging. If you could solve that, we would buy that in second. I would come out of one meeting with the company in the financial space and go into a meeting with somebody in pharma, or the airline industry and I’d say “Hey I’ve been thinking about an idea, do you have problem integrating multiple data sources coming into your business?” and they’d say “Yeah, actually we do. It’s a huge problem for us. So I’d go from vertical to vertical essentially market testing the idea.
Maybe even getting paid to do the consulting along the way.
Tyler: Exactly.
That’s a great gig.
Tyler: Yeah! At that time, as well as now, there were all kinds of new cloud enterprise data sources of various kinds being invented. If a manager wanted a holistic view of their business they’d have to go log into 10, 15, 20 different log-ins to get a picture of what was happening within all these different functions. What’s up with Customer Support, Marketing, what’s going on with our online presence, what are we doing in PR? How are our marketing campaigns performing? We have great tools to track all these things. But logging into them independently gives a very fragmented, siloed view of what’s going on. If I have 15 services to log into, by the time I log into number 15, the data has changed from when I logged into number 1.
So the notion was since all these sources are accessible through APIs more and more through the cloud can we pull this information together in one place and then make it accessible? Not only pull together one place but make it accessible to a business user as well as an engineer. So I started sketching out a product and applied for a series of patents. So that was the first step. We’re back to my inventor DNA and it’s fun to mention here because that first patent was filed in 2010 in the early stages of thinking, and the patent was just allowed in January of this year. So it does work if you’re patient.
What is the pitch today for Tickr? What does Tickr do today?
Tyler: Tickr does the same thing today, we just do it better. We didn’t radically change our core proposition. We make enterprise business data easy to access and consume. We put it together in a holistic picture, and make it easy to share. We break down the “command and control” barriers that have been around enterprise data where business people say oh, that’s off limits, or “that’s too complex.” It’s often trapped in a glass room on a bunch of servers and “data people” deal with it. We break down that barrier and make data immediately accessible and useful to an MBA, to a business decision-maker, in a form they can use every day.
And is the business model an annual subscription based on the number of data sources you’re pulling from or is different?
Tyler: It’s an annual subscription. It’s a classic cloud SaaS model. We do annual contracts and then we charge by the number of data sources that you’re pulling in. Our model is constantly evolving. Going back to the beginning, one of our first investors a guy who’s been incredibly great to work with and supportive named Don Hutchison. Don said “Pulling all this information together in one place and making it easier to use, everybody’s going to want that. I’ll invest. Your challenge is going to be how do you price it? How do you package it? How do you productize it? And he was right. And that’s been the challenge. People respond to the concept of what we’re doing and say “that makes sense.”
Do you have a good use case of somebody that might be using Tickr today just to put in a reference and give an example of Tickr in the real world?
Tyler: Yes, we have a lot of those and a lot of them are tracking confidential stuff so I can’t talk about them in detail, but Hallmark one that I can mention to you because they are posting about their use of Tickr. They’re a great use case for us because they are extremely interested in tracking what’s going on in the moment. Tickr gets you out of this idea of creating a static report and reading two weeks from now what happened two weeks ago. Hallmark doesn’t want to know in April what was hot in March. They want to know how their products were mentioned and used. Were people sending Instagrams of Hallmark cards and tweeting about them? They want to know about related news events events, both positive and negative, that may play on the messaging that’s coming from Hallmark. They want to be very agile and responsive to that.
As you’re going through this journey, do you remember a specific moment and time where you realized that the business had legs. Was there a specific moment or did just kind of gradually happen?
Tyler: I don’t remember a specific moment. We went out and pitched Gatorade, they were our first customer and they were trying to build something called Gatorade Mission Control and it wasn’t working very well. So they kind of came to us for help. We had early traction with big brands and that kind of gave me a sense it was working. But I also probably had a sense it had legs before I started it — back when I was doing the consulting meetings and hearing this common thread in people’s problems…
You knew.
Tyler: Yes. Going from finance to telecom to airlines to pharma and hearing exactly the same pain points I thought there’s definitely something here worth building.
What does the competitive landscape look like for the company?
Tyler: If you take a step back, the enterprise data space is almost too big to think about. Think of the number of companies in the enterprise data space that touch and handle enterprise data in one form or another — either in the back end, in a unique database design, in a presentation layer, or as integrated data. Some are big, some are small, some are adjacent to us, but nobody’s really offering the package that we offer. The unique set of features.
So let’s go a layer down. We unify that data bring it into a common database from all these different sources. Then we do a lot of post-processing on it. We harmonize it and enable you to compare one metric to another. Those metrics may have come from two totally different systems that never talked to each other. We bring them together in Tickr. You have to do a good bit of processing to make that seamless, and easy for an end user, and useful. Then in the last couple of years, we’ve started to do Natural Language Processing on text content. For example, by understanding how you use Tickr and by paying attention to what you click on, we can give you tools within the interface to mark a piece of content or piece of data as not relevant. So, now have machine learning that’s learning from our users about relevance, and constantly improving the relevance of what is presented.
This is the stuff I want to get into because when you look at Tickr it seems so simple and what we’re talking about the business model, I’m talking about what Tickr does at a high level seems really simple and makes sense but underneath all that what you’re doing with just the harmonizing of all that data, bringing all those days heads together and having them talk to each other that’s really really complex. What does the team look like at Tickr?
Tyler: The team I think is very typical in the sense that we’re about 20 people now. That’s a mix of contractors and employees. It will sometimes move up and down a bit. We’ll hire say, some marketing resources to do a series of webinars or something like that, but it’s right around that number. We have six engineers. We have two sales people. We have a VP of product who we just hired. We have a COO who does legal HR, finance — all that stuff in one.
The stuff you don’t want to do.
Tyler: Yes, exactly! So I think in that sense we’re typical. Maybe you noticed I said only two sales people, a small number and that’s because we’ve been launching a channel partner model that enables other companies to sell Tickr. Our sales channel now is primarily partner-driven. And so we have our people on the sales side finding qualified partners and doing partner enablement more than direct sales day-to-day. We’re doing a white label SaaS service’s model and I don’t know of many other companies doing that.
How is Tickr’s growth? Do you mind sharing what the growth rate looks like for the company right now?
Tyler: Well to a degree I can, but we like to be somewhat stealthy about those details but we’ve been steadily growing since we started the company. In June of 2017 we launched the channel partner model. Prior to that, we’ve been in the direct sales model. So if you know enterprise sales, direct sales is feet on the street and it’s dedicated sales reps for large accounts and long sales cycles. We had good success with that model, but it’s the channel partner program that tipped the scale for us. That has really spiked our growth and it’s accelerating. The Channel partner model lets us engage multiple partners who all have their own sales team. So right away that kind of sales presence grows exponentially and in the second half of last year, we came close to doubling our customer count. And then in Q1 of this year, we came very close to doubling it again.
Wow.
Tyler: It’s really because of this channel sales model. So that’s the good news on that. There’s nothing we see standing in the way of really expanding that far beyond where we are today.
Companies are finding amazing success in that channel strategy. A few episodes ago on the show I was interviewing Eric Matlick. He’s the CEO of Bombora and same thing they put together a channel strategy and they’re doubling in size every year just enabling these partners to grow the business for them. So I’ve seen that in a couple of different areas now just in the last month, of companies that are deploying this channel strategy.
Tyler: Yes we see it more and more too. I’m surprised there’s not more of it because if you think about how cloud software works and that it can be deployed from any point to any client anywhere it seems that a channel type of strategy is natural. But I think enterprise companies take on money, they take on investors and the investors want to see everything done under the company brand in a channel the company owns. I can understand that, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity out there with a channel strategy as well. And I should say that we still do sell direct, because we get inbound leads, inbound business coming to us, so we’ll do it in direct mode. But the channel model is what’s driving our growth.
What is the greatest challenge that Tickr faces today? Are there any blocks that you foresee in the way?
Tyler: The issue we have right now I touched on it already is that we’ve had this spike in our growth and the growth rate is accelerating. It actually accelerated more in Q1 than we projected. So it’s managing that growth making sure that we’re smart about it, making sure that we’re smart and do all the things you have to do to capitalize it, and fund it correctly, and then of course, hiring the right people. No secrets there. And when you get into scaling, stay careful. So I’d say that that’s the number one challenge today — combining quick and careful.
Where do you see the company in one year? Where do you see Tickr one year down the road?
Tyler: Well we have a couple of conversations now with potential channel partners that are very large. I can’t say who they are, but it’s the old “names you would recognize” and if we do strike a relationship with them and they start selling Tickr, that could dramatically, drastically transform our model and make us unrecognizable relative to where we are today. We believe sometime around the middle of this year we could break even. So in that sense, you’re much more in control if you get that right, you’re much more in control of your own destiny at that point. So if we didn’t turn into this kind of this moonshot that I’m talking about where we sign on some big channel partners we still have a model that would let us grow and be sustainable. So it’s not like we have to become a unicorn to survive. There’s a path where we could be profitable and self-sustaining, and growing and that’s appealing to me also.
I ask every company and every CEO that I interview where they see themselves in five years because it really conveys the vision and mission that they have for the company. So where do you see yourself and the company in five years?
Tyler: Well, I would never start a company that I didn’t want to get out of bed and work for every day. Again, I’ve done multiple startups but never with this expectation that it’s going to be a specific number of years until you sell the company for exactly this much into exactly this segment. I’ve done it enough times to know it never turns out the way you think. So I’d be happy to be doing some version of what I’m doing now in five years. I always fall back to that inventor mindset. I always have a few ideas in the back of my mind. No shortage of ideas right? That’s the easy part. In five years, I’d love to be doing some version of what I’m doing right now.
I think it’d be fun to support more startup companies. I’m starting to build up some experience in doing this, so being able to find some kind of structure where I could help out people who are doing it for the first time. I really believe the entrepreneurial mindset is a healthy mindset for people and the culture in general, far beyond Silicon Valley. I just think it’s a healthy worldview to be a self-reliant problem-solver, focused on creating value. So I’d love to have a chance to bring that out and I try to bring that out within Tickr as well because we hire people who have ideas for their own startups… I like that kind of energy and that kind of culture.
For where Tickr would be, I’d love to be at a point where people in business are waking up in the morning and the first business thing they do is look at a Tickr screen. Because that pulls together all the key metrics what’s happened overnight while they were sleeping, what’s happened in media and what’s happening around their brand, what’s happening with their numbers and their industry. That would be the first thing that they would turn to and they’d get a much clearer and up-to- date picture than what they get today. Much more useful, much more actionable, and if it’s in a team context they know that their team members are seeing that same information and they feel immediately empowered to take action and improve their business. That would be it — that Tickr becomes as indispensable as email is today.
Thank you for reading this CEO Q&A interview with Tyler Peppel. This write-up is only a portion of the full interview. To hear the full interview, please listen to our podcast “Outsell for Startups”. It can be found on iTunes, Stitcher and Sound Cloud. You can also find more information on Outsell For Startups at our website. Thanks for reading!
