Drill to Detail - Drill to Detail Ep.78 ‘Coronavirus, Shutdowns and the Data Analytics Industry’ with Special Guest Seth Rosen

Episode Date: April 8, 2020

In this special episode of Drill to Detail Mark Rittman is joined by Seth Rosen, Co-Founder and Principal at Hashpath to talk about the impact of COVID-19 and the subsequent economic shutdown on the business of analytics and product startups, the work being done in the community to help find a cure and the role that data and analytics can have in accelerating the post-shutdown recovery.“A COVID-19 Dashboard for Massachusetts using Looker and BigQuery” - Hashpath.com blog“The Virus Survival Strategy for your Startup"“COVID-19: Implications for business” - McKinsey“As COVID-19 data sets become more accessible, novel coronavirus pandemic may be most visualized ever” - ZDNet.com“Leave COVID-19 analysis to the experts” - Japan Times

So welcome back to a special episode of the Drill to Detail podcast, and I'm your host, Mark Rittman. So I'm joined today by Seth Rosen, founder of HashPath, to talk about coronavirus and what it means for the analytics industry. So Seth, welcome to the show and what it means for the analytics industry. So Seth, welcome to the show and thanks for joining us during these crazy unprecedented times. Yeah, thanks a ton for having me. It's definitely unprecedented and surreal, but also I'm a huge fan of the podcast, so I'm excited to talk to you and beyond. Excellent. Well, I mean, we met a bit back in what must seem ages ago now, back at Join in San Francisco. And I remember thinking what you were doing was interesting at the time.

So, you know, in a way, it's a bit of an excuse to get you on the show and talk about actually what your company does. But, you know, this is such an unprecedented, amazing, crazy time at the moment that, you know, we both run businesses. We both kind of obviously work in this area. It'd be interesting to think about how coronavirus and the impact of it on the economy is going to affect what we're doing. So maybe just start off though, Seth, by just talking about what you do at the moment, your company, and I suppose how you got into that line of business.

Yeah, awesome. Sounds great. So HashPath really started as a full service data analytics consultancy, I think a lot like your business. And we have since evolved into part consulting company, part product company. So we have a couple of different products that we build and invest in. And really, kind of pre-coronavirus and still post, think about our consulting business as a way to bootstrap the products that we're building in the analytics space. And when we got started, it really was just a consulting business. And now we've since evolved. The main inflection point was when I convinced my older brother after 20 years to leave his job at Oracle and come on board. He's a

software engineer. And so now we run the business together. So it's half family business, which is also adds a unique wrinkle. Okay. Okay. And so I noticed Oracle is your brother's background. So, I mean, that's my background as well, more in the partner space than actually working for Oracle. But it's quite a difference, isn't it, really? Quite a different world and quite a different sort of, I suppose, ecosystem, really, we work in now. Totally different ecosystem. And I think for him, it's just been, he's been able to learn, learn a whole bunch of new businesses, learn new skills, but also bring a lot of, bring a lot of his knowledge. And he was a software engineer. So bring that knowledge

to what we're doing in the data analytics space. And that's allowed us to also build our, our couple of software products, which has been great. Okay. So just sort of, I suppose maybe to set the context for this conversation, let's talk about what we were doing prior to the coronavirus outbreak. So just tell us a bit about the product your company is building and the type of customers you work with and on what led to this product. So give us some flavor really for what you're doing before this. For sure. So our product was called White Label Data. And what it basically allows companies to do is productize and share their data with their customers, basically build this really quick your data, you can do a bunch of transformations, you can do some dashboarding, and there's really great tools in the market to let you do all that. If you then want to now build an app around that

and productize and do user onboarding and maybe add a custom feature that you need to do, that now requires software engineers to do it. You have to build an app. Sometimes you have a SaaS app and you can just throw it in and that's great. But a lot of times you don't have anywhere to put this. Does is it allows people like me that aren't necessarily software engineers, but are semi-technical and understand data and can, you know, build dashboards and write SQL to build these fully custom white label branded sites.

And so we do a couple of things. We work with Looker. So you can use Looker iframes and the Looker API to build kind of rich interactive experiences. But then you can also go directly down to your raw data sources and query Snowflake, BigQuery, Postgres, et cetera, and build some really powerful branded customer-facing analytics applications. Okay. And so what kind of customers are buying this then? Who is your, I suppose, your target market and the problem you're looking to solve for them? Yeah, for sure. It's a good question. I think one of the good things and the challenges, it's a very long tail, right? So companies that want to share data externally, that's a pretty long tail of use cases, right?

But it runs the gamut from agencies that maybe want to build a portal for their clients. Maybe they're a digital advertising agency. They are doing a whole bunch of work for their clients and they want to basically build a stickier experience and give them the data that their clients need. A lot of times agencies will ship stuff over in Excel. Maybe they'll give their clients direct access to a dashboard. A lot of them using Data Studio. Some of them are using Looker and others. And so what our product would allow an agency to do is kind of quickly build their agency portal and have clients log in and do self-serve analytics in a way that's completely branded towards their toward to their agency

another couple examples would be you know a customer success team that you know maybe you work for a sas company and you're sharing tons of data with your customers it's not necessarily embedded analytics because it's it might be a different stakeholder in the company, but you want to kind of build insights.yourcompany.com or reporting.yourcompany.com and allow customers to log in and get the data they need. That's another use case. Let's say you sell data. If you're selling location data or you're selling some data to supplement your own internal analytics, you can use white label data to basically give an example about what your data set can do. And so when you're demoing what your underlying data can do, you have this experience. It kind of looks like a SaaS application where you can kind of show off exactly what your data can do. So those are a few of them. It's a long, long tail use case. And we're working hard to kind of document and explain some of the possible ways people

can use our software. Okay. And actually, I looked through your documentation earlier today, fair enough. And I was impressed with how, I suppose, polished that was as well. So it's, you know, it's not just, I suppose, consulting where you've got here, is it? It's an actual product you're building. For sure. And I think it was fully the genesis of it. It's fully evolved from consulting. And so, you know, one of the things that we were doing is, you know, my background's product, we do analytics, Josh's background software. So we were taking on these projects that really were custom, customer facing analytics projects. And so we started to see a whole bunch of commonalities between them. And we said, there's got to be a bit better way. And so the first iteration of our product, quote unquote, that back into our own internal tool set to allow the next project to go faster.

And that's why, you know, if you were looking at our documentation, you see we support a whole bunch of stuff. We support Looker and Chartio and Periscope and Snowflake and BigQuery. And all of those connections just basically grew organically from customer requirements, including all the other features that it has. And then we reached a point where we were doing hybrid, where we would do consulting and then also license our software in combination. And now we've been able to fully move where we have customers only licensing the software. And so we still are operating under all three models. Some of our work is true, fully consulting. Some of it's consulting on top of white label data and some of it is customers building themselves with white label data which has been awesome awesome to see people doing it on their own obviously we play a support uh we play a support role there but they're

off and you know building their own stuff on our tool which has been really exciting okay so give us a sense of the i suppose the the size trajectory and so on of the business. I mean, is it something that is VC funded? Is it funded out of the consulting you do? What was your growth like at the time this all happened really? Yeah, good question. So we are, I guess you could call us fully bootstrapped. My background has been working for a bunch of VC funded companies. And I think I personally just have a lot of scar tissue around it. It's a great model. But we were excited about the fact that we could build a profitable business with consulting and then be able to invest in this product and grow it organically. And so it had just been

our focus of every month, can we just slowly change the percentage of our revenue that's service versus product? And so we've just been heads down trying to change that percentage over time so that it becomes a little bit more recurring and sustainable. And so have we talked about trying to raise money? We've definitely talked about it. We think about it. But we do get excited about the fact that, you know, we can somewhat control our own destiny, but we have slower growth trajectories and, you know, could end up, you know, it'll transition to the next stuff we're about to talk about. It could end up being a negative too, just because we're bootstrapped at a time like this. Just tell us a bit about how, so tell us a bit about how you found out about what was going on

with coronavirus and what was your, what was the immediate impact on you and your thoughts and actions at the time yeah so i mean we had been somewhat monitoring it um you know my wife is just a germaphobe through and through and so she actually was monitoring coronavirus for some time just as it was spreading through china and we were were talking about it. And I think one of the things that's been interesting is I'm active on Twitter. And I think people that are active on Twitter saw it coming a little bit before, maybe not a ton before, but I remember when I first saw the tweets coming out of Italy, I was up at night, I did some panic shopping. That's why I still have toilet paper right now, right? And kind of just like, this is going to be bad. I remember waking up and saying and saying to, you know, my wife, this is going to

get really serious really quickly and, and had a little bit of time, I think, to kind of panic before, you know, everyone was panicking. And that, that did help me from a business perspective too, just because we were able to, to think about things and then kind of get back to a level head where we could kind of make, make some decisions about what we were going to do or not do because of it okay i mean my my wife actually is a pharmacist as well and so um uh and we actually were in italy we were in italy about two weeks before it all kind of kicked off so we were over there for her birthday for it went to rome and um noticed there were a few people wandering around with with face masks on people from china and um and it was starting to get in the news at the time her birthday for, it went to Rome and noticed there were a few people wandering around with,

with face masks on, people from China. And, and it was starting to get in the news at the time then as well. We came back obviously, and things were starting to get on the news over here. And actually, I think it was the thing that for me really brought it home that there was something happening was, I think it was, it was actually the New York Times daily podcast I listened to. And there was an episode in there when there's a scientist on talking about this is going to be serious, you know. And, but I think what's been, I think there was a lot, people were saying you couldn't have anticipated it happening.

And people did predict, people did talk about epidemics and so on. And, but what people didn't think about was the effect of closing down effectively closing down all commercial activity for um a period of sort of months i don't know what it's like in in the states and canada and so on at the moment but over here it's everything is effectively closed what's it like what's what's the what's been the impact in terms of the commercial activity where you are yeah it's been it's been the same. I mean, it's we're, we're in Boston, everything is shut down. We have, you know, a lot of restaurants, even though restaurants can do delivery and take out their closing, um, you know, really, really across the board, everything is,

is shut down. It's good. Cause people are obeying, you know, the distancing and, and doing what they have to do to kind of slow the spread. But it definitely feels totally surreal and shut down. But then you walk around the neighborhood and you see kids outside and people on their porch and people really are, we're talking to our neighbors more than we ever had. So it's a really, it's a, I think, surreal time in Boston. And like you said, totally unprecedented. So I think for both of us, the most important thing is family and your health and so on. I mean, so how has it been for your family and I suppose maybe kids being off school?

And how did you kind of make sure that everyone was safe, first of all, and yourself as well? Yeah, no, thanks for asking. We're all good, actually. My wife, who is in health care, she'll have to go back. She's on maternity leave. So we have an eight-week-old here. You might hear them hear her in the background here and a toddler running around. So we've been hunkered down

together, she'll, she'll have to go back to work and I'll have both of them. So that's a whole different, different wrinkle when that happens. But we're safe, we're doing good. Josh, who I mentioned, who I run the business with my brother, his wife's a doctor, he's got three kids out of school. So now he has them full time while he's while he's, you know, working, working on Ash Path. So those are the wrinkles. Luckily, you know, so far, you know, knock on wood, you know, everything's fine. But we are definitely just just people issues that come up that you don't you take for granted when everything's good that, you know, now we have to do a bunch of things at the same time okay okay so getting to the i suppose the the thing that as business owners we have to sort of think about is pipeline cash flow and so on and certainly for myself the first thing i did when i realized this was serious was was work through cash flow you know work through some

scenarios work out if we had to close the business today and couldn't do any billing what would how long would be last for um and then various various scenarios that are less and less kind of i suppose extreme where you know and i think the one that i kind of worked to in the end was was um we wouldn't get any kind of new sales for example for a while i mean what for yourself how did you do that initial planning and i suppose disaster planning and making sure that the business is going to survive for the next kind of period of time? Yeah, good question. I think the main things we did was we just said, okay, we need to just now fully commit to our current customers and making sure that we can prove to them that we're able to execute on these projects through this, you know, distraction, you know, as an understatement, to prove that we can execute.

Because companies are thinking about, hey, how do we cut here? Where can we save money? And if you have a consultant that is distracted because of world events, it's justifiable. No one's going to knock you for having other things going on. But we said, one, we just have to commit to current in-flight work and deliver it to the best of our ability to try to preserve those projects that are in-flight. And then two, we said, we have to now, I think, commit a little bit more to filling the top of our funnel with different leads. We have been fortunate in that we've been in that over the past couple of weeks and we're going to continue to do even more marketing and content and put things out to try to fill the pipeline

and give ourselves the wiggle room that we need. We definitely have had customers pause right away, a couple of customers paused and not unexpected. I think one of the things that has kind of struck me is just the luck or unluckiness that a company has based on this. Certain companies have gone to zero, and certain companies are skyrocketing. And so one of the companies we were with, they went to zero based on this. And, you know, it was nothing about their business or how healthy their business was. It just happened to be in a specific industry that is now getting zero traffic.

So so it's you know, I think we're we're fortunate that we can work across all of those and try to, you know, you know, find the industries that are still spending money and investing and need help. And from that perspective, I think it's lucky that we're able to diversify that way. Yeah, definitely. I mean, so I think probably both of our customers are generally online businesses. They're basically digital. I think, well, certainly for ourselves, our customers are almost all online digital um they're in a position where they can continue to work obviously um but then it's it's the thing it's the second order things that are interesting i mean for example a lot of our customers are are online businesses but they're um they're kind of venture

funded so maybe they're expecting to get their series a the series b at the end of the year suddenly that's not going to happen this year and that means they have to kind of venture funded. So maybe they're expecting to get their series A, their series B at the end of the year. Suddenly that's not going to happen this year. And that means they have to kind of get their own way to extend. I mean, have you found that as well, that the business itself might be sound, but their funding plans might be out the window? Yeah, for sure. And I think that's kind of some of the discussions we're having now with a few of our clients is, you know, they're thinking about how do they just extend that runway, like you're saying, just in case, right? Because there's a plan, they have a certain burn rate, you know, how do they lengthen that burn rate, so they're lengthen that runway, reduce their burn so they can, you know, have more cushion built in. And I think it's, it's the

prudent thing to do. And they should be doing that. But that means they're looking at all their costs and trying to figure out, you know, what are the things they can do to make that happen? However, analytics is not a cost. And the thing that we need to be very kind of clear on and understand is that what we do is not just a cost and a burden and so on. The stuff that we do for companies is what's going to get them out of this position or at least give them a route out of this position. And so as we both know that there may be, certainly I'm finding that there's an initial,

I think companies at this moment are just kind of taking stock and some of that, I mean, they could be themselves having issues with, you know, staff maybe can't come into work and there's a justifiable element there of just kind of taking stock for a little bit of time. But are you finding that actually there's demand coming from those customers or other customers for your services at the moment? There's definitely demand. And I think you're right that analytics is not just a cost. And there's value that I think companies like ours can add to actually help you be more efficient. And that's what we're talking about. How do you build a data analytics stack that is the most cost efficient? You're

picking the right tools for the right job that are going to get you... Maybe you would have made a slightly different decision in terms of a vendor or decision or how much data you're moving or something. Maybe you would have made a slightly different decision. But can you still do that project, pick the right tools, and make the investments you want to invest in? And so we're helping companies make those decisions and figure out the right path forward. And then the other part that we talk a lot about in terms of hiring consultants is a lot of times you can save on employee costs. Maybe you have a full-time analyst that you had a job description out for,

and now you're on somewhat of a hiring freeze, but you can now work with a smaller analytics consultant to come in and maybe it's a shorter term thing so you don't have the full year salary to worry about, or it's a small project you can carve out. I think that we can, as consultants, add value there where we can help you pick the right tools, make the right decisions to be cost effective, and then also help you with short term, medium term projects that you might potentially not be hiring full time for. Exactly. And we'll get onto that in a moment.

But in more detail, I think, towards the second half of this. So one thing that I think has been quite encouraging is, separate from the businesses and so on we're working with, but how the data analytics, I suppose, community has stepped in. And I suppose the role of data analytics can have in trying to address, trying to find a cure, trying to help people organize themselves and so on. I mean, how's it been in the States really in your area around people using data analytics and helping out with this kind of thing really? Yeah, it's been remarkable to watch. And, you know, as someone that, you know, we've been, been crazy busy with, with the two kids in the business, I've had, I've had FOMO over it, watching what people are doing with, with all of the data and the stuff that they're able to produce. It's, it's been, um,

really quite something to watch just in terms of across the board, right. Uh, you know, just basic dashboarding around, you know, the curves and the counts and, and, you know, keeping track or, you know, projecting various things like, you know, ventilator availability. It's been, it's been really kind of the mobilization has been really quite impressive. Yeah. Interesting. Although, I mean, I suppose, I suppose there's another angle to this as well, which is we've got a lot of amateur statisticians and amateur analysts now potentially using data and these data sets that are out there to try and come up with some answers who, I suppose, don't have the training, don't have the kind of the understanding of how data works. I mean, you know, as someone who has worked in this area for a long time, any thoughts around that? And I suppose dangers in coming to conclusions from the data that maybe isn't warranted? Yeah, I think there's a ton of danger in that. I think that the benefit probably outweighs the concern. It's a big concern. I think that anytime you read anything online, anytime you look at any data, anytime you see any analysis,

you have to figure out, okay, who is this person telling me this? Are they frustrated? And there's, I think there was some, you know, some prime examples of this, of people that put stuff out there that was proven to be incorrect and false and misinformation. And that's unfortunate. But I think, you know, everyone, everyone's coming together to try to help not just, you know, on the data side, but figuring out how do we get masks for everyone? How do we get funding here? How do we just raise awareness of something that's happening that needs to be bubbled up to a local politician? And all of that stuff, I think, really comes together as something where people are just trying to trying to do whatever they can to help and i think that's a that's a really positive okay so i mean i mean during so during this period

then when you know you're working from home i think i saw a comment i think you made or someone made saying that you know we we're at home working from home but it's not normal times you know it's not like this is we're working from home normally and and and the coffee shop when the corner is open and the kids are at school and so on i mean how much pressure are you putting yourself under and how is your working style and your company style changed over this period you try is it business as usual or is this sort of different how you're trying to work yeah it's uh we were always fully remote so we've never had an office we've been a fully we're we're all in massachusetts actually so we're able to meet up. We don't

do that anymore, but we've always been remote. So we've had a remote culture where we are using various tools, video conference, Slack, et cetera, to do it. This is way different. This is not like it was before. Just in terms of people's anxiety, the distractions at home, you may have thought you were going to be available for something, and then something pops up. And so one of the things we've done differently is we have a lot more, and people have been talking about this, a lot more asynchronous communication where we'll record a short video, throw it over so someone can watch it and reply back, rather than banking on having a specific meeting time. Things like that have changed a lot.

The actual hours that we're working in terms of probably both quantity of hours and also throughout the day, what times we work, that's changed for us just based on other responsibilities. And so it's definitely, if this is your first taste of work from home and a lot of people are saying this it's not this isn't what it's usually like maybe it'll get a bad rap for that um but it's um it's been an adjustment even for companies that are used to working for home so how have you found trying to work on projects with customers now then because we you know you're fully remote we've worked remote in the past. Our customers not necessarily do that. And how have you found, how effective has it been trying to run projects or to get things to happen over this period, in your opinion? Yeah, that part, that part feels somewhat similar. I mean,

I think, you know, there's the, you know, first few minutes of every call that are just talking about, hey, how are you doing? This is crazy. There's that. And everyone is – whereas before, maybe we would be on a call and they'd be all in a conference room together. We have everyone on a Zoom separately. But that part's felt normal. I feel like when the meetings happen in the client meetings there's just uh the general sense in the air that things are different but that part is has actually felt fairly normal okay okay um so you

said earlier on that you know one of the responses you've had to this is to double down on the consulting side um and your existing customers so so with the so it's interesting that you say the consulting side because another angle i suppose with this would be to say this is a naturally quiet period now's the time to invest in the product because you can actually spend some time doing that. What led you to the balance you're going for really there? And is it just pure cash or is it, what's your thinking around that? Yeah. I mean, it may end up being what you suggested. I think if that's the case, we will definitely embrace that and invest more in the product. I think we want to, you know,

we just want to make sure that we have a healthy business and, you know, we don't go, we don't go, you know, too far in one direction. I mean, every part of me, you know, as kind of like a product manager and someone that really believes in what we're building, every part of me just wants to go all in and just build our product and just spend all our time doing that. And that's what we get so excited to do. Not that we don't like our client projects. We like them. But we just want to make sure we have a healthy business first and foremost.

And once we do that, we'll feel comfortable working with contractors to go faster on the product development side and invest in marketing and marketing collateral. And so it's just been one of the things that we've always felt is important is let's have a healthy business first and then go from there. If that doesn't happen and we are left with all this time on our hands, then we'll use it wisely and we'll invest in our product and go even further. But I think if we have a healthy business, we can actually invest in our product more. And so that's hopefully the direction that this goes. So when do you think, something I've been struggling with is, when is it an appropriate time to start doing some marketing in this situation?

So I think everybody sent out those continuity of service while COVID-19 emails out, which I think to a certain extent almost became like the GDPR ones that went out a while ago when you had so many of them out that it became almost like spam. But there comes a point at which you are going to have to go out and find new customers. And also there's a role for the services we provide. Have you thought about when is a good time to start marketing?

When is inappropriate? When is appropriate? And how that form might take, really? Yeah, for sure. And I think there's a couple different approaches. I think the main question is what really is marketing? And it could be a lot of things, right? So some of the stuff we're going to do is we're going to be on a, we're gonna be on a podcast, I think, in the next couple weeks,

not a podcast, a webinar, where we're going to talk with other small business owners about what how we're dealing with, you know, very similar to this, this podcast, right. And that's, you know, that's not marketing, but it's being active, it's talking about your business, it's, you know, helping other people. And so we're going to start doing that stuff immediately. We're also doing various things like going back to talking about using data for good. We went in and we hooked up to the BigQuery public data set for COVID. We wrote a little looker block. We built a little app to show Massachusetts specific data for COVID. And so those things are, you know, it was we wanted to we wanted to, you know, look at the data from Massachusetts. We wanted to share it. So people had it. But also that's also part marketing, right? Just doing things that are, you know, generating some buzz. And I think we'll continue to look for creative ways to not, you know, slam marketing down, you know, at people, but still be active and talk about our business and in ways that is constructive and helpful. And that's kind of how we always have thought about it, but we'll just keep doing more of it.

Okay. I mean, one thing to bear in mind, I think, we've been in this industry for a while, and I suppose we're people that have a bit of experience and a bit of um having this hasn't completely faced us but there are people who work in our industry who um or people we kind of come into contact with who would be nervous and would be i suppose wary of what's going on and and and kind of anxious is there anything that you can think of or you've done that just to reach out and help people in our industry um over this period when you when this can be quite a scary time for people and quite an anxious time yeah to definitely scary definitely anxious i mean the only thing that i could say that's helped me is just how we i have way more conversations with people about this you know and about about how they're dealing with it the ways they're managing their business or doing their job and being kind of open about it having those conversations with maybe people that have gone through similar things, maybe in, you know, 2008,

or at other times in their life. And, and I think people are doing that. I think there's a lot more conversations happening about how do we deal with this? How do we get over it? Whereas if it was something smaller or not as big, I think people might not share and not collaborate. But I've had people reach out to me on Twitter and to talk and, and you know we'll jump on a zoom call and that that kind of back and forth i think just really helps people put things into perspective and also um you know get through difficult times just by by talking and sharing different stories and anecdotes okay okay and i think we looking beyond i mean like all things all things come to an end at some point and the situation we're in, it's probably not going to be finished in the next kind of few weeks, but there will be a time when this is over. And

I suppose in a way, you know, what do you think, what do you think of the opportunities for growth and for scale and where do you think the opportunities for analytics is going to be really in the future? And where do you think your product is analytics is going to be really in the future? And where do you think your product is going to be driving that and part of that in the future? Yeah, really good question. I do think things will come back to normal. I think it's an opportunity for companies that are, you know, able to kind of ride through this and stay focused, that there really will be opportunity that kind of comes out of this to, you know, as kind of growth comes back to the

market to ride those tailwinds and be in a good position. And so we're trying to put ourselves in the best possible position to be able to do that. In terms of our product, I mean, I think, you know, and I think people that listen to this and you would agree that data is not going anywhere. People are continuing to invest in their infrastructure and their analytics capabilities. It's only going to become, you know, more important in, um, in the future in terms of our white label data product. You know, one of the things we always talk about is let's say you're a SAS company and you're trying to move up market to the enterprise. Well, one of the things that you really want to have in your product is be able to say, Hey, we have all this analytics that's available for you. And so if you're now a SaaS company, maybe you're trying to figure out how to grow faster,

we think we have opportunities to help you add features to your product to make your customer-facing analytics more robust so you can actually move up market and differentiate from your competitors. And so I think we can use some of those kind of competitive talking points to try to grow and kind of get the momentum of the market back in our favor when it happens. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I agree. I think a lot of the things that customers were hesitating over, our customers, you know, everybody wants to hire their own team. Everyone wants to build their own data team. And a lot of customers I work with or potential customers were holding on for that kind of that unicorn hire, that someone to come in and build their team for them and so on. And that's not going to happen at the moment. People aren't going to be moving jobs.

People are going to be more cautious about that. And I think that, you know, to my mind, it'd be a much clearer decision now about, look, we can't do that. Let's build a team with the assistance of someone like ourselves. Let's, you know, use your product embedded in our SaaS rather than build it ourselves. I think it will really kind of bring to a quick close some of these decisions that people were kind of prevaricating over. And especially when you've got to get things done, but there's less money around really as well. Right. And I fully agree with that. a quick close some of these decisions that were people were kind of prevaricating over um and especially when you've got to get things done but there's less money around really as well right and i fully agree with that and i think i think even during good times right we're we're out there trying to make that argument as well right like if you work with someone who's done

this same thing a million times you can do it really quickly you can do it faster you can do it cheaper it's great to have your internal teams and you should have it. But especially in these times, I think that there'll be, and maybe we're in a little bit of a weird period here where everyone's kind of on pause, evaluating things, as you mentioned. But as soon as people start looking beyond, I think they will be making those decisions. And that's our hope, for sure. Yeah, definitely. I mean, just go back to the point you said about embedding your product in SaaS applications. I mean, that go back to the point you said about embedding your product in SaaS applications. I mean, that to me is, I think, is quite a good opportunity. And tell us a bit about that again. How does your product work in that area? And I suppose on a commercial

basis, how does that work really? Yeah, good question. So one of the things that companies are always deciding between is, are you going to build a completely custom thing into your application? Are you going to embed a dashboard or are you going to do something else? And so the way we think about our product is on one hand, you have a complete self-serve dashboard that is fairly rigid and you can't quite change every single element of because you're limited by what the tool can do. And on the other hand, you have something that's fully custom. Maybe you've built something in React. We want to be directly in the middle. So you're not limited by the rigidity of the dashboard, and you're not building something

completely custom. And so our product has this, it's essentially a low code syntax to build up a dashboard. And so you can write a SQL query, you actually get back the data, you can map that to a visualization, but it's all code under the hood. So you can customize and change virtually everything. And so if you're embedding or using the product in conjunction with a SaaS application, you have a lot more levers that you can pull in terms of look and feel and user experience that you may or may not have gotten with a fully embedded dashboard. And you would have gotten

it if you fully built a custom. But there's all sorts of things that you have to think about if you build a custom, not just the visualization layer, like the caching and the queries and the connections. And there's a whole bunch there that's happening under the hood. And so we feel like our platform is right in the middle between something that's kind of not customizable, like a dashboard and something that's fully custom, like building yourself, or really this low-code solution in the middle. And we think that that makes a lot of sense for SaaS and sharing data externally.

Interesting. And obviously, I met you at the Looker Join event. And so you're in an interesting position there because in some respects, you're a competitor for Embedded Looker, but also your product will consult data from Looker, which I noticed today as well. How do you manage that relationship with Looker, but also your product will can source data from Looker, which I noticed today as well. I mean, how do you manage that relationship with Looker at the moment? Yeah, I mean, we have a phenomenal relationship with Looker. And I would say

white label data plus Looker is just a really remarkable thing because you can use this very unique combination of Looker iframes and the Looker API to build these experiences. And Looker is unique from that perspective as a BI platform because they're not necessarily just a dashboarding tool. They have this whole API layer where you can use your LookML and your model to do all the data work that you need to do and then get back that data with the API. And so with our platform, someone that is need to do, and then get back that data with the API. And so with our platform, someone that is not an engineer, again, like myself, because I was the original user that we were building this for,

you can go in and say, okay, I want to put this iframe right here, but then I want to do something slightly different with Plotly using the Looker API here. Maybe I want to use Mapbox down here with the Looker API. And so you can leverage the entire Looker model that you've built, maybe reuse some of the dashboards for certain things, and then build the custom stuff that you have to do custom. And all of that's done without writing any JavaScript or Python. It's just using our low-code development environment. And so I think one of the reasons I think we're working so closely with Looker on it is because it just leverages everything that they do really, really well. And we're able to just enhance it just that much more by kind of being the last mile of how you actually deliver that to an end customer.

Okay, excellent. Well, look, how does somebody get to hear about, get to see and play around with your product and maybe get a trial and so on? How would they find out more and how would they get a trial? Yeah, that's awesome. They can go to the hashpath.com and reach out to us there's a little chat widget um and we can do a demo and we spin up these instances really fast and people can can play around with them and take it for a test drive um so that just hashpath.com okay fantastic well seth it's been great speaking to you glad to hear you okay and uh it's it's kind of interesting someone speaking to

somebody in the same industry who's been through similar things and um yeah i mean life will go on i think to treat this as i think to treat the situation that's happened as nothing is different is is wrong and things will always be different after this but the value of analytics and the value of what we do um and the nimbleness of our businesses and so on i think is what will keep us through really and um yeah it's been great to our businesses and so on i think is what will keep us through really and um yeah it's been great to speak to you awesome yeah i really appreciate a great conversation thanks a lot Thank you.