Sramana Mitra: Name the companies that are very expensive to use but address the problems you’re talking about.

Dheeraj Pandey: SQL-based data warehouses. Snowflake did an amazing job in the last 10 years to make it more accessible. Data was still locked in a few people’s bureaucracies. I helped create some of those back at Oracle, but we created big systems. These were hardware-based systems that had the traditional Oracle software. Not many people had access to it. They’re not elastic.

Cloud gave access to systems. The idea of applying the cloud to data warehousing was a big deal. We see that with Databricks, which was again, done at scale. Of course, SQL came back. They applied SQL on top of streams. It’s MAYA. People are still struggling to build pipelines because they break all the time. There’s very little observability for these pipelines. You need a very expensive talent to manage these things at scale.

Sramana Mitra: Which is a huge bottleneck.

Dheeraj Pandey: I can’t forget everything we did as Adobe on the marketing side. Tons of data about customers. We’ve done a phenomenal job of all the clicks that users want to do on an everyday basis and product launches. I think it’s early days.

Sramana Mitra: Speaking about Adobe and visualization, we’ve seen Tableau. We’ve done the Tableau case study from the founder and the investor. We haven’t seen a whole lot on the data visualization side since then.

Dheeraj Pandey: If you peel the onion on Tableau, there are two things they did well. One is the Visualization language. There’s a domain-specific language around how you write a little bit of code. It’ a low-code way of building dashboards. They democratized dashboard building, not just through drag-and-drop no-code, which had limitations. They created a whole army of data analysts who can create this on the fly.

The second innovation that they brought was because they had to compete with Excel, they had to make it consumer-grade in terms of commerce. They have tons of small customers. Now we call it product-led growth. They were one of the originals. That carried the day for them for 15 years until their acquisition.

What Thoughtspot is doing now and the way they’re building it on top of Snowflake is unique. They’re taking their visualization strength and applying it on top of a popular data warehouse in the cloud. We see more visualization companies come out simply because of the power of the browser now. No code is out there. I haven’t seen a low-code company in the visualization space, which has made it simple to create new dashboards. Those who really create delightful visualizations are one in a million.