Why I Left Palantir and Faced 50 RejectionsㅣMosaic, Bijan Moallemi

Intro

00:00If I'm playing a match and I lose a point, I can't worry about the point that I lost. Because if I'm still thinking about the point that I lost, I'm gonna lose the next point and the next game and I'm gonna lose the match. The same is true in a startup.

00:09We had like 7 or 8 people in. So I'm in my master bedroom closet getting a call from an investor hoping for a yes, and we got to no. That was super painful. We weren't ready for that, but it motivated us to be better and move faster and things moved on.

00:25And so later that year, we were raising a series A and that same investor came back around actually saying, hey, I've heard about the progress. I'm seeing everything you guys are doing. I'd love to be a part of the round. I don't see no as a failure if I'm doing the same thing over and over and not learning, that's failure.

00:40But if there's mistakes along the way and I'm learning from that, I actually see that as a positive thing. I don't necessarily see that as a failure. Ultimately, that's that's just part of the journey. I'm Bijan Moallemi, mosaic tech is a strategic finance platform.

00:54We hook into data sources across the business and automate a lot of the manual work that finance teams would be traditionally doing. We debuted as number 97 on the Deloitte Fast 500, and so that's for the fastest 500 growing tech companies from a revenue perspective.

01:08Pretty happy to be top 100 on that list. And I think it's just a testament to all the team's hard work over the last few years to hit those numbers.

7 Years at Palantir : Lessons from Scaling to $3B

01:37My dad moved to the United States when he was 18 to escape the revolution in Iran, working three jobs to pay for college. He was sending money back to his family, ended up getting two degrees in three years. And so I think that work ethic, that tenacity was something that he had, something that my mom had and was just kind of the way that I was raised.

01:56For me, I think the first time that I really started to see to see that in myself. Was on the tennis court, played competitive tennis. Growing up for me was never the most talented person, never the most athletic on the court. But I felt like if I was training harder than everyone, that would put me in a position to where I would have a chance to win any match before I'd get ready for tennis tournaments.

02:14They'd always have these national tournaments over the summer and they would be in the hottest places. So San Antonio in August, which is 100 degrees, 100% humidity, or maybe it's Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the weather here doesn't really get you prepared for that.

02:27What that would mean for me is going out to Palm Springs, training in sweatpants and a hoodie in 100 degree weather for a week, getting ready for those tournaments. And that's definitely the attitude that I've kind of taken with me throughout my entire life.

02:40I think that's the attitude that you can't really lose because you're always getting better. And in the long run, we feel like that'll help us win. Palantir is an amazing company. The company was just over 100 people when I joined. The finance function wasn't really built out yet, and so we went on this incredible journey for seven years, building and scaling the finance team, doing close to 3 billion of a quarter dollars in revenue by the time we left.

03:03When you've got a rocket ship and you've got a company who doesn't have their finances in order, the business was asking these reasonable questions what's our cash balance? How much revenue do we have? Who owes us money? And early on, because we didn't have the infrastructure, we couldn't answer those questions.

03:17Ultimately, we were working really hard. I remember I was living in San Francisco at the time. We were taking the first Caltrain down to Palo Alto in the morning, taking the last Caltrain back up. But because we were doing our work kind of the old fashioned way, which is using Excel to do everything, we were spending so much time pulling data, cleaning data, mapping it, doing the analysis that if the business asked us an important question, it would take us days or weeks to answer it.

03:40And with the pace of business these days, if it takes you two weeks to answer the question, people have moved on. They need something that is faster. They need something that's real time or proactive. Palantir was step one. My co-founders and I, we each went on to be CFOs at other high growth VC backed companies.

03:56If you don't have the billion dollars on the balance sheet like Palantir had at the time, you don't have a technical finance team, which most teams don't. You're actually in a big disadvantage. And the problem that we were solving at Palantir, it's mission critical.

04:08Every company needs to understand their finances. We realize that, hey, everything we did at Palantir, this is actually something that's needed. And it's ubiquitous for all companies. It's not just a Palantir specific problem. As we were just getting the company built, we spent a really long time thinking about the name.

04:24We bought a dictionary, and so my co-founder and I, we'd probably spend 2 or 3 hours a day just paging through the dictionary. We landed on mosaic. The name itself, if you think about a mosaic tile, one tile on its own could be one system of data, and that's valuable, but it's only so valuable.

04:39But when you zoom out and you've got 1000 tiles representing all the data across the business, you can actually paint. Beautiful mosaic, this beautiful vision about the company. We're a small startup. We haven't hadn't raised any money at the time.

04:51There's other mosaics out there. It's a somewhat common name. And we landed on tech because we're a technology company first and foremost, and mosaic is really all about pulling in data from various systems across the business, using that data to plan, forecast, analyze, do all the most strategic, important work that a finance team is responsible for.

How 60 Rejections Turned a Finance Expert into a CEO

05:16For myself and one of my co-founders, we're finance people. We're not the most outgoing. That isn't really the most natural thing for us, but it had to be done. And so back to us, and the way that we sold and the way that we were probably presenting herself, we got a lot of no's.

05:30And it's not always fun to get no's when people tell you, no, I'm not interested or they don't really understand what you're selling. It probably took a few months and 50 or 60 no's for us to really start to figure selling out. The memorable no that we have actually is more on the investing side.

05:48So I remember early on there were a handful of investors that that we were talking to, and we felt like our pitch was pretty good at the time. We were starting to get a little bit of traction, and we got kind of late stage in these processes with these investors, and we're in, I think, the closet, because the room itself, that was my office, we had like 7 or 8 people in.

06:09So I'm in my master bedroom closet getting a call from an investor hoping for a yes. And we got to know that was super painful. We weren't ready for that, but it motivated us to be better and move faster, build the product faster, build the business faster.

06:26And things moved on. And so later that year we were raising a series A and that same investor came back around without us reaching out, actually saying, hey, I've heard about the progress. I'm seeing everything you guys are doing. I'd love to be a part of the round.

06:38So I don't see no as a failure if I'm doing the same thing over and over and not learning, that's failure. But if there's mistakes along the way, if there's something that goes wrong and I'm learning from that, I actually see that as a positive thing.

06:51I don't necessarily see that as a failure. Ultimately, that's that's just part of the journey in a tennis match. If I'm playing a match and I lose a point, I can't worry about the point that I lost. Because if I'm still thinking about the point that I lost, I'm gonna lose the next point and the next game and I'm going to lose the match.

07:06So you need to have this attitude where you analyze it, okay, what can I do better? But then as you're starting the next point, you kind of it's water under the bridge. You move on. The same is true in a startup where everyone that's involved in a startup.

07:17But I think really for founders, you feel it. Orders of magnitude more. The highs are high. The lows are low. And there's days where you don't want to get out of bed. You don't know what the next step is, but I think it's really all around persistence and giving 110% and doing that day in, day out over a long period of time.

07:36If you're thinking about starting a company, are you ready to be persistent? Are you ready to overcome those tough days? Are you ready to do that for many years? And if you are, being a founder is the most amazing thing, but it's it's not for everyone.

How to Build Lasting Customer Loyalty

07:53One of our core beliefs across the business. And we have three core values. But the first one is champion the customer. The way to improve your retention is to really understand what your customers want, what they need, and the more time that you can spend with them, the better off you're going to be.

08:08Listening to customers, I think two things are important. Number one, you have to make sure that you're listening to the right customer. And the right customer from last year may not be the right customer for today or tomorrow. So that's something that you have to keep in mind.

08:20For us, the customer that we were serving early on was kind of the SMB, the small market customer. The things that we were hearing from customers when we had those customers was everything that they cared about in the SMB. Now, the last couple years, the focus for us has been pushing at market, really trying to wean off of some of those smaller customers and focus more on the mid-market and the upper mid-market.

08:40We do still have customers that are in that SMB space we'll sometimes sell to them, but the feedback that we hear from customers at this point, we're going to listen more to the mid-market customer than we are to the SMB customer, and that's just because of the business that we want to build and where we're trying to go.

08:57And I think second is it's really easy to fall into the trap when you have a large customer to bend the roadmap and do exactly what a big customer wants you to do. And you have to be making sure that you're listening to the broader customer base and not focusing on what one individual customer might be saying.

09:13I think our approach I'm really proud of this is we've spun up this team, we call it the Rapid Response Team, where it's a handful of engineers. It's a smaller team, but it allows us to take the requests that we're hearing from customers and if they're smaller or medium type features, we'll try to weave those things into the roadmap.

09:29It's a nice way to get quick wins for customers, make them feel like their voice is heard without actually bending and changing the bigger roadmap that most of the teams working on. I think customers value it, but at the same time it's allowed us to stay very focused.

09:43I think focus is probably the most important thing as a startup. It's less around, what are you building? It's actually more around what are you not building? I think for us, as we started mosaic, we saw other folks across the business at Palantir, folks in legal, folks in HR, folks in sales, folks in marketing, all other departments.

10:04And they'd been blessed with these amazing technologies. These tools made them better at their job. It made their work faster, easier. And on the finance side, for the most part, over the last 40 years, things haven't changed. You're still doing your work in spreadsheets and Google Sheets and Excel.

10:20It's rows and columns, and the technology hasn't really advanced. And so we felt like there was an opportunity to really push forward and bring this technology to the finance persona, a persona that has been needing innovative technology for for years now.

10:34So it's something that we're passionate about. And I think if we can play a part and make the role the CFO a little bit easier, I'd be proud of of what we're building.