North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring. And as a leader, it's your job to deliver. But where do you focus?

Where do you direct your time, your team, your budget, and your emotional energy? We're learning this together on the North Star Leaders Podcast. In this podcast, I talk to purpose-driven leaders about the choices that they make to create audacious economic value while also realizing their distinctive purpose.

I'm Lindsay Peterson, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of the North Star Leaders Podcast. Let's get to it. Today, I am so happy to be joined by Colin Zima.

Colin is CEO of Omni, the business intelligence platform. Colin, welcome to the show.

Colin Zima

Thanks for having me.

Lindsay Pedersen

Really happy to have you. To start us off, what is your favorite thing about what you do?

Colin Zima

I think at heart, I'm kind of a data nerd. So I just like using our product every day. It's kind of nice to build a company where you are the primary user of your product.

It's hard to even imagine a company where you're sort of like not your core target user. And I just love using the product. So I love doing data stuff.

And that's what I'm doing as my job.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that. I love that. Yeah, I know what you mean.

There have been times I actually, at one point in my career, managed a cat litter brand at Clorox, and I didn't have a cat and didn't like cats. So it took a little bit of mental gymnastics. I actually eventually came to kind of love it.

But I know what you mean. It's neat when you are just naturally squarely in the target audience.

So you would know this, what do customers best love about Omni?

Since you are sort of a customer, what's best about it?

Colin Zima

I'd like to think that our sort of core insight is there's really sort of sloppy, messy ways of working with data. You know, like cut every corner, go as quickly as possible, do things fast, but get to the result that you want. Excel is a great example of a tool that does that really well.

And then there's very structured versions of doing data, like get the whole team organized, get everyone on the same page, slow things down, theoretically, to speed you up later, like Enterprise BI. And what we have done is built a product that can sort of float back and forth between those worlds. It can be fast and messy when it needs to, and it can be governed and centralized and sort of enterprise when it needs to.

And I think that's sort of the interesting hinge point that we've gotten right with the product.

Lindsay Pedersen

Is that what inspired your starting Omni? Is this realization that you're either trading off speed or robustness? Or like, was that kind of at the founding here?

Colin Zima

It was. I mean, it's sort of from the life story a little bit. So my previous job, I spent eight years at Looker, which was an enterprise BI company, like very far on the governance side of the house, and led product for a lot of the time there.

So obviously, I was one of the first customers as well. So I was a big believer in that way of doing things. That being said, I started my career in finance on the Excel side of the house.

And I think probably my core personality trade is a little bit closer to sort of the messy corner cutter. And I always sort of felt this tension using the product, which is like we did the robust enterprise sort of govern stuff well, but it was completely non-compromising. And so there was always this piece of me that was really frustrated that it couldn't go fast and get out of the way when it needed to.

And we kind of were never able to completely rebuild the product inside Looker to go do these things. Like our brand persona was sort of set to be enterprise governed structured stuff. And so I always wanted to build this thing that could actually do both.

And that was where we started Omni and wrote a memo about that day one. And that's essentially what the product is right now.

Lindsay Pedersen

Do you sort of acknowledge there are companies, people, clients, customers, who are better served by an Excel and there are companies, clients, people, users who are better served by the other end of the spectrum? They're already well served.

Colin Zima

Yeah. And use cases can demand one side or the other. I think the hard part is like, it's really clear that you have both of these problems.

Like sometimes you get a question and you're an accounting team and you know that the SEC is going to ask you that question again next year and you need to make sure it's the same. It needs to be intentionally sort of rigid. And then there's other times where maybe on the same data set, even someone asked you a question where the fidelity of the answer is lower, the urgency is higher.

And there's just a different set of trade-offs. And oftentimes you're just stuck in the style that the tool allows for. And so very much, I think people have cobbled together like Excel and a BI tool or some decentralized thing and some centralized thing.

The challenge was always like, they're not talking to each other. They don't work well together.

And so that was sort of the core founding principles could we actually kind of make them stick together.

Lindsay Pedersen

Is your target audience, is it as much about the target use case or set of use cases as much about the person? Is there a customer archetype? Usually I think of target audiences as a customer archetype.

But what I hear you saying is it's almost more like a need state. Like I'm in the need state where I need to be able to toggle or am I?

Colin Zima

No, no, that's right. I think the good and bad thing about our company and sort of our approach is kind of everyone can empathize with the problem. There are data people that exist in this problem state where like they've got really rigid tools and they have a lot of questions that people are getting in line for.

And then you have end users that want like governed, reliable things, but also are just sort of like, give me the data. I need to go do the thing on my own. And so a lot of our challenge is that we are intentionally trying to build a product that can do a lot of different things, a lot of different ways.

It can show up and act one day like an enterprise BI tool, and it can show up another day and be fat and get out of the way. And so a lot of what we are trying to sort of pick at in the sales process is do all of these problems exist for you? Like, are you making these trade-offs on a daily basis and walk me through which side we picked and what you do when you can't do the other thing? And that's sort of where we can actually start engaging with someone about the problem.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yes. What do you find creates anxiety for your customers in this, not necessarily with respect to their BI platform, but what keeps them up at night? What's the unifying theme of like what they care about or that's not working right now?

Colin Zima

That's an interesting question because I think with data people, you get a lot of different personas, actually. I think data people in many ways can sometimes be very pedantic about being objectively right at all times and sort of the quality of everything. So you might have people that are like, I wish this thing could be even more rigid at all times so that I'm more right.

I do think increasingly though, data teams especially are trying to sort of be valuable and stretch themselves. And it's oftentimes people are just doing work that they don't want to be doing. It's like it's coordination work or it's janitorial work on the work that they do.

And I would say in most ways, people are just trying to be more effective at their job. Like data people are trying to help the company make better decisions, enable more people to get a little bit of data to answer their question better. And the hard part is that, and we knew this going into the BI space, people will find a way to get data.

Like BI is probably one of the oldest software products in the world. I was looking this up yesterday. Ognos is a BI tool that evidently people still use. It got bought by IBM in like 2000. It was founded in the sixties, the 1960s. And there's been products that has been ongoing since then.

And so some of the challenge is actually there's ways to work around all of these problems. Like ultimately anyone can get a set of and draw a conclusion with it. I think the question is just sort of like, how do we have more impact on the business to make better decisions, to do it faster for less money and ultimately like be more productive, I guess.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Like feel like they matter, like feel like they matter to their business.

Colin Zima

Exactly. Like no one wants to be the reporting center. No one wants to be like, my passion is when people come ask me one-off questions and I do something that I could have done on their own.

And so a lot of people like want to get into deeper work or more thoughtful things, but feel sort of blocked by lower priorities in the food chain that eat up more of their time. And that ends up being a lot of the places that we can contribute.

Lindsay Pedersen

And that's kind of a soul sucking place to be, right? Like spending time on things that are not your zone of genius and are also in addition or not even going to ultimately move the company is a soul sucking place to be. Strong agree.

I've heard you talk about the value of doing unscalable things. You talked about doing support for other software products and their problems because when you solve that problem, the customer is then going to associate that good feeling with you. Can you talk more about the value of doing unscalable things and any tension that that can introduce to being the leader who's also needs to scale?

Colin Zima

I mean, the obvious tension is you only have so much time in the day. And I've had as a couple examples, I did all of our billing for a little while. So I did all of the invoicing to our customer base

And the core reason was it just didn't feel like there was enough work to go ask someone like to go hire someone for that to be a full-time job. And I kind of looked around and there's no one else to go do it. So it was like, okay, I'll go do the billing work.

And the inevitable kind of thread that comes up is sort of like, that's not a good use of time, go find someone else to do it. But a lot of my thought around sort of like the scalability of the effort that you put in is first, I think it gives you a good perspective of how everything fits together. So it's helpful from a product perspective.

But I think when you really think about sort of doing unscalable things like support or kind of little pieces of work at the margin, I think when people buy software, they are in some ways buying a product. They're buying like the literal bits of technology and things like that. But oftentimes when you're buying sort of like enterprise software, you're sort of buying like a partner.

You're extending the staff in some ways and the software is most of it. Again, you don't want to get in line for the data team and they don't want to be pinging me every time they have a question in the product. But like the way the whole company shows up with our product is completely wrapped in the software itself.

In that if we can make someone that much more successful with the product, whether or not it's me helping them or them figuring it out on their own, ultimately, that's going to build on itself and make them more successful with our product in the long run. And so I think in many ways, you've seen like a lot of younger companies, and I know I think this is true of lots of companies, like the support experience can almost be a marketing experience in the product. Like every touchpoint is a good touchpoint.

And so I think in the grand scheme of things, like doing one support request does not make our company successful, but we will have all of these little moments where someone was like, I was really stuck here and you all came and helped us. And like any company in the whole world could do something like that. It has nothing to do with our software, but it's all wrapped in sort of this message that Omni will take care of you.

You know, like Omni will make you more successful at your job. And I think if we can both make great software and also make great customer experience, we can sort of get the dual association of just like, I am going to be taken care of and this team is here to help me. And it's like, we had someone that got stuck at a conference today and the spacebar key was not working.

And they happened to be using our product with the spacebar key not working, but they kind of came to our support. It was like, it was an emergency. We went out to Google and we're like, okay, this is a Mac problem with the spacebar, like go here in your settings.

And it fixed the problem. And I think it's one of those things that just like, it helps build trust with the person on the other side where like, it's such a small thing, but I think people remember those touch points and those experiences. And I think it also like selfishly gives me satisfaction to help other people.

And sometimes doing that, like you want some mix of very tangible work and intangible work. Like if you're just sort of doing abstracted work all day and planning, there's something very satisfying about like, I have a question. Great.

I have an answer. So it's like, it's a mix of all of these things, but like some of it is definitely selfish.

And a lot of it is also just like, I think this is a better way to go deliver things to customers.

Lindsay Pedersen

It seems also from what I hear you saying that it's in your DNA, the collective your, it's in the Omni DNA to care, to want to do that, because as you said, like anybody, probably even I could Google space bar not working, but you know, anybody, it didn't take a particular deep expertise in order to solve that problem. But the fact of the matter is you did do it. You cared enough to do it and others wouldn't, or it's just not, it's not because they're bad people.

It's just not there. It's not what motivates them. It's not interesting to them.

And so you're also kind of like putting the spotlight on something that just is you, like whether it's good or bad, it just is and like making it into a competitive advantage.

Colin Zima

I strongly believe that it's, it's weird to be like, we care more as a company than other companies, because any company could just decide they care more. I always think of like Alaska air. I can't remember what they're saying as it it's like, we care a lot or something like that.

But like, I, I do think if you make it your responsibility to just make sure your customer is successful, it's just a slightly different positioning that like we make software that we hand to customers. And I think ultimately the difference there matters to people. Like I think just to sort of strictly selling software, if we were required to do it a hundred times a day for every single customer, then the economics of the business wouldn't work, but that's just not what it looks like.

And so instead it's just an opportunity to make people more successful. And like, again, I do think it's sort of viral in the company at some level. If people see the CEO doing customer support, it shows that we care about it and we do actually care about it.

So it's like, there's some self-fulfilling sort of aspects to it.

Lindsay Pedersen

I can see how it would be just really gratifying to do something like that. It's very rewarding, especially when, if it can be kind of quick and it's something as vulnerable as you're on stage and your space bar doesn't work, that it just feels good. It's like, it's kind of a dopamine hit to you as a person, as a leader to do that.

And that is a self-perpetuating cycle that makes you want to do all the other things that might take more cognitive energy or time. It also makes me think of, you mentioned like businesses whose positioning is around caring more. I work with companies a lot where it actually is true, but it's not a very massageable positioning because it's something you have to experience.

It's like, show them, don't tell them. So like Nordstrom with the famous, you can return a tire here that somebody bought here 40 years ago before it was even at Nordstrom. Stories like that kind of drive it our way to showcase and demonstrate that the caring is true instead of just saying we care more.

Or like Zappos with, I think people are actually rewarded for long conversations in customer service. And sometimes they're five hours long and those are sort of celebrated, but it is kind of a more, it's a difficult needle to thread when it comes to messaging it because it's such an experiential benefit. You have to experience it.

Colin Zima

And the whole company, I think needs to believe it. Like everyone sort of needs to act it because any one person can sort of peel away at that core value if they don't act on it.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's kind of a high bar. Like it, yeah. Like if it's not going to be delivered on, it's actually going to erode trust.

It's not only not going to accrue trust, it's actually going to erode trust.

Colin Zima

Yeah. There are some amazing outcomes though. Like I think one of my favorite stories is we've had one piece of downtime that was sort of significant in our company's life where the app was down for like an hour and we couldn't figure out what was going on.

We just like, we had the whole engineering team looking at it. It was a problem. And then we had a customer come on support and he was just like, Hey, I was doing this thing.

And I think I might've broken Omni. I was the first one to respond to him. I was like, there's a 0% chance that you broke the app.

Like there's no way. And then I went back to like the escalation room and I was like, Hey, this guy said he did a thing. And then people started looking in the logs and they were like, Oh my God, it was that.

And he had created some sort of infinite loop that like blew up our servers or something like that.

And if you don't have the connection to that customer where they also feel like a partner to you, we're just kind of on an Island by ourself. Like no one's calling bank of America and being like, Hey, I was at the ATM and I broke all of your ATMs. Like it's just, there's that relationship doesn't exist, but because our customers are sort of like partners and we actually have like a working relationship with them, they are able to communicate it with us. And we are able to sort of like solve the problem with them. And there can be obviously frustration that can be like, Hey, you're not doing well today. What's wrong.

But it is more like a working relationship that has back and forth that actually has advantages that accrue to us also beyond, you know, us just handling our customers and making them happy. And I thought that was like an amazing example. That's like, if we didn't have an open line to that person where they were just like, aha, Hey, I think I'd blow up your app.

We wouldn't have solved the problem nearly as quickly. I think those are the interesting things that are very hard to sort of plan for and articulate that are like when your customers are your partners, it's sort of like a different set of benefits accrue to everyone.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. I was like the definition of partnership. It's a relationship.

It's not a one way thing. We're in this together and we're trying to figure it out together. What's the culture given all of that, like I'm getting a flavor for the culture of Omni, but what else makes Omni different from other places to work?

Colin Zima

I mean, I think just on an absolute basis, I mean, we're 80 people and 40 of us came from my previous employer at one time or another. So a lot of us have worked together before. And so I think in that sense, that's not really the important part, but there's just, I would say that we're pretty high trust as organizations go.

Like we've, for whatever reason, we've hired a lot of senior people that we know pretty well. And I think that we give people a lot of latitude to work in different ways. And there's very little micromanagement.

And I would say that we're sort of like one of those companies that is like a remote company where people are trusted to sort of just do good work on their own and sort of not suffer it over and things like that. And so I think in that sense, like we have extremely high trust in the entire company. Like we do all hands, we used to do it three times a week, and now we're down to one time, like one and a half times a week.

And so like, I think that we built a high trust, like pretty transparent organization in terms of just like, again, like people that are trusted to do a good job, do their work, show up, be authentic. I like to think that we're just sort of like a mature workplace. And I think it was because a lot of us went through, like we had a great experience together, we went through an acquisition that we didn't really enjoy the experience of and like the working changes.

And like, we're here, because we like building BI tools and doing good work, and making customers happy. And we go to work and do that. And so it's like, it's gonna be interesting to see how it scales, because it feels like these are all superpowers that you have when you're small and young as a company.

But I think we've done like an amazing job of just sort of being honest and open and transparent and trustworthy. And just like, I don't know, mature, almost.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. I keep thinking of the phrase treating people like adults. And also, you know, there's a self fulfilling prophecy to that, that you treat people like adults, they'll act like adults.

And also, you have every reason to treat them like adults, you already have so much trust.

Colin Zima

I believe that. So like, I tell people in almost all of my interviews, like I coach my daughter's soccer team. And we have practice, or we did have practice at like 330 on Thursdays, which is not the most convenient time for like running a company and scheduling needs and things like that.

But I think the general point is like, if you're not sitting around sort of questioning like who is doing work, and are you working hard, and like, you're just sort of living your life. And like that fits into my life nicely. And it makes me happy and lets me do good work.

I feel like we've just found a nice balance of that type of thing. It's like, we're not sprinting at all times, but we're able to sprint, you know, like, we can work hard, but we can also take a break, go coach a soccer game, go on vacation. And I feel like it's hard to find a balance where, you know, the company doesn't sort of get soft, but it also is not sort of on the side of like a sweatshop or something like that.

And I think that we're trying to actually find an intermediate place where we can run fast, but we can also relax. And that's at least what we're going for. And I think to date, we've done a pretty good job of it.

Lindsay Pedersen

What are you working on right now as a leader? What's your growth edge?

Colin Zima

That's a great question. Probably not enough. I mean, I think the big thing is, if it's not obvious is like, I like to lead by doing.

And I think I've been a little bit more thoughtful about just sort of communication and sort of talking to the company and things like that. Like one example is I'm not a great compliment giver as a leader. I'm just sort of like, I expect great, you know, you did great, like thumbs up.

That's about all. But like we sort of consciously doing shout outs in that weekly meeting that I talked about, it was trying to find an authentic way to just be like, Hey, you, thank you. And like, I'll solve right down like three a week.

And now the whole company for like the first 10 minutes of this meeting just does like really quick shout outs for everyone in the company. And so I think just sort of trying to find little ways to enhance or like push the culture into the company, just sort of thinking a little bit more consciously about things like that. Like how do we show new people how we work?

How do we celebrate doing the small things? I think just trying to be a little bit more conscious about how we communicate those things versus sort of letting them happen naturally. I would say it mostly just happens naturally.

And like our culture is what we do. But I think that we're trying to spend time thinking about that kind of stuff.

Lindsay Pedersen

The word scale comes to mind for me because it's like, when you're small, the explicitness is less necessary. And like being really conscious in codifying and like creating rituals, like the one you just shared, those things become more necessary because you're scaling. So the demand on you as a leader just evolves over time, depending on the stage of the company.

And once you get to a certain size, people can't read your mind anymore. It turns out they kind of can when you're smaller and you've worked together for a number of years. There's a lot of mind reading that actually does happen, but making the implicit explicit then sort of scales you as a CEO. Yep. And we have a lot of work to do there, but we're starting to do it better. This has been such a lovely conversation about leadership.

I have five rapid fire questions for you. Sort of like one word answers-ish. You ready?

Colin Zima

Yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. What's your favorite meal?

Colin Zima

Probably nachos.

Lindsay Pedersen

Like with every, like with the...

Colin Zima

Yeah. I mean, you can't really do nachos wrong, but I probably like the fake cheese even the most. So yeah, you know, but yeah, everything on there. Everything on there, fake cheese.

Lindsay Pedersen

Everything on there, fake cheese. Okay. Introvert or extrovert?

Colin Zima

I would say I used to think I was an introvert, but I'm probably just an extrovert at this point.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. Are you a dog person or a cat person or neither?

Colin Zima

Definitely a dog person. I'm allergic to cats. I think I love cats and they're a lot of fun.

Like I had friends with cats and like going fishing for cats with the little string is pretty fun, but I've only had dogs and love dogs. I've got three kids now, so we've paused the dogs for a little bit, but we will go back to having dogs for once the little one is a little bit more stable.

Lindsay Pedersen

Paused on dogs while children's ball. Okay. What is your favorite thing to do on a Saturday afternoon?

Colin Zima

If I can get on the bike and go out for a bike ride, ideally with the family. So we have, my wife and I both have e-bikes and we like to throw the kids on the back of the bike and just bike around the Bay. So we'll go for like long 20 mile bike ride on the e-bikes with the family.

And that is probably my favorite thing to do.

Lindsay Pedersen

And since you have three, one of you has two behind you.

Colin Zima

I'll put two on mine and she'll put one on hers and we'll just go bike around.

Lindsay Pedersen

That sounds awesome. Okay. What is your favorite dessert?

Colin Zima

Not a big dessert guy. I can probably like a drink. Does that count?

Lindsay Pedersen

Totally counts. What would be your choice?

Colin Zima

Probably do like a Negroni or something would be nice. Okay.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Okay. Awesome. I love this. Well, thank you for this conversation. Okay.

Colin Zima

Of course.

Lindsay Pedersen

If my listeners want to find out more about you online or about Omni, where should we send them?

Colin Zima

Omni.co. O-M-N-I dot C-O. You can find about me there too. Awesome. That's awesome.

Lindsay Pedersen

Awesome. That's awesome.

Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for listening to this episode of Northstar Leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app.

If you know of a North Star leader, whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com. Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter.

I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star leaders.