The following interview is a conversation we had with Ryan Janssen, CEO and Co-Founder of Zenlytic, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $5.4 Million Raised for AI-Assisted Business Intelligence to Drive Better Decisions.

Ryan Janssen
Yeah, thanks for having me, Brett. I’m really excited to be here. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and bit more about your background? For sure. 

Ryan Janssen
So I am a big nerd. First and foremost. My background is I jumped back and forth between two sides of the nerd table. So I was an engineer right at undergrad. Then I quickly kind of went and got an MBA and worked as a venture investor for like six, seven years in London. Then I went back and did a master’s degree in data science and after that founded Zenlytic with my Co-Founderr Paul, who I met at that master’s degree. So I guess by there’s an old Peter Thiel rule, right, where it’s like if you’re valuing a business, what do you add a million dollars for every engineer and you subtract a million dollars for every MBA. So I guess I’m net positive because I have two engineering degrees and one MBA. 

Brett
I love that. And from your time as a venture capitalist, what’s the number one thing that you walked away with that you’ve applied to Zenlytic today? 

Ryan Janssen
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s so hard to choose. There’s lots of things that I’ve taken away from that, but I feel like well, first, let me just say being an investor really does help you a lot to prepare as a Founder. I think probably the number one thing that I took away from it is resilience. And when you’re starting an early stage startup, it’s always a roller coaster ride. Any given time of the week, there’s like three or four cycles where you feel like it’s like, hey, we’re on top of the world, we’re geniuses. And then the next day you’re like, oh, we’re total idiots, how could we thought that’s going to work? So it’s not for the faint of heart. And I think as an investor you have a portfolio of ten of those companies doing that at any given time. So at some point in time there’s always a couple that are having some sort of challenger crisis or some sort of issue, basically. 

Ryan Janssen
And you kind of realize that’s just part of the natural cadence and rhythm of building a startup, you know, that’s normal. And you come in with, I guess, the ability to ride those sort of cycles. I think a lot better than someone who just jumps in not knowing what they’re in. 

Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now a couple of questions that we like to ask really just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and entrepreneur. First one, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire. 

Ryan Janssen
About you know, I’m not going to say Elon Musk because I’m sure everyone says Elon Musk, even though I love Elon Musk. The thing that you could really admire about Elon Musk is that he know hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank after selling PayPal. And he could have just relaxed and had a happy life. But he decided to basically bet all of that on the future of humanity for humanity’s sake, which I really respect, but I’m not going to say know. And I’ve got to say that the person that I look up to most is probably Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs passed away just as I was starting my venture career, like the same quarter that I started, pretty much. And I actually got to see his impact throughout that entire wave know, growth inside, especially Valley Tech, but in tech in general, I think that people that are studying today, it’s kind of been just long enough that they kind of forgot the impact that Jobs had and they’re focused on Musk. 

Ryan Janssen
But I think a lot of the things that people still do today are attributable to him, right? Like just that perfectionist Founder ethos and that relentless focus on the customer product. And I think a lot of what you’d call the archetypical Founder personality you can trace back to him. And I never was fortunate enough to meet him personally, but the friends of mine that say that the reality distortion field was real and I still don’t have that kind of reality distortion field, but I can respect how powerful that would be when you’re building something like Apple. I think he’s amazing for some reasons. First, because of those traits to be on distortion field, the charisma, the perfection, attention to detail, I think those are really impressive and I think his track record just speaks for itself, right? I mean, to have transformed multiple industries and just watching how things change when he was or wasn’t with Apple, for instance, like the profound impact he had on a company at all stages of his development all the way through to being the largest company in the world just kind of chokes me up. 

Ryan Janssen
It’s really quite remarkable what he achieved. So he’s got to be my number one. 

Brett
I think there’s only two in total that I remember. I’ve categorized them as like celebrity deaths, where I heard it and I was genuinely very sad and it affected me. And for some reason, Robin Williams was one when he died. I was super sad about it. And then Steve Jobs, I remember just, like, reading that news and just feeling like, fuck the world. Just really lost someone really important. I was worried for the world that we had lost him early, which isn’t very common when I see this type of stuff. If it’s not someone I know, I don’t really think about it that much. But Steve Jobs, that was heavy. That was really crazy. 

Ryan Janssen
I remember the day that Jobs died. And so my boss at the Venture Fund and my mentor to this day was an even bigger Jobs fan than I was at the time. Right. I learned a lot about Jobs from him, and I remember he was just kind of, like, despondent. And I remember going into his office and saying, I’m really sorry for the loss. And it felt like we’d kind of all lost somebody that day because who knows what he could have done with another decade? Or imagine if Job was alive today and what he’d be doing with the developments in AI. Actually, the only other time that I can really point to for that. This is the nerd side of me, but I think a lot about Alan Turing, and I think Turing was about my age when he died, and he had, obviously, profound impacts on science, technology, the outcome of World War II, and pretty great man. 

Ryan Janssen
And I wonder what the world would have been like if we had another 40 years of him. Dedicated, working hard, too. So same thing. The same thing for Jobs as well. Just great people. And definitely goats, for sure. 

Brett
Last weekend, I was in the beautiful state and city of Omaha, Nebraska, for that Warren Buffett event. So I just wanted to go ahead and watch him speak because he’s getting up there. He’s, like, 96. Charlie Munger is, like, 99. So they probably don’t have that many years left. And I was just thinking about their age, and it’s like, on the topic of Elon Musk. Elon Musk is what, like, 50? These guys are, like, late 90s. Imagine we have another 50 years left of Elon Musk. Just innovating and terrorizing society, probably a little bit, but overall, a very positive impact on the world. And I don’t know why that just blew my mind to think about. We have, hopefully, even more than that, but probably like, 50 years left of Elon Musk innovating. And that’s just, I think, very exciting to see someone who’s still so young and hopefully has a lot of life left. 

Brett
Yeah. 

Ryan Janssen
You know, it’s actually really interesting with all the people we’ve talked about, like, even Turing, Jobs, all those people, they were all kind of shit, right? Like, all of them are controversial characters, right? Like Steve Jobs, like, famously called or whatever. It’s interesting how all of them have to ruffle feathers a little bit, but that might just be an essential part of making a really big dent in the universe. 

Brett
Yeah, for sure. Have you watched the movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley by chance? 

Ryan Janssen
Yeah, I love that movie. I watched that movie before the ending was written. Know steve Jobs’s return. I remember that movie ending with the famous scene of Bill Gates sort of like looming over Jobs and they kind of ended that. It’s like, okay, that’s the end. Microsoft beats Apple. That’s the end of the story. But it’s funny because that movie came out before Apple’s. Sort of big comeback, right? 

Brett
Yeah, I think it was like 90. When did it come out? I have to look again. But I just watched that recently. A friend introduced it to me and it was so good. It was like the original Social Network is kind of what it felt like, if you remember that movie. 

Ryan Janssen
Yeah, no, these movies are fascinating. I love this stuff. 

Brett
Yeah, agreed. What about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact and it can’t be the Steve Jobs book? 

Ryan Janssen
There’s a couple that come to mind. I think probably the real classic one. It’s not a huge surprise, but Lean Startup, huge fan of Lean Startup. I think a lot of those lessons. It’s funny, we’ve had this full sort of cycle where first that was like when that book came out, everyone is trying to sort of replicate what was happening in Lean Startup. And I remember reading that book, thinking about how your startup’s runway should not be measured in dollars or months or anything. It should be measured in number of experiments. And I remember that just clicking and thinking, wow, that is really interesting. And just sort of pouring through the rest of the book like that. Just like having all those realizations. I remember that when that book came out, a bunch of people had that same enthusiasm and I was quoted Crazily. And then for a while it actually became kind of just a backdrop of sort of how you run a tech business, right. 

Ryan Janssen
And people still talk about product market fit and stuff. But a lot of the ideas that the book popularized had become just sort of canonical without people thinking about it being originally sort of presented in that book. And now I feel like people are kind of slowly starting to forget those lessons. And you’re hearing less and less of these terms talked about with a couple of exceptions, like PMF, but I think it’s due for a resurgence. And I feel like we need some people sort of posting more quotes and more ideas from that book to bring people back onto that ethos, because that’s a great way to start up. I want to give a special mention, actually, to Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One. Also a controversial figure who’s probably shaking things up because he’s, you know, just all of his little lessons in that are very fascinating. 

Ryan Janssen
And I think Peter Thiel is a very smart person, and I love the way that he know I think people call him a contrarian. I don’t think he’s a contrarian. I think that he’s an independent. He just thinks independently. Right. And it’s not like, know, married to an ideology or against an ideology in terms of running a tech business, but he has the ability to avoid the sort of crowd thinker or whatever that industries can fall into and just sort of speak independently. And he has some really good ideas in that book which I think are also just really cool. 

Brett
Yeah, I need to read that one again. I read that in 2016 or something like that. Maybe a little bit later, but it’s been too long now. And I feel like when you go back and read those books five something years later, you always walk away with something completely different. So I’m going to move that one up my list to reread again. 

Ryan Janssen
Yeah, totally. It’s funny when you read a book, there’s a couple of books that I come back to over and over again because it really depends on when you’re reading a book. It’s not just the book, it’s also the reader. 

Brett
Right. 

Ryan Janssen
And so I’ve come back to Lean Startup several times, first as someone just getting started in tech and then someone has been more experienced investing and now is a baddie. And it’s funny because you do take different things away from it every time. 

Brett
Yeah. My secret is I use different colored highlighters. So there’s this book called Traction. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. It’s like the entrepreneur’s operating system that we’ve used for our company. And I’ve been reading that now for many years, and I can go through and see the areas that I highlighted back in 2015 with an orange highlighter. It’s like, wow, that was meaningful to me back then. That’s not useful at all. And then there’s other stuff where I’m. 

Ryan Janssen
Like, how did I miss this? 

Brett
How did I not highlight this? So it’s fun seeing this book just get destroyed over the years and how different things hit at different times. 

Ryan Janssen
That’s right. What was I thinking? Yeah, totally. 100% nice. 

Brett
Well, let’s dive a little bit deeper into the company. So can you take me back to the early days when you were talking about the idea and throwing around starting this company with yourCo-Founderr orCo-Founderrs? What were those early conversations like and what made you guys say, yes, this is it, let’s do it? Yeah. 

Ryan Janssen
So myCo-Founderr and I have it’s interesting, we both found ourselves together at the intersection of two sort of really important things that both informed where were going to go with Senlitic. So I think I mentioned we met when you were know, AI school. We were doing master’s degrees in machine learning and data science. So at the time, that actually came out the famous paper, Attention is All You Need, which kind of underpins the development of the transformer, which is what is the operating unit of every sort of large language model today that came out while were studying together. So we’ve actually had a very front row seat to the dawn of these generative AI large language models and we played with the great, great grandparents of GPT Four and everything in between. The other thing that we did together is sort of halfway through that program we started a consultancy, data science consultancy, where it was kind of full stack data support, everything from setting up data pipelines all the way through to data driven strategy. 

Ryan Janssen
So were actually working with dozens of companies from startups to Fortune 500s basically. And we had a front row seat to how they used or failed to use their data. And we saw at the time there was a very common the streams converged at one point, which is that there had been tremendous advancements in data pipelines over the past couple of years. Every company has more data than ever before, but nobody’s really using it to its full capacity. Right? And the reason for that is actually a lack of great tools for the end user. When you’re a big nerd like me, and you’re good at Python or SQL or whatever, it was remarkable how fast we could actually go from cold, cold to the most well informed person in the room by just doing a couple of hours of data exploration as consultants. But when you don’t have those tools at your disposal, it’s actually really tough to make sense of your data, right? 

Ryan Janssen
So that’s the kind of convergence of the two things we saw is like the world needs better self serve tools, especially for business intelligence. And then we could see the groundswell was beginning or the outs picking up for where this AI tech was going to go. And that just kind of even at the time, it kind of felt like you’re in your wraps and you can feel the stream is speeding up before the waterfall and you can just kind of see on the horizon. That if you just scale up the compute, you scale the data size, there’s going to be tremendous things are going to happen with this tech. So those two things converge, right? Which is kind of weird. We both happen to be working on both of those things at the same time. And we both happen to be people with tons of mutual respect and very complementary skill sets. 

Ryan Janssen
And from that, all of that happening together is kind of a Six Sigma event. Zenlytic was born and yeah, so Zenlytic, long story short, it’s a business intelligence tool. You can talk to, it’s a full featured bi platform, but it also has this AI powered data analyst that’s basically like having an email with someone on your data team, except they never sleep and they’re always on, and they’re instant replies. So I guess all those things together sort of led to us building that. We’ve been doing that since before the revolution started in December with, like I said, the progenitors, the grandparents of some of the modern LLMs, and there was always sort of chat functionality in the tool. Then in December, Chat GPT came out powered by 3.5. And within an hour of that coming out, we just seen the capabilities of that tech, and we said, okay, it’s time to accelerate and double down on this. 

Ryan Janssen
So we just continued to focus and refine that language powered experience, and we’ve been cranking full steam ahead. The tech has been cranking full steam ahead at a pace that I’ve never seen in my career. In tech, just the pace of this change is sort of eye watering. And yeah, so now we’re actually up to very powerful modern tools that can replace a conversation with a data analyst. They can pass a Turing test. 

Brett
Are the companies that are using this, do they not have a team of data analysts? And this is giving them that function, at least? Or is it optimizing teams that already have data analysts in place? 

Ryan Janssen
Most have the data teams in place, usually smaller teams, but some don’t. And I would say the more just in case, it’s the latter, actually, because you’re like, all right, if they have data teams, then why don’t we just email them? But if you’re a data person at a mid sized organization, you kind of have three jobs, right? So your first job is, like, building and maintaining the tools. So you set up these data pipelines, business intelligence tools. The second is helping with these sorts of questions, and the third is sort of deeper analytics. So this is running more advanced experimentation and sort of statistical rigor around experiments and A B tests and things like that. So I call just bucket those into advanced analytics and data people. It turns out that they obviously love to do number three. They actually love to do number one as well. 

Ryan Janssen
They love building these tools for the team. The only thing they really hate is the second one, which is sort of like answering those data questions for the team or building the data tickets. So they spend the vast majority of their time on the second one. They probably spend 80% of their time on that. Oh, hey, I’ve got a quick data pull. Can you help me with this? Can you put this on a dashboard? And then they’ve got to crowd out the rest of their time between building the tools and the advanced stuff after they settle all those quick data pulls. So it’s a bit of both. Got it. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And who are the companies that you’re working with? You don’t have to names, but is there like a general bucket. 

Ryan Janssen
Is it? 

Brett
Ecommerce Brands? Is that fair to say? 

Ryan Janssen
Ecommerce is one of our sort of biggest heads. The reason for that is because we started working exclusively with ecommerce businesses. And we did that because one of the big problems, the reason that data teams get a bad rap is because people say that they have trouble solving specific problems of the end users because they’re not close enough to the domain knowledge. That’s where that friction sort of happens is because the data teams are not expert performance marketers or they’re not experts in sales ops or anything like that. They’re experts in data. So the reason we chose sort of commerce exclusively, we actually turned off everything else. We said no, only commerce businesses was because we wanted to get close to the problems of a commerce business and understand their day to day and work really closely with all the loops that you’d expect from a commerce company from acquisition, conversion, retention are the big three. 

Ryan Janssen
And then like inventory management, we got to live and breathe those same problems. But we did that at the start for a while. And commerce will always be a big part of the companies we work with. As most recently as the revolution has been happening, I guess we’ve seen a lot of interest from other verticals as well. So lots from consumer tech, increasing amounts from SaaS businesses now. So we made a decision to drop the official commerce moniker and just make that sort of unofficial thing. And we worked a lot of commerce businesses, but now it’s sort of broad. And then I’d say, yeah, we work with companies that are generally mid market just because we like the mid market sales cycles versus long enterprise sales cycles. But I’d say the sweet spot for us is something like our customers mostly have revenues between sort of 15 and $500 million a year. 

Brett
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Ryan Janssen
Now, back today’s episode. 

Brett
And are there any metrics or numbers that you can share that just highlight some of the growth and traction that you’re seeing today? 

Ryan Janssen
Yeah, for sure. I mean, the way that we really measure our success right now as a seed stage business is with engagement, which is very high. And we see brands are using this tool. We’ve seen like six, seven hour sessions and things like that, and we see people using it many times a day. So that’s great. But if you want to track growth. I guess the biggest number, I don’t know, y axis for you, but I’ll say that we’re about six x on the year so far in terms of Arr. So I think we can do much better than a straight line basis for the last two thirds of the year as well. Yeah, just lots and lots of growth. I think that has been driven by several factors. First, broading out beyond ecommerce. And the other thing, of course, is just lots of enthusiasm for what’s happening with AI, large language models, the capabilities of the really remarkable tech happening right now. 

Brett
And from an AI perspective, what are you doing to stand out? Because there’s just so much noise. Everyone is talking about AI. Everyone’s changing their domains to end in AI. So what are you doing to stand out and rise above all that noise and make sure that people understand that you’re not just using this for marketing and sales. 

Ryan Janssen
It’s not just BS. 

Brett
It’s something real there. 

Ryan Janssen
Totally. 

Brett
Right. 

Ryan Janssen
Also, by the way, I’m sure there’s someone right now in the domain office or whatever, like the office of the registrar. And I think it’s the Dutch Antilles, maybe. It’s I think it’s like the AI TLD just like, patted themselves on the back and they’re like, yes, I’m an like, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m just like crazy. Yeah, I know, it’s mean. So there’s a couple of things. The first thing is actually, this is a bit of an aside as well, but the hardest part is actually not really differentiating. The hardest part is keeping up. And I think I mentioned before, the pace of this change is like nothing I’ve ever seen. And I don’t think people fully appreciate how fast this is happening. Because when I was a kid, I watched the dawn of the Internet, right? And that took years and years and years. 

Ryan Janssen
I remember logging into my text only telnet and then trying Netscape, like three years after that. And then CSS came out another four years after that. So that was a slow progress. The mobile revolution. There was several years between the launch of the iPhone and the launch of the App Store, for instance, right. And that was on kind of like a yearly cycle. We’re seeing stuff happening. We’re seeing stuff happen day by day with AI. And it’s just remarkable how much is happening. And there doesn’t even seem to be any sign of things slowing down. So that is unprecedented. So I think that’s the real hard part. But back to your question, how do we differentiate? I think the real way to differentiate is not to be an AI business at all. The real way to differentiate is to solve a problem that happens to be using AI. 

Ryan Janssen
And I guess that’s our focus. We’re lucky in the sense that we have been doing this since before AI was cool. So it’s not really that novel for us, but we just focus on, I mean, our mission, our goal is to pass that Turing test, right? It’s to make that conversation feel like an instant always on Data Analyst. So you can sort of push the boundaries of what’s possible and self cert. Those are all really valuable things, but nothing in that mission actually says the word AI. Right? So I think that’s the first part of it. I think the second thing too, is that a lot of the bandwagon jumpers are not acknowledging the limitations of the technology, right? And while this tech is very powerful, it’s also not a panatia, right? And there’s certain things it can’t do. And these tools still hallucinate, for instance, or whatever. 

Ryan Janssen
There’s still lots of limitations of the tech. And if you don’t have a good understanding of the limitations, then you end up being just one other tool in that sea of thin wrappers over the OpenAI API or the Google Barred API or whatever, right? And I’d say that right now, the vibe in sort of Ventureland is like, don’t be a thin wrapper. How can you avoid being a thin wrapper? A lot of those tools, I think, either will struggle or have already started struggling because they’ve already been eaten by the developments of the foundation models. Right? There are a bunch of tools that were doing AI web browsing and it’s like, yeah, you can now OpenAI can’t browse the web. And now this is a browser with AI built in. And then three days later, which is like 18 months in AI dog years, three days later, OpenAI launches the web browser capability and it just makes the startups all completely obsolete. 

Ryan Janssen
So I would say that you have to understand the limitations and you have to understand where the tech is going, and you don’t just have to be a thin wrapper. How does that manifest in our particular situation? I’d say that there is about a bajillion different companies trying to build what we’re building. I would say about 999 sub bajillion of those are doing something called Text to SQL, which is exactly that, it’s a thin wrapper where you ask OpenAI, just convert something into SQL that doesn’t work. So in that case, that’s probably accurate, like about 90% of the time. Which is fine, I guess, if you’re trying to write poetry or something, which I’d beat chat to, BT. But when you’re doing data analytics and you’re building board reporting off of this, 90% of the time is absolutely terrible, right? So you can’t have that sort of reliability or that they can’t achieve the scale that you can with other methodologies. 

Ryan Janssen
So our approach is instead to utilize parts of those LLMs, but we deeply integrate them with all the other tech that we’ve built. And getting really specific, we integrate it with something called a semantic layer. Semantic layer is like a really nerdy thing that takes your business’s metrics. And sort of translates it into data speak in the locations in a data warehouse. By doing both of those things at once, you end up with something that’s way greater than the sum of its parts. And the LLMs provide the comprehension, the semantic layer provides the consistency and the overlap of those things together is really where you start getting that sort of always on, instant analyst feel. 

Brett
Makes sense. Yeah, I was going to ask about that because I feel like there is just a major trust issue and I can speak through. Like on our end, we’re a podcast production studio, so we do a couple of hundred episodes every month and we started playing around with the Chat GBT. And I saw it, I was like, man, this is sick, this is going to replace our writers, we’re going to save a lot of cost. And were using it or started playing around with having it create show notes for us and we got through a few of them and then I’m going to fact check it and just make sure and it turns out it was just totally making stuff up. It was pulling stuff that wasn’t from the transcript, it was just making things up and it was like partially accurate, but it also was making stuff up, which was not ideal, so we had to abandon those efforts. 

Brett
And I think other people have had very similar experiences with Chat GPT, so I have to imagine that harms you in a way, right? If that’s what people’s experience has been with Chat GPT, they hear about your tool, then they would think, oof, sounds cool, but what if it’s wrong? What if it makes stuff up like Chat GPT does? So how do you navigate that? And how do you educate customers to make sure that they understand that it is very different? 

Ryan Janssen
Yeah, 100%. And by the way, if you ever want to do something fun, you’re just chilling with a beer in the evening, go ask Chad GPG to write your biography. And my wife and I did that a few nights ago and she got her biography back and it talked a lot about her time at Goldman Sachs and her career progression there and who she worked with, and just in great detail about her time at Goldman. And my wife has never worked for Sachs before, so you’ll get funny stuff like that happening and it’s funny. I know one of our in our show notes we talked about this will dovetail nicely in a question which I think you’re probably going to ask later, which is like, what has been your greatest challenge? Going to market with an innovative product? And I think this actually covers that nicely. 

Ryan Janssen
I think there’s actually, at the end of the day, there’s kind of two types of startups, right? There’s ones that are trying to convince you that their solution is the best in a known set and it’s like, hey, we know that CRMs work, we’re the best CRM because of X. The other type is people that have to convince, they’re trying to convince you that this new solution is possible, right, that it works. And it’s like, hey, we have this very new technology that no one’s ever done before and there’s not lots of companies doing it. So there’s those two sets, the ones with lots of companies doing it, the ones with not many companies doing it and the latter category is challenging because people are inherently skeptical that it’s going to work. In our case, that’s one of the manifestations that happens is like, yeah, they hear about hallucination, they hear about how is this going to be a problem for a data driven tool and it’s real. 

Ryan Janssen
So we had to spend a bunch of time saying that, showing that this is reliable. Basically the onus is on us to do that. I guess our solution to that has been to open our product up and show people our product as early and as fast and as often as possible. So our objective is really to get to a demo in pretty much sort of every sales you call. And that’s whether it’s meeting with an investor, meeting with a potential sort of new user, or in a sales call. Or meeting with a potential new team member in a hiring process or just having someone visit the website. Polynomials our website is basically a giant demo with a website wrapped around it. Our goal is to get people in front of the product as quickly as possible so we can show you put the onus on us to deliver it. 

Ryan Janssen
We want to make it as easy as possible to show you that this works. In our case, people will go and use that demo and they’ll see the reliability firsthand. They’ll understand some of the work that we’ve done around, like I said, this sort of semantic layer under the hood. What we’ve essentially done is we’ve kind of chopped off the head of a large language model and sort of wired it deeply into a highly structured semantic layer of a business intelligence platform. So that thing is hardwired. It’s mechanically impossible for it to go off the rails basically and that’s not an easy task, but we’ve accomplished it and people can see it for themselves. When you’re a Founder, every call is a sales call, but I approach every sales call in any capacity with the mindset of okay, what can we do to show this person how awesome this new tech is and how well it. 

Brett
Works and what are your views when it comes to your market category? It sounds like Bi tool is just very broad. No code analytics also feels very broad. How are you thinking about the market category that you’re in? 

Ryan Janssen
Yeah, well, so yeah, I would call ourselves business intelligence for sure. It does feel broad. I suppose it’s an interesting category because in a way it’s not the kind of category that VCs usually to get involved in because it’s pretty mature, right? It’s been around for a long time. There’s a lot of people doing it. We’ve had some big changes in the industry though, that have actually made it a lot less broad than it feels like. And that’s basically a couple of the biggest sort of behemoths in the room. For example. Tableau looker. A couple others basically have been acquired, right? And in those acquisitions, it’s left a bit of a vacuum in the greater Bi landscape. So Tableau is, in my opinion, it’s kind of increasingly focused on visualizing salesforce data. So you see the salesforce influence after that acquisition. For example, at the same time, data pipelines have advanced time. 

Ryan Janssen
So there’s been this quiet revolution in data warehouses and I don’t know the status. I think it’s something like in the last five years, the amount of corporate data that’s being sort of held has gone from like 20% to 65%, has gone into the cloud into data warehouses like snowflake. So there’s all these tools that are sort of storing and processing and cleaning that data. At the same time, there’s decreasing number of tools available for consuming it. And at the same time, I like to think as a VC in terms of secular shifts. I think actually when people pitch VCs, they answer two of the big three whys? Very well. So why is this product useful and why are you the right team? People are pretty good at answering those questions, but they often miss the most important one, which is the why now, right? 

Ryan Janssen
And it’s like, what’s changed? Why isn’t this happened 20 years ago? If you look at the sort of Bi landscape through a why now lens, you realize that the history of Bi has actually been like increasing, sort of monotonically, increasing amounts of self service, right? So people could do more and more with their own Bi tool without having to code as the tools got more sophisticated. And they always kind of expand out to the capabilities of the tech. It’s like as good as the tech can make it. And so just for example, when cloud data warehouses came out, looker was able to let people drill down into their data with better detail. The tech that’s happening now is AI right. LLMs and it’s like, this is the secular shift and I think most industries are going to have to start asking these questions. It’s like, how does our industry change now that we have the capabilities like this that have just come out of nowhere that we’d never had before? 

Ryan Janssen
And when I think about Bi and I’m like, how is this going to change? The answer to me is self evident, which is that every one of those past generations of Bi tools, they ultimately default to a conversation with that data analyst that’s the fail state, right? So it’s like your dashboard doesn’t give you the answers. You, yeah, better go email Sally and data team. It ends with that email and with these LLMs. And with this technology, we can for the first time ever emulate that directly inside the tool and highly integrate it with everything and again, make it happen instantly and make it happen so that it’s not a week long back and forth of emailing. And I just see the opportunity where this new tech has unlocked the capabilities to do this. We’ve seen the pent up demand for this over the last ten years of emailing data people. 

Ryan Janssen
So it just feels to me self evident that even though it’s a very broad space, I think the opportunity is there. 

Brett
And final question, since I know we’re way over on time, but I want to give you a chance to answer it, let’s talk about vision. So can you paint a picture for us of what the next three to five years is going to look like for the company? 

Ryan Janssen
So I think that at the pace of change right now, a five year vision feels like another universe, frankly, first. So that’s a long ways away. And when we’re measuring developments in days, the five years feels a long ways away. But I would say that our goal is to be sort of the next step in that evolution of bi platforms. And I think about the history of it. And again, in the beginning there was tableau. Ten years ago or whatever, there’s tableau. And tableau was the first person to really crush building great dashboards, and everyone flocked to tableau, and it generated $16 billion in value at exit because it built nice dashboards, right? So the demand for that is just very strong. After that came looker. Looker was the first tool to really popularize the semantic layer in modern history. And with that, looker had dashboards, but then they also had the ability explore. 

Ryan Janssen
From here, you can drill in and slice and dice and just explore your data in a visual way that led looker to a $3 billion exit to google. And I think we’re due for the next wave now. And I think the next wave is, again, it builds on the capabilities of the previous tools. So we also have innovated on tableau’s dashboarding approach. We’ve innovated on looker’s exploration approach. And now we have the third leg of the stool, which again, I think is, you know, a natural language interface for data. So when I look to the future, I actually look to the past of like, what did these tools, how did they grow, and what do they become in the past? And my goal for zenalytic, if we do our job right, is to become the next step in that wave. 

Brett
Amazing. 

Ryan Janssen
I love it. 

Brett
All right, we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision. Where should they go? 

Ryan Janssen
You can hit me up on Twitter at Ryan Jansen one word, two S’s. Or you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with people. I would say in general, you’re going to find slightly more startup y, sassy focused stuff that I like to connect about on LinkedIn and slightly nerdier stuff that I like to connect about on Twitter. So you can self select on your nerdiness level or you could know the whole team@zenlytic.com. 

Brett
Awesome. Ryan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about what you’re building and just make this a really fun conversation. 

Ryan Janssen
I really enjoyed it. 

Brett
I think our audience is going to as well. 

Ryan Janssen
Thanks a ton, Britt, and thanks for having me again. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform form of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.