The following interview is a conversation we had with Ethan Aaron, CEO/Founder of Portable, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $3M Raised to Build a Cloud ETL Tool That Supports the Long Tail of Business Applications
Ethan Aaron
Totally. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Ethan Aaron
Totally. So what is Portable? Portable is a data integration tool. We help people extract data from systems and put it into analytics environment snowflake, BigQuery redshift, et cetera. What is my background? I’ve worked in Data for, let’s say, about six years, going on seven years at this point. And I’ve held a bunch of different roles. First I was selling into the Data ecosystem. Most of the pain points were around data integrations. Then I was doing product management, trying to figure out how do we get data into our system? So again, came down to data integrations, and then the startup were at got acquired, and I stood up our analytics team. So I was at LiveRamp publicly traded company, and I stood up the Data team. I said, hey, why don’t we have our own team that’s responsible for dashboards? It’s responsible for organizing the chaos that is enterprise.
Ethan Aaron
Data did that for about nine months, and then Lyramp sold off its parent company, Axiom, had a bunch of cash on hand. And the question was, who does Lyrep buy? Who do they partner with? And I went over to work in strategy and M and A. So I spent another year digging into the data integration ecosystem through the lens of partnerships in M and A. So I have a pretty good macro understanding of the landscape. And then we started Portable about three years ago.
Brett
And did you always know that you wanted to end up being a Founder and an entrepreneur, or did that come up later in your career?
Ethan Aaron
I’ve always wanted to start something. My dad was an entrepreneur, and growing up just like this was however many years ago, 30 years ago. Having my dad at home, working from home before that was popular, and just watching him build was so fascinating to me. Kind of always had this itch to build. I studied engineering and business, always trying to figure out, how do you create something? And I’m glad I didn’t do it earlier, to be honest. I’ve always wanted to do it. I was like, oh, right out of college, maybe I’ll start a company. But getting experience working investment banking or working at a startup that is successful and goes through an acquisition. I just learned so much from people that are phenomenal at what they do that it kind of helped me learn along the way on my journey to do this. But it’s definitely something I’ve always had the itch to do.
Ethan Aaron
Nice.
Brett
Very cool. And two questions we’d like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. What CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Ethan Aaron
What CEO do I admire the most? I’m not the type of person who’s like, oh, wow, I want all these crazy things. That’s what drives me. But in our ecosystem, someone that I have a ton of respect for and someone I look at, and I’m like, wow, that’s both a phenomenal business, but also a phenomenal way of running a business is Wade and the team over at Zapier. Not just because they’ve built an awesome product that a ton of people use in the data world, but they’ve done it with very little capital. And I’m not capital averse, but the idea that you can do that proves by orders of magnitude that there is demand for your business and for the things that you are building. People not only want to find your product, but use it, pay for it, et cetera. So in our space, the team over at Zapier and the way in which they’re building their business is unbelievably impressive to me.
Ethan Aaron
Nice.
Brett
That’s a great call out. What about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? This can be a business book, or it could also just be a book that’s really influenced how you view the world.
Ethan Aaron
So I read a lot of books, and I’ve gone through different phases. I’ve read a bunch of computer science books. I’ve read a bunch of business books. My favorite book of all time is actually not on any of those topics. It is called the art of narrative psychiatry. And it’s a fascinating book. It’s, like, written by a PhD to help psychiatrists learn how to become better psychiatrists. And the whole concept is, in someone’s life or in any narrative or any story, you have a thousand data points that you could choose from, maybe a million data points that you could choose from. So, like, in my life, I can look back over time, and there’s a thousand things I could tell you that happened. I was born on this date. I went to this college. I did this thing. This happened to me at this moment in my life.
Ethan Aaron
And the whole concept of the book is you have all these things to choose from and the narrative you tell, you can select many of these things. And what it allows me to think about both for myself personally, but also my engagements to other people. And the way we build our company is the facts and the narrative are two separate things and trying to get as many facts as you can is really important. But also really spending the time on the narrative that you want to tell yourself about your own life or that you want to explain to someone else about your product or about what you’re building is something that you have control over. You have control over kind of what the narrative is because you can pick from 1000 data points. So it’s a remarkable book. It’s not something where people are teaching in business school, it’s not something that most people decide to read but it’s a pretty remarkable mindset shift and really have an impact on.
Brett
Yeah, it sounds like it. It’s refreshing to hear a book other Ethan Aaron to one or the hard thing about hard things. So I’ll definitely check that out. How dense are we talking about here though? Is this like a 1200 word book meant for psychiatrists or what are we working with?
Ethan Aaron
It’s probably 250 pages, well written, not a textbook by any means, but it’s definitely a reference book. It’s not like the Alchemist or a New York Times bestseller. So you got to be in the mood to learn and think kind of outside the box around something that I personally knew nothing about going into it nice.
Brett
We’ll definitely have to check that out. Now let’s dive deeper into Portable. So just to kick things off here, can you define what ETL is for the listeners?
Ethan Aaron
Totally in the simplest capacity ETL is really just the idea of take data out of a system, do something to it, typically filter, simplify, organize the data, aggregate it potentially and then put it somewhere else. There’s use cases for ETL. There’s analytics, you want to build a dashboard to better run your business. There’s automation, you want to automate a manual task. So maybe every morning you download a spreadsheet and send an email with a data pipeline you can automate things and then the third one is building products. If you put all the data in data warehouse you can build a dashboard that people can pay you for. So ETL is really copying and pasting of data from one place to another to power either analytics, automation, or product development.
Brett
And what does it stand for? Probably a dumb question, but what does it stand for?
Ethan Aaron
It’s a good question. So it stands for extract step one, transform step two and load into the destination. Folded it out, do something to it, load it into the destination.
Brett
And what’s the origin story of this term? Did that come from Gartner or does it go back much deeper than that or much further than that?
Ethan Aaron
I don’t know. My guess is it’s much older than I am. So data analytics has been around for quite some time and a lot of what people call most data integration companies in our space, in the ETL space today, they actually call them ELT tools. Extract and then load, and then let someone else do the transformation downstream. A lot of that comes with the advent of the cloud data warehouse, where you can load it all into snowflake, and then they’ll just process it. They have unbelievable amounts of compute power, use a different tool after us to process the data. That’s actually kind of the way we are architected is we don’t really do a ton of transformation, but back in the day, probably when I was in diapers, you had to transform the data before you loaded it because you were trying to load the data into some database.
Ethan Aaron
But the database in the 90s was really small, so the data you pulled out needed to be simplified and aggregated before you could put it into your destination. The importance of the transform piece happening up front is significantly less important nowadays than it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Got it?
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And if your customers were to explain or summarize the problem that you’re solving, how would they summarize the problem, and then how would they articulate the benefits that Portable has brought to them?
Ethan Aaron
We help data teams. So someone whose job is either build dashboards, automate workflows, build products. So imagine you’re that person, and your head of HR comes to you and says, hey, Mr. And Mrs. Head of data, can you get our HR data on our applicants into a dashboard? I want every day to be able to see how many applicants have applied for this new job. The problem that we solve is, if you can’t already pull data from that HR system or that applicant tracking system, the head of data is stuck. They’re sitting there being like, yes, I would love to build you that dashboard. I just can’t get the data out of that system. So that’s the problem people have, is they’re really just sitting there. They’re not sitting there, they’re doing lots of very important work, and they have to build some new dashboard, some new automation, some new product.
Ethan Aaron
And the first step is, can I get the data I need to do this? So that’s the problem. That’s the scenario in which someone says, I need a solution. Portable solution is super easy if we have the connector. And right now we have about 320 different connectors, two systems. If we have it, you just sign up Portable IO, connect your data source, connect your destination, click run, and the data moves. It could take you five minutes to set the entire thing up. If we don’t have the connector you need, this is where kind of the concept of custom ETL comes into play. If we don’t have the connector you need, you just ask us for it. If we can, we’ll build it. Right now, we’re building about 30, 40% of the requests that come in, we’ll build it in a matter of hours or days.
Ethan Aaron
And then you log in, you connect your source, you connect your warehouse, you move the data in a matter of five minutes, ten minutes. And that’s the pain point we help people solve.
Brett
And what types of data teams are embracing the platform the most? Is there a specific pattern or market segment that you’re seeing really gain the most traction?
Ethan Aaron
I would say so in terms of verticals, there are a lot of ecommerce companies that are using Portable today, one of the top ten sellers on Amazon, we have a bunch of other ecommerce brands. And the reason behind that is all the ecommerce companies use the likes of Shopify or BigCommerce for their core platform, but they also have 1015 other tools that they use to run their business. Referrals, returns, inventory, shipping, all these other tools that are pretty niche, pretty bespoke. And Portable has like 40, 50 of these connectors out of the box in the ecommerce space. So that’s one place we’re doing well, and it’s kind of just a no brainer. The more macro, the people that tend to find value in Portable, they already have a data stack in place, they already have the head of data or analyst or both. They already have a data warehouse, they already have dashboards.
Ethan Aaron
And Portable is not typically the ETL tool you use to scan everything up. There are plenty of other great tools for that. We’re typically the one that comes in second. When you are in that scenario where your head of HR, head of marketing comes to you and says, hey, can you help with this? And you’re like, oh no, I need a solution here. So it’s really data teams that need the next connector. That’s when we can really add a ton of value for them.
Brett
And in terms of numbers, is there anything you can share that just demonstrates the type of progress and traction that you’ve seen so far in the market?
Ethan Aaron
I can’t share revenue numbers or client numbers, but on our homepage Portable IO we have, it’s probably eight or ten different client testimonials from people in the ecommerce space, in marketing, in finance, literally just being like, hey, I needed a shippo connector. My other vendor broke. I used Portable because they built a shippo connector and it worked. So we just have countless scenarios. It’s a pretty similar story every time of just like, hey, I needed this thing, Portable built it, or they had it. They are on call when it breaks. I got set up simply and easily and quickly, and you can check them out. We have a bunch of them listed on our homepage.
Brett
And if someone isn’t using Portable, who would they be using? What’s the competitive landscape look like?
Ethan Aaron
We’re going after a pretty niche part of the market in the sense of like, we’re going after all the stuff that no one else wanted to build, because it’s pretty niche, pretty bespoke systems. So what people typically are using before they end up with Portable is the likes of someone like Fivetran massive company, super well respected, reliable Data Pipelines, or Stitch. They were acquired by Talend years ago. Talend’s currently undergoing acquisition, potential acquisition, or the likes of someone like Airbite in the open source ecosystem, where again, they’re pretty similar to Five Trend and Stitch in the sense of they build the sales forces of the world, or the postgres integrations of the world. What we really compete with is you think back to the data person who’s sitting there being like, can I pull data from the applicant tracking tool? In that scenario where they can’t find another solution, their options are pretty limited.
Ethan Aaron
They can either learn the code and write it themselves, they can hire a consultant and pay top dollar for development and maintenance. They can not build the insights literally just give up and be like, sorry, head of HR, I can’t do this for you. Or they can use Portable. They’ll come to us be like, hey, can you build X or Y? We’ll build it. They go live, they take a note, code solution, super easy to use, et cetera. So in most scenarios when we help a client, they are not saying, oh, it’s you versus other person. They’re saying, no one else on the market will build this connector. Can you please help us? And we build it really fast and they start working with us. Nice.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And I’m sure there’s a lot of funding being thrown around in this space, or there was over the last couple of years before everything started to tank a bit. But what were you doing, or what have you been doing to really rise above the noise and attract customers?
Ethan Aaron
That has been our focus for the last three years, has been attracting customers, rising above the noise, focusing on the business. How do we drive revenue, how do we drive value for our customers, and how do we do so in an effective way? So one of the big things that kind of differentiated us, especially in 2021, when there was an unbelievable amount of capital flowing into our ecosystem, is we hadn’t raised any money. We were a bootstrap company. And even nowadays, our approach is very much focused on kind of back to your earlier question around who do I look up to? It’s like I want to build a business that really scales. And a lot of that is like finding the way of saying, okay, great. How do we solve the most pressing customer pain points? How do we drive revenue? I think especially in 2021, I guess it’s already 2023.
Ethan Aaron
I guess in 2021 and 2022, there was a lot of money that flew into the data space. People were raising $30 million rounds, $150,000,000 rounds. And that’s amazing. But what it led to was a lot of marketing and a lot of free stuff being shipped to people’s houses as gifts to buy stuff. And I think for us it was very much like how do we get in the door with clients without that? How do we solve a real pain point like tell a story that resonates with them? And it really just forced us to really specialize, really focus on what it is that we do really well as opposed to try and do everything in the ecosystem all at once. So that’s kind of how our approach has been slightly different over the last couple of years and hopefully it’ll pay off the long term.
Brett
And in the early days, was the long term goal to remain bootstrapped and then you ended up raising venture or did you always know that you would end up raising venture?
Ethan Aaron
I don’t think it matters to us. Our goal is to build the best business and there are moments at which capital can really help with that and there are moments at which capital can be a liability and it also kind of depends on the way in which you build your own business. But for us, capital raise venture funding, all of that has never been a success metric for us. Like having amazing investors and people that are on our team and helping us to build the best business out there is definitely really valuable. That being said, it all has to be in service of how do we help the most customers generate the most value. And that’s kind of how we thought about it from the beginning. Like, whether we’re bootstrapped or we have outside investors that are venture capitalists or angels or whatever is a way of getting to our goals and way of accomplishing the things we want to accomplish.
Ethan Aaron
For us, it’s never been how do we go raise the next round? Yeah, so that’s kind of how we think about the world.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And I’m sure you sleep much better at night tonight than the founders who raised the Fu money rounds in the previous years. I think they’re probably sweating quite a bit right now.
Ethan Aaron
It’s definitely a different path. Everyone’s got their own paths. And for us, we’ve been growing our team recently. We’ve been taking on contractors and investing in things right now, which is a slightly different approach than most of the people that were growing really fast last year and this year aren’t able to do so as effectively. Yeah, makes sense.
Brett
And in terms of your go to market, what would you say has been your single greatest challenge that you’d had to overcome and how’d you overcome it?
Ethan Aaron
I would say the single biggest challenge in the data space in general, but also in the data integration space is what is your either beachhead or niche that you start with and that you focus on because if you think about any niche that anyone starts with, it’s never going to be where they end up. It’s never going to be like Google. I guess for Google they do search and that’s kind of where they ended up. But they’ve also done tons of other stuff. Things have grown over time. And for us, I think the biggest thing was when you say you’re a data integration company, everyone’s like, Amazing. Aren’t there 100 data integration companies? It’s like, oh, yes, but we’re an ETL company. And they’re like, amazing. Aren’t there 30 ETL companies that all do the same thing? It’s a good point. And I think the biggest thing for us was, and it took us a while, was what is our story?
Ethan Aaron
How do we really position ourselves? And a lot of it was scoping things down, our focus on the long tail, on custom integrations that no one else wants to build. It aligns both with what is our beachhead, but also what is our expertise. And a lot of our expertise does come down to development of connectors and being able to help these analytics teams get a new data source connected to their data warehouse.
Brett
And how do you think about market categories? What market category are you part of? Is this disrupting or transforming an existing category, or are you creating a new category here?
Ethan Aaron
It’s interesting. I wouldn’t consider us creating a new category like no code ETL or no code ELT, very well defined thing. Like, there’s plenty of companies that their product experience looks identical to our product experience. You connect your data source, you connect your destination. You say, I want this to run every day. You click Save, you swipe credit card, done. That is not an innovative thing. We didn’t come out, sit down in the room one day and be like, this is it. This is a new thing that we’re creating. It was created in the early 2010s, so that’s not our innovation. I guess for us, we’re more of a second 3rd mover into this market, but we’re doing so really not competing against other people. We’re doing the same thing, but we’re doing it for all the connectors that no one else has. So if you think about it’s like the model exists.
Ethan Aaron
The idea of connect data source to destination, move data every day exists. What we are creating is that exact same solution and experience. For right now, it’s 320 different data sources, but over time, it’s going to be 10,000 data sources that you cannot find anywhere else. So it’s really the innovation is our ability to build and maintain thousands of connectors that you can then use to augment the top hundred and 50 that you can use from someone else. Amazing.
Brett
And last question for you. If we zoom out in the future, what’s the three year vision for Portable?
Ethan Aaron
Hopefully we get there before three years. But as I said, we want to build 10,000 integrations. Right now we’re at 320, and Zapier has got 5000. They’re the high watermark right now in the data integration world. We actually don’t compete with them, but for us, we want to help analytics teams get all of their data into their analytics environment. And when you try and do anything 320 times, let alone 10,000, it introduces some remarkable complexity. But that’s what we’re focused on. That is the only thing we think about every day is how do we build the next hundred how do we build the next thousand connectors so that our clients don’t have to?
Brett
And what excites you most about this work you get to do?
Ethan Aaron
What excites me the most? I would say one of the most exciting things, especially right now, is the people. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I put on some happy hours in the city and go to conferences and talk to our clients all the time. And the data ecosystem is a pretty remarkable place when it comes to just people. People are all collaborating, working together, trying to figure out the best way to accomplish tasks. But they’re also just very down to earth human beings solving problems across industries. So I love that aspect of this industry. I’ve worked in other industries before, and it wasn’t as much of a community feel in the data world. It’s pretty remarkable. Community amazing.
Brett
Love it. Ethan unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Ethan Aaron
A couple of things. One would be Portable IO. You can sign up for a free trial, check out the connectors we already support, request new ones. The second place would just be LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn. Ethan, aaron and I post all the time. Awesome.
Brett
Ethan, thanks so much for taking the time to chat. Really appreciate it and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision and get to 10,000 integrations.
Ethan Aaron
Totally. Thanks so much for having me.
Brett
Brett all right, keep in touch. Bye.
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