Today, I am proud to welcome Gaurav Rewari as Mode’s new CEO.
In 2013, my co-founders and I made two big bets: we bet that cloud data warehouses would make data analysis accessible to companies of any scale, and we bet that data teams would grow in number and authority, becoming the voices for how their companies make decisions–and driving new bottoms-up market dynamics. If you’re reading this post, you probably already know that both of these bets have come true.
On one hand, this evolution has set off an explosion of new products and categories. On the other, we’ve already seen serious consolidation. That puts in front of Mode a big opportunity: to be the independent analytics platform for the modern data stack.
This directly benefits you, our customers: we won’t push you to buy another product in our portfolio and we won’t spend our development cycles integrating with the rest of our portfolio. Instead, we can focus all of our efforts on making Mode the best way to do analysis and share it where decisions are made.
I want nothing more than to deliver on this promise. That’s why Gaurav joins us today as we close out a banner year for our business. A veteran of Microstrategy, Oracle, and his own startups (twice!), he is an outstanding operator with profound knowledge of this space.
I’ve gotten to know Gaurav deeply over the past few months and can’t imagine a better person to lead Mode through the next phase of growth. Gaurav has not only seen but sparked years of evolution in analytics and BI tooling and his vision and passion for the space have only grown. He is just as eager as I am to build an enduring, independent company that carries our customers through the many stages of their data maturity and many market cycles of technology.
I will remain on Mode’s Board of Directors and will continue to work full-time as Chief Strategy Officer. I look forward to working side-by-side with Gaurav to grow Mode into the amazing product and company we both see ahead.
Sincerely,
Derek Steer, founder and (now-former) CEO
I am delighted to join Derek and the rest of the team at Mode!
In Mode, Derek, Benn, and Josh have created–and an incredible team has built–a company whose purity of focus (“deliver the complete analytics toolkit for data teams to provide insights to the business”) is matched only by the scale of its ambition (“become the de facto analytics lens for the modern data stack”).
The business analytics market has been the gift that keeps on giving. From the introduction of SQL itself and the evolution from Executive Information Systems to Decision Support Systems (and the alphabet soup of OLAP architectures that followed!), to pre-built BI applications, visual discovery and BI-as a service, the business analytics market has experienced “moments of reinvention” as a result of both technology advances and shifting patterns of user requirements.
At a time when digital businesses are awash in data and their success, and even survival, hinges on how well they harness it; when analysts and data scientists are being charged with guiding businesses by blending historical analysis and forward-looking insights; and when the modern data stack and its related ecosystem is being rapidly adopted by digital natives and–increasingly–digital aspirants, a similar moment of reinvention is now upon us.
The novelist William Gibson famously said, “the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” With 600+ customers using our product as the analytics lens for their cloud data warehouses, Mode has created and deployed a platform to drive enterprise-wide, data-driven decision making and collaboration with the data scientist at the center. This centrality of the data scientist, and all the capabilities that come with it, represents one of the future trajectories of a reinvented business analytic market. And that future is already here.
Over the past couple of decades, I’ve had the good fortune of working with some exceptionally talented teams in several of the business analytics industry’s most iconic companies. The team at Mode is among the best that I have encountered. Their commitment to excellence in everything they do and the infectious enthusiasm they have for the data and analytics field is what has most drawn me to this company. The opportunity to lead this team is truly humbling.
Gaurav
