How Workato CEO Vijay Tella grew Workato to $150M revenue and 11K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is Vijay tella he is the creator and one of the founders of a company called a work Auto he's of the creation of market leading integration technologies for over 25 years before work Auto he was the CEO of kik a consumer video communications company acquired by Skype he helped create two multi-billion dollar integration products before that he's also part of the team that created the world's first middleware platform TI be the information bus if you guys need a jog down memory lane there act technic tron software systems which was required by routers plc in 1994 he's also the founding on the founding team and SVP of engineering of TIBCO through its IPO as chief strategy officer he then helped launch Oracle's fusion middleware platform in 2005 Vijay are you ready to take it to the top yes of course all right I always know when a bio has lots of acronyms in it you must be impressive right that's how it works oh well all right tell us tell us more about a work Auto it's the company doing how do you make money so you know we are a integration software company you know the the you know companies out there are used you know there's using a lot of apps you know large companies have over a thousand apps you know there's an explosion of sass in every corner of a business and the challenge with all of that Nathan is that the information about your customers and your business is splintered and split across so many different apps so you don't have a really complete or consistent view of what's happening with your business with your customers or Coty's products you know helps you connect all these apps together and automate your processes that cut across all these apps elastic dar��o zapier segments how do you beat all these guys yeah I think it's a very big market there is you know some of the tools that you talk about are really you know focused on sort of the small business segments and are suitable for just moving data between applications a and B right you know where kados heritage comes from you know companies like TIBCO and technical all that you may be referred to earlier you know there's a you know this it really refers to enterprise-grade integration for you know for connecting it's sort of you know these mission-critical like applications in large companies you you know like for example like when you are like integrating like a you know Dropbox with Instagram and they say photo coming in on Instagram with Nathan tagged in it and you miss tagged Nathan or you kind of you know tagged it twice and put the photo in twice into a Dropbox folder it's it's still fun you know but not so in enterprises where you know all of these integrations and automations and workflows need to be super robust and very reliable and secure and all that so like were kado is like an enterprise version of integration tools not it so what would you say the average customer is paying you per month I know you go from about 600 bucks up to 2500 bucks a month and probably much higher yeah much you know even much higher I mean I think it's we have fortune 500 companies that are know paying a 6 and 7 figures you know but you know the problem is very broad you have comedy if I forced you into an average though just before I move on what would you say the average customer is paying you per month you know we're not you know we're not sharing that Nathan but we have a you know we you know we support a range of customers from line of business and sort of mid-sized companies to enterprises that sort of give me a general range I understand you want to keep it vague but generally between what and what just to slim it down a little bit well I think you know we have enterprise plants at 60k and you know line of business plants that go up you know to 30 K it sort of in a month or a year for that's pretty year that's the starting the enterprise plans start at 60 K a year and then like I said we have you know we have companies that pay us six and seven figures per year and then we have line of business which are more departmental purchases that you know go up to 30 K or so it's sort of in that range okay that's okay good so we'll say kind of fair to say $30,000 a CV on average that's about 2500 bucks a month that's a good kind of sweet spot for you guys it's probably trending up from there but okay and and give me now that we understand kind of the code that's kind of a sweet spot cohort you said it's trending up so are you intentionally trying to move up market increase expansion revenue I think expansion has been having written naturally for us we have you know we have a you know companies that start on work odd Oh like within months they have hundreds of integrations going and they're connecting you know hundreds of apps so there's expansion within existing customers that is happening is that your number one pricing lever by the way number of connections there's I think it'd be priced by features as well as number of connections that's correct so then the more projects you think of it the more integration projects you do the more you play what kado interesting give me more of the backstory here so you have a well-documented history and kind of heavy this heavy tech space when did you start this company and and why yeah I said that's a really good question so you know yeah as you mentioned our background in the space goes back a long time you know I you know we invented the integration software at this company called Technic Ron and then which became TIBCO which became public and then we started the middle of a group in the middle where product line that Oracle but you know in between you know I was CEO of a consumer video company called quake it was a mobile video application that do 220 million users and it got acquired by Skype in 2011 that's right I think I remember you guys cuz you relied heavily on Facebook's API and then they shut you off well no they didn't shut us off but we were the first people that you know that basically you know like launched with the Facebook Mobile SDK was that your most effective customer acquisition strategy and the cheapest for you though was through Facebook's SDK it was actually Facebook the Apple App Store we were the top paid apple app in the Apple App Store for many months okay so we were you know we had and we were preloaded by you know carriers like you know Verizon Sprint and quick and DoCoMo onto like millions of phones Samsung and Nokia so they all pre-loaded us so we had like growth coming in from you know through the social media companies carriers as well as okay you know handset make maker so much to how much Skype end up paying for the company they they paid 150 million okay 150 and how much had you raised uh we had raised fifteen okay so I assume this made you it was it was a significant was it this the most significant financial event of your life to that point or no not not really I mean it was the you know there's a third one for me you know we had always it the most significant or no no a person you had no you had larger successes before that in terms of exiting companies that's correct interesting you obviously got your investor's money back and then some of those so it's a good it was a good event how does a guy like you stay motivated after you've create so much wealth yeah and that's a really good question goes back here you know your earlier question or why we started this right so we have a long background in this space so one thing that happened Natan is when I got out of like we were part of Skype and you know after I did my time and got out of there and I looked at what was happening in in the world of software what I saw was that there's just been a huge consumerization trend and you know in the enterprise space you know especially with SAS and the cloud-based apps and the business users sort of driving that this kind of transformation that's going on and you know what I saw was the integration tools that were that was required to make all these apps work together and connect together remain complex and technical they they they they kind of moved to the cloud and form or you know but not in the spirit of it meaning it you still needed to be like a developer or a technical guy to kind of use these integration tools that's the whole dis business transformation the cloud apps are being driven by business people that don't know what XML is or what JSON is and so on so uh the thing that we saw was we saw maybe the one of the biggest gaps in enterprise software is the ability for these non-technical business users to be able to connect all their apps and automate all their systems and large scale you know in a very dynamic environment so we saw like a really big vision what year was this by the way when were you watching this you know this was in you know 2011 and 2012 we were looking at this whole space and what we saw was we needed to bring the consumers you know like approach you know the things that we learned that quick and you know how you build and grow consumer products that type of an approach was really very much needed in the enterprise integration space and so it was really you know bringing together a background a long time dragged on in integration space for the consumer background that that made something they work how to pause and who's we how many founders I have four found we have four founders okay that's a tough conversation to have how...