Peter Fishman’s resume has its fair share of disparate data points. “I was once considered the world’s expert in video rental,” he explains. “This is essentially the world’s worst skill.” He spent a decade as Chief Bacon officer of Bacon Hot Sauce, a company he co-founded with Dan Silverman. He even describes himself as a “failed” academic, despite earning a PhD in Economics from Berkeley. Fittingly, he eventually streamlined these career data points into Mozart Data, another company he co-founded, with Silverman. Mozart Data is an all-in-one modern data platform that allows anyone to—without the need for engineering resources–organize, centralize, and analyze their data.
Even outside of the data space itself, knowing the statistics of consumers and investors is crucial to launching any successful enterprise. Fishman admits that the relationships and reputation that he and Silverman formed from all of their previous years in business helped them launch their platform with unusual speed, as their first customers were investing in 30 years of accumulated trust.
On this episode of Billion Dollar Tech, you’ll learn the value of a data pipeline, what major change in the data space has Peter excited, and the crucial difference between customers and friends.
Quotes:
“B2B companies were not developing like consumer companies. They would sell to a CIO and magically whatever the CIO decided, that’s what the company had to adopt. ([5:54]-[6:07] | Peter)
“You started to see that in the software space, you started to see teams that would make decisions about what software they were using to basically make themselves move quicker.” ([6:27]-[6:37] | Peter)
“What has happened in enterprise or B2B in the last almost two decades has been this shift from exclusively a top-down sale from somebody with a fancy title making a decision on behalf of the whole company, to a more natural, bottom-up motion. What do you prefer and vote with your credit card.” ([9:05]-[9:31] | Peter)
“It’s very hard to raise money without either a product, a vision, or traction. If you have all three of them, you’re in the driver’s seat.” ([11:48]-[11:57] | Peter)
“The reality is 99.99% or entrepreneurs don’t end up on a rocketship to Mars. They end up toiling for many years in a really challenging environment.” ([15:03]-[15:17] | Peter)
“We were selling a product, not ourselves as a service, that said the buyers trusted our names. This is about 30 years of trust we had built with these three customers.” ([17:58]-[18:12] | Peter)
“So you mentioned the word data pipeline. What’s a data pipeline?’([25:54]-[26:00] | Brendan)
“You have to understand some of the nuances of your data, what’s generating your data. What’s the mechanism?” ([35:56]-[36:01] | Peter)
Connect with Brendan Dell:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendandell/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendanDell
Instagram: @thebrendandell
TikTok: @brendandell39
Buy a copy of Brendan’s Book, The 12 Immutable Laws of High-Impact Messaging: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780578210926
Connect with Peter Fishman:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petefishmanv
Twitter: @peterfishman
https://www.mozartdata.com/
Blog: https://www.mozartdata.com/blog
Check out Peter Fishman’s recommended resources:
Moneyball by Michael Lewis: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780393324815
https://fivethirtyeight.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/mozartdata
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About the Author
Brendan Dell
Brendan Dell is an author and the founder of The Daily Creative. As a freelancer he's worked with clients like Expedia, Cvent, Panasonic, Brother, Windstream and 100+ more to build unignorable tech brands. At The Daily Creative, he shares advice and lessons to help freelancers level up.
