I'm so glad the Domo chickens finally came home to roost. It's been pretty painful to observe all the undeserved hype around this company over the year, I felt for a long time like I was taking crazy pills.
Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
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Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
#82I'd love to see the LA Times go back and revisit the Utah Valley region and the culture that helped contribute to this. The Utah Valley is chock full of startups with a serious inferiority complex to their big brothers in Silicon Valley, hence derivative name. More importantly, Utah is the “multi-level marketing capital of the world [1]” This kind of sales and growth tactic is not limited to the diet smoothie and cos…
I work in Utah Valley at a tech startup in the space. While I agree that there are some startups with 'inferiority complex' etc, there is a growing number who are happy and proud to be a Utah startup and what that entails, not just chasing Silicon Valley. The instant connection to MLMs is unfortunate and something we are trying to move past. I would argue Utah has a very strong sales culture not solely because of MLM…
Pluralsight being a prime example of a proud Utah startup focused on making a quality product with great management.
The instant connection to MLM's is unfortunate but it's real. It's not something that can be moved past unless there's meaningful change. I would argue there hasn't been meaningful change. If anything they've gained strength and notoriety see vivent, domo, etc. Would love to be convinced otherwise that meaningful change has come or is coming.
As far as a strong sales culture, I agree. MLM's are prevalent in Utah because of the sales culture. Not the inverse.
Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
#83I work for a BI startup (competitor to Domo), so as part of my work, we did our own analysis of Domo product, and also chanced across prospects/customers that are current/ex-Domo users.
Domo is very "business users friendly", they do this by:
- Very pretty (and drag-and-drop capable) visualization. Not as compared to Tableau though, but still.
- Native mobile apps
- Their Domo cache + datasets concept, that makes it easy to load simple data into Domo and visualize
- Their commenting system?
I suspect that it's these things + all the marketing that made them sell well in certain contexts.
They have the dataset concept that ties to their cache, which makes it easy for business users to upload a file and "just explore", but then joining these datasets together is not quite straightforward. And you have to load each dataset one by one. So it's good for very basic use cases, but for advanced stuff that requires proper data preparation, it starts to fall behind.
Also soon Domo customers would run into performance problem, since Domo hosts the data for the customers.
Besides that, I feel like the entire product is a patch work, without proper thorough design/thinking. Feels like they hire a lot of different product managers, each responsible for one feature, but the features they don't fit together very well.. Some I even find redundant (seriously what's the 3D visualization of datasets/data sources in the product homepage for?).
It's been very interesting for me to observe the space. Our startup, we took the directly opposite approach to Domo in building our business: totally bootstraped with no funding. We've been profitable since year 1, working with customers from unicorn startups, public companies to fast-growing startups. We're very conscious/aware about the space to shape our product strategy.
I think ultimately the team and the product are the most important in the long-term success. I can say that among the solutions, we're most impressed by Tableau, PowerBI and Looker.
In case you've read this far, do check us out: https://www.holistics.io
Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
#84I'd love to see the LA Times go back and revisit the Utah Valley region and the culture that helped contribute to this. The Utah Valley is chock full of startups with a serious inferiority complex to their big brothers in Silicon Valley, hence derivative name. More importantly, Utah is the “multi-level marketing capital of the world [1]” This kind of sales and growth tactic is not limited to the diet smoothie and cos…
I work in Utah Valley at a tech startup in the space. While I agree that there are some startups with 'inferiority complex' etc, there is a growing number who are happy and proud to be a Utah startup and what that entails, not just chasing Silicon Valley. The instant connection to MLMs is unfortunate and something we are trying to move past. I would argue Utah has a very strong sales culture not solely because of MLM…
> other reasons
Like door to door summer sales, and the massive bro culture associated with that.
That gripe aside, there are a lot of lifestyle companies. And it's great. They aren't chasing silicon valley, they are just some small business owners trying to make a good living and provide employment for people in the region.
Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
#85I'd love to see the LA Times go back and revisit the Utah Valley region and the culture that helped contribute to this. The Utah Valley is chock full of startups with a serious inferiority complex to their big brothers in Silicon Valley, hence derivative name. More importantly, Utah is the “multi-level marketing capital of the world [1]” This kind of sales and growth tactic is not limited to the diet smoothie and cos…
A few years ago I was able to guess Domo's documentation wiki, it was public and not protected by password. The product was really unimpressive, not surprised they required NDAs to show it.
Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
#86"Domo also has spent $600,000 for catering services from Cubby's Chicago Beef, which describes itself as 'a cute little sandwich and salad restaurant.' It’s owned by Josh James and his brother Cubby. ('The menu does look delicious, but there must be caterers in American Fork, Utah, that aren’t owned by the boss,' remarked Shira Ovide of Bloomberg). Domo also has bought $200,000 in furnishings from Alice Lane Home Col…
For real though Cubby's is so good. If I worked there, I wouldn't be upset about the relationship because it's a very popular restaurant.
The wild rice and kale salad is especially tasty. (Here's a copycat: https://meaningfuleats.com/chicken-kale-wild-rice-salad/ )
Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
#87I was at the conference referenced in the photo - SAASTR 2017. The level of arrogance of the CEO was striking - down to the literal slouch in the chair for the entire talk.
I've remarked several times to people that he was the most arrogant conference panelist I've ever seen. The line between confidence and arrogance is pretty distinct in my opinion and at that time this ceo had no idea where that line is.
Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
#88I find it weird that the article doesn't actually say what Domo does.
Domo is an analytics company: "The pitch for Domo was that it would fill in some of the gaps in enterprise data analysis that Omniture had left open, providing access to real-time marketing information that would help CEOs run their companies more efficiently."
Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
#89I work for a BI startup (competitor to Domo), so as part of my work, we did our own analysis of Domo product, and also chanced across prospects/customers that are current/ex-Domo users. Domo is very "business users friendly", they do this by: - Very pretty (and drag-and-drop capable) visualization. Not as compared to Tableau though, but still. - Native mobile apps - Their Domo cache + datasets concept, that makes it…
On the product side, another way to say is lacking of vision, strategy and roadmap
Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Practically speaking Satya Nadella runs MSFT, not the board of directors. Nadella does not have control of MSFT (he isn't the majority holder of shareholder voting rights), though. Investors don't want to run the company. But the question is should they be able to fire the person running the company, even if that person is acting against the interests of the rest of the shareholders. * ps, yes, the BoD can fire a CEO…
Shouldn't the law prevent the CEO from doing just that? I mean, the board is presumably the only check on the CEO's power, so even if the CEO is the majority shareholder, they shouldn't be able to control the board.
No.
What's the worst they could do? It's their company. Worst case the CEO runs it into the ground and everyone loses their money.
CEO =/= President of the United States.