Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO of Airbyte, discusses how his company raised over $180M from various investors after just one year.
Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO of Airbyte, discusses how his company raised over $180M from various investors after just one year. He touches on the journey of scaling Airbyte, which grew a community of over 6k members and was deployed over 16k times.
I think as part of our exploration for what company, what market we wanted [music] to address. If I were to go and talk to my younger self, yeah, I would say men, you know, the complexity of data, just go and only do your exploration on any kind of data product. Don't waste time on things that you have no idea about. [music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Deal Maker Show. Well, today we have an amazing guest and I hope that you're all ready for the battle of accents. So, it's going to be quite fun. You know, it's going to be quite an inspiring conversation. We're going to be talking about the building, the scaling, the financing, the exiting. Uh he's also been part of uh two acquisitions as well, you know, in companies that he was at. One for 300 million that was acquired, another one for 115 million. and now he's actually raised for his company 185 million and doing
something really interesting especially you know on that transition of project market fit to product market fit. I think that you guys are all going to be really enjoying you know what our guest has to say. So without further ado let's welcome our guest today Michelle Trio. Welcome to the show. >> Hi everyone. Thank you Alejandro for having me. >> So born in Switzerland. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up in Switzerland and all the above? >> Yeah, Switzerland. I mean, obviously very biased by my childhood memory. It's an amazing country, beautiful uh and very close to the mountain. So, I was put on skis very early on in my life. So, love skiing [laughter] >> and and you moved quite a bit too. I mean, I I'm wondering, you know, going to Strasburg from Switzerland and then Paris. I wonder like moving like that what kind of perspective
opened up early on for you? >> Um I think you get less attached to locations and more to the to the people around you and also you know as you're moving it also makes you have to leave some friend in your original country and I think it reinforces also your relationship with your family. So Strasburg was a great time. It's a beautiful city and Paris I mean amazing as well. Amazing. For sure. For sure. Now, computer science, how do you get into the whole computer thing? >> Yeah, that's a very good question. When I was in Switzerland, actually, uh very good friends of my parents uh were like had this big um room full of computers. So, I would spend like all my weekend with them. I did not have a computer at the time. And yeah, I was just playing Prince of Persia, Tetris, and just hacking around a few a few things. And as I was in Strburg, uh later on, um I got my first computer
from like someone was getting rid of something that was a 386 or something like that. And yeah, that's when I started to really dive a little bit deeper. And when I was end of middle school in France, you can work uh in um in farms. And so I went work in a farm harvesting tobacco and that's how I bought my first computer and in at the beginning a little bit in programming a little bit in hacking etc etc. So that was my my initial journey into it and yeah end of high school had to decide between do I want to go for like the human machinery so on the medical field or do I want to go on the celissium uh uh machinery and that was CS and I went for CS >> and you you eventually came here to the US too at Princeton you know working there with the understanding the brain understanding the brain out of all things and >> etc. So, so how was that, you know, coming to the US, the
American dream, you know, all of that good stuff? >> Yeah. Now, the the the end of your master in most uh French engineering school, you have to go work for like a company or like to do an internship for like about 6 months. And I was very fortunate that uh Seemens had a a program where they would bring in like international interns and have them work with a researcher from uh from Princeton. And here I worked on uh computer vision algorithm for segmenting the brain and all of that was a product that we were selling to hospital and and all the um like brain surgeon etc. And it was really the ability to detect what part of the brain is where, what does it look like, what is the shape and also with like some specific modality you could see disease appearing on the brain. So that was a very very uh fun moment. Uh American dream. I still remember the first time I landed in New York. Um
big buildings, very wide roads, >> a lot of lights. I [laughter] mean I still even remember you know the they I I had that same feeling. I mean it's quite shocking now for you quite heartbreaking you know the whole visa nonsense that you had to uh to deal with. Yeah, I don't know if I would call it nonsense. For me, it's more you it's like it's like a filter looking for for motivated people. But yes indeed I had to go back to Paris uh mid 28 2008 and but actually that was a bad that became very good because that was very much my first uh experience in the manufacturing of data. Uh I was at a company called Faxet. So also a US company and so I I was doing some back and forth between um uh New York and and Paris at the time and yes that's really when I learned like the fundamentals of what does it mean to collect data at scale prepare it and then uh making it actually actionable for
um for like the end user. So here it was like traders and and quantitative uh analysts. very that was a very very good experience. >> So how do you go from that to landing back in San Francisco and and joining as one of the early employees at LifeRamp because it sounds quite the the transition there. [snorts] >> Yeah. I mean I always wanted to go back to the US. Um, and I also wanted to be uh in San Francisco in the Bay Area because this is really where a lot of the tech is happening and where all the talents are going. And yeah, in 200 I remember uh December 31st uh 2010, I was with my now wife and we said, "Okay, we're going to change something in our life. We're going to get married, etc." and cherry [snorts] on the on the cake. We're also going to be moving let's try to move into into the US uh in San Francisco. So I called a few friends that I went to college with. some
we had a very very strong uh group over there uh where we did all our school project together and one of them had just joined uh live ramp at the time it was called raplift and he said yeah uh let's try to see if that works and at the time visas were a little bit easier to get and I got it and October 2011 landed in San Francisco with three suitcase and that was the beginning of the journey >> how many employees were at life ramp when who joined. >> Yeah. So it was between 25 and and 30 people. Uh and they had an initial product, the Rapliff product, but also internally they have started to pivot more into the the ad tech uh world. So how do you move data between different like advertising platform to better target uh users online. So we are not doing anything that is advertising related but we are moving all these pieces of information so that the the advertising or like the
all the different uh thing that you see online is very well suited to the to the audience. Um and here working at internet scale as you can imagine when you're in AT tech you basically are on so many websites so many calls so many uh like we're processing like pabytes of data and to me that was I went from like the manufacturing of data to how do you manage very very large scale um uh data systems uh and yeah >> I mean 20 or so employees you know it It's a definitely gives you a glimpse of uh what are what are some of the ingredients that ended up making the company becoming a success because it ended up being acquired for over 300 million. I guess if you had to like look back you know and and reflect what would you say were the top three three things that actually made that company the success that it became? >> So the first thing would definitely be right place right time.
That was really the explosion of mobile and I know internet had started earlier but that really became like completely widespread and there was this new business model around like free content but on the other side you have to watch some ads you you have to get some some display in front of you and we were just here at the right time and we have a very so that was that would have been the the first one. The other one is with a small team of very capable and very driven humans, you can do a lot. And that is something I've always uh kept with me me which is humans make the difference on the company you're building. If you have motivated people that are smart and that are just understand like where the company is going, they can do marvelous things. Uh and the last one was more around like how do you give and how do you make bets on on people. So you know we always talk about like
experience versus um…