#224 - Peter Fishman, CEO of Mozart Data - on the first principles to grow traction

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to make becoming data-driven easier than ever before. My guest is Peter Fishman, Co-founder and CEO of Mozart Data.Dr. Peter Fishman has over a decade of experience running data and data-adjacent teams at companies like Microsoft, Yammer, Opendoor, Playdom, and Eaze. He realized that he was building the same types of modern data stacks at each company. Taking a broader perspective, he saw many other companies building a data stack over and over again. This inspired him and his co-founder, Dan, to found Mozart Data in 2020. Mozart Data is on a mission to make it easy for anyone to set up a modern data stack, without a data engineer, in under an hour. Why does this matter? Because that enables 10x more employees to get access to data, it decreases the time to insight by 76% and delivers 30% cost savings compared to assembling your own data stack. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Peter to my podcast. We explore what's broken around the way we can embrace the full potential of data. Peter explains his vision of what can be when we can leverage the power of data as a first principle versus an afterthought. He shares his lessons learned around what a SaaS application has to excel at to overcome the trust issues customers have and create a sustainable business from the start.Here are some of his quotes: The idea of, let's build everything and let's be good at everything. And I think like this is like, almost the kiss of death. Customers don't want good. Customers want the best. You might say, well, the customer won't know the difference between good and the best. They will know the difference. What I think of as the way to win business is you have a small contract, and you expand with a combination of the startup and the impact that you're having. So, as you're helpful, that sort of growth within the company ends up being sort of a no-brainer. During this interview, you will learn four things:That you can build a thriving business by working closely with your competitors That customers want the best product in the market - whether we like it or not. The opportunity is: they define 'best' - no one else.What principles to follow to grow solid traction around adoptionWhen you know your vision is clear and powerful enoughFor more information about the guest from this week:Peter FishmanWebsite Mozart Data