[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Data Exploration for Everyone With Mike Palmer

Mike Palmer is the CEO of Sigma Computing, a company that makes data exploration, analysis, and business intelligence accessible to all. Under his leadership, Sigma has experienced remarkable growth, going from $2 million to $100 million in IRR over three years and raising a $200 million funding round. Mike’s expertise in business transformation and customer experience has been a driving force behind Sigma’s success. He specializes in scaling enterprise solutions and driving innovation across product, marketing, and operations.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:14] Mike Palmer introduces Sigma Computing’s mission to empower non-technical users with business intelligence
• [07:21] How Sigma’s platform enables faster decision-making and real-time data exploration
• [11:00] The evolution of Sigma’s ideal customer profile from mid-market companies to large enterprises
• [14:34] How a poultry company built a custom ERP system using Sigma Computing’s flexible platform
• [18:02] Mike’s insights on fundraising and selecting investors who can drive long-term growth
• [20:27] Why Sigma Computing avoids acquisitions to maintain product integrity and user experience
• [22:27] The pivotal decision to rebuild Sigma’s product from the ground up to achieve simplicity and scalability
• [27:51] Strategies for focusing on mid-market customers to refine product usability and minimize complexity
• [32:42] The process and long-term strategy of expanding into large enterprise clients like JP Morgan
• [37:27] The evolution of Sigma’s sales team and leadership approach to sustainable growth and operational discipline

In this episode…

Many businesses struggle to unlock the full potential of their data, especially when complex systems limit access to only technical teams. This creates bottlenecks that slow decision-making and restrict company-wide collaboration. How can organizations make data accessible, actionable, and manageable for everyone, regardless of technical skill?

Mike Palmer, an expert in scaling technology solutions and driving enterprise growth, shares how to break down these barriers by focusing on user-friendly, no-code platforms that allow non-technical users to analyze and act on live data. He emphasizes starting with mid-market customers to perfect the user experience and building scalable, intuitive products that eliminate complexity. He suggests prioritizing real-time collaboration, developing features like instant data write-back, and continuously collecting customer feedback to drive product evolution. Mike also highlights the importance of growing strategically by securing the right investors, resisting distracting acquisitions, and building a team culture that values direct feedback and long-term development.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Mike Palmer, CEO of Sigma Computing, about creating accessible, scalable data solutions. Mike discusses how rebuilding their product from scratch led to exponential growth, why a mid-market focus sharpened their user experience, and how his team strategically expanded to enterprise clients. He also shares lessons on fundraising, product-led growth, and sales team evolution.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Mike Palmer on LinkedIn
• Sigma Computing

Special Mention(s):

• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

Related episode(s):

• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series & Israel Business Series] The SaaS Growth Playbook With David Bitton of DoorLoop” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments: 

• “Execution is where all the magic shows up. The mission we remain on is to be licensed to every person, in every department, at every company.”
• “The best way to build software is to start in the mid-market. They have no preconceptions, just forward-looking thought processes.”
• “Getting the product right is the highest leverage decision that a team makes at a company. It was the inflection point for where we’ve gotten to today.”
• “In the end, all software companies are large enterprise software companies because that’s the economic reality. You need to have larger deals.”
• “I want to be as open as possible in getting advice. I can always decide myself whether to take it, but I can’t decide whether I get it.”

Action Steps:

1. Prioritize simplicity in product design: Making products easy to use for non-technical users increases adoption and minimizes friction by empowering more employees to make data-driven decisions without relying on specialists.
2. Focus on mid-market customers first: Starting with smaller customers refines the product and user experience while building a strong foundation before expanding to complex enterprise environments.
3. Invest in real-time collaboration tools: Allowing teams to work on live data simultaneously improves accuracy and speeds up decision-making by ensuring everyone works with the most current information.
4. Continuously gather and act on customer feedback: Listening to users and incorporating their feedback drives product improvement and ensures solutions are tailored to real-world problems.
5. Expand strategically into enterprise markets: Gradually moving into enterprise sales unlocks larger, more stable revenue streams while balancing the shift with strong product support.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of Inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Mike Palmer of Sigma Computing. Check them out at sigmacomputing.com.

Mike, before I formally introduce you, I would like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top SaaS series. I had one of the co-founders of Zapier on Wade Foster. That was a really interesting interview on how they’ve grown Pipedrive. Also at the time, Mike, I think there were 10,000 customers. Now I think they’re over 100,000.

So they’ve grown quite a bit. And I had David Bitton of DoorLoop. They have a SaaS company for property management. It’s a property management software. It reminds me a little bit about your story, but they raised over in a very short period of time, grew to 200 staff, raised $130 million.

And he talked about his SaaS growth playbook. And it was really interesting on how they grew and just so many favorites. Jotform founder talked about growing 25 million users and why they had a free version because I’m like, that’s expensive to have a free version. This stuff, people using it, that and many more. It inspiredinsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise25. We help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast.

So we do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution and production behind the scenes. We also, number two are an easy button for a company is gifting. So we make gifting staying top of mind your clients, partners, prospects and even staff. From a culture perspective, very easy. You just give us the list.

We’ll do everything else. We kind of might call ourselves magic elves that run in the background to make it stress free for the company, so they can build amazing relationships and they can focus on running their business. So I mean, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And over the past decade, I found no better way than to profile the people I admire and send them sweet treats in the mail so you can check them out. Rise 25.com or email support at rise25.com.

I am super excited to introduce Mike Palmer. He’s the CEO at Sigma. He makes data exploration, analysis and business intelligence accessible to everyone. He has more than two decades of experience in technology, developing solutions for enterprises, startups like Veritas, The Totality and more. And fortune 500 companies like Verizon, Seagate and Mike specializes in helping companies transform, grow and scale.

And that is like that sounds like transform, grow and scale. But when I talk about what Mike and Sigma has done, like that is truly the definition of what you and the team have done there. Because in the past few years, I think three years they’ve gone from $2 million IRR to $100 million in IRR. Okay. That’s crazy.

That’s amazing. And they also raised a $200 million round of funding as well. So it’s been a crazy journey. Mike, and thanks for joining me.

Mike Palmer: 03:37

Thank you for having me. And it has been a crazy journey.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:40

And I you know it’s it’s fun to talk about I mean on the surface it seems like oh my God this is amazing. But there’s always when we go back to those really hard times, it doesn’t look like it does now. So we’ll talk about the journey. But I want to start off with Sigma Computing and what you do. And I’ll pull up the website for people to see as well.

So just talk about Sigma, which is, you know, on the websites enterprise business intelligence and spreadsheet UI. So talk about Sigma.

Mike Palmer: 04:14

So what Sigma was built to take advantage of was the migration that customers have been going through, both to cloud but also ultimately to cloud data warehousing. So think about products like Snowflake and Databricks and BigQuery and redshift. And we wanted to build something that made that transformation not just an infrastructure transformation, you know, one type of database for another, but rather the way that like every person, the 90% of people who are not technical at your organization, that they could take advantage of this data. And so we focus on the spreadsheet UI because we know that business, for the most part, departmental business gets done in spreadsheets. We joke that in the old world the most popular feature was the button that said Download to Excel.

Because this is where people do their work. They do pivot tables and scenario models and reconcile data, and then they send that file to someone else. And we wanted to bring that online. And we knew that the scale of the data was getting huge. So huge that you really could no longer use a client-based software like Excel.

There was security and governance concerns. There was opportunities around collaboration. And so we built that. You know, we built this initial version of Sigma being a combination of old BI and spreadsheets. Now, since then, we’ve gone into application development platforms and embedding and a whole bunch of other stuff we can talk about here.

But that’s kind of Sigma in a nutshell.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:40

I’m curious what the product started out as, because I know even a few years ago, you rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up. But what was the idea in the beginning? And I know it always evolves like talk about the evolution of Sigma a little bit.

Mike Palmer: 05:57

So we have two amazing co-founders, Rob Woollen and Jason Frantz, who met at Sutter Hill Ventures. And when they kind of left the nest or so to speak, the idea was let’s go build something for the average person. You know, the Silicon Valley is really good at building generations of tech products for tech people, but they really wanted to break free from that kind of the rhythm, if you will, that the Valley had developed. And obviously coming from Sutter Hill, they had pretty good visibility into what was going on with Snowflake and thought that might be the market opportunity, and that still drives us today. So that was the core idea.

Execution is where all the magic shows up. But in the end, and the mission we remain on is that we’ll be one of the products and maybe one of the very few products ever that is licensed to every single person, in every department, at every company, regardless of the vertical or your geography or your business focus at all.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:56

So this you know, when we’re looking at here, this seems like it allows anyone to customize their data into a dashboard. Right. And then one of those things that people are using it for is just, you know, productivity, decision making, acting quicker. Can you talk about decision making, like how are people using this to make quicker decisions?

Mike Palmer: 07:21

Yeah, and we could go into different demos on the website that would drill further into this product. But what you’re seeing here is a nice visual of the combination of a by product, which of course, when people associate by products, they think about charting, right. So here you’ve seen a bar chart and a donut chart on the bottom left, but the table which is on the bottom right, the ability for an end user to click into that table and explode all of the data, which could be hundreds of billions of records, is unique, right? So no one has built that drill path. They’ve not predefined your question.

You could just go into that chart. You can explode it to all of its drill down, as we call it, into all of its glory. Get to a row level view. And then what you’re seeing here is you can start changing that table. We have a feature called Right Back that is unique in the industry.

And it allows you to add your own perspective to that data. And that perspective could just be a growth rate. It could be a comment. It could be a reconciled value. It could be anything.

You saw a little bit of our collaboration features when that red squiggly line went around the table. Everything that we got used to doing in Google Suite or Office 365, you can do that in Sigma. So you and I can live edit an analysis that we’re doing together. We can chat about it, we can draw on it. You know we can invite others to do this with us.

So that same idea of what I refer to as synchronous work based in data that can do something familiar, like a dashboard, but something more personal, like a spreadsheet based analysis that you would have done all by yourself, all possible in this one UI that you’re seeing here, what you’re not quite seeing here that we then branch off of this is if I have done an analysis and I want to do something about that and I want to take an action, there’s a whole then subsequent capability in the product where you can build workflows. You can say under this condition, I want to send this notification. I want to update this third party application. I could build a form and collect data from people inside of my organization. We have had people replace brand name applications with Sigma.

[Continue to Page 2]