SnapLogic

Gurv Dylan had already built and taken public Informatica, the data integration company he co-founded and ran for more than a decade. After leaving in 2004 and taking a year off, he returned to Silicon Valley and sat on several boards. In one of those board meetings, it became clear to him that cloud computing was going to be a big deal, and that the new cloud applications would need to be connected to the legacy systems that already ran businesses. He saw an opportunity for integration.

Around 2006, he put money into a "science project" built by a few people he knew from his pro bono board work. He wrote the first check himself and told the founding team to prove there was a business. The check was structured as convertible debt, which converted at the first outside funding. As Dylan put it, "The initial check was a million dollars."

Dylan has described the company as a new version of the earlier client-server wave he rode with Informatica. In his telling, SnapLogic connects new cloud applications with older on-premise systems. Its platform handles both data integration, like the ETL work Informatica was known for, and real-time application integration. Customers pay monthly recurring fees for a cloud product, and deployments often include an on-premise component, depending on how much of their data sits on-site.

In 2009, Dylan joined as CEO. Over the following years, the company raised roughly $136 million in successive rounds, starting with venture firms and later including Vitruvian Partners, which led a $40 million Series D.

SnapLogic's growth came from enterprise sales rather than self-serve adoption. Dylan contrasted it with consumer automation tools like Zapier and IFTTT, arguing that those tools serve individuals while SnapLogic targets large companies whose systems need to talk to each other. The company has about 750 customers, many of them large enterprises, with an average contract value of about $136,000.

The go-to-market model relies on a small team of sales development representatives. Prospects who request a demo are qualified by an SDR, matched to a sales rep by territory, and then handed off. Dylan said fewer than 20 of the roughly 250 employees are SDRs. He also described a referral effect: customers who change jobs ask for SnapLogic at their new companies.

Dylan was explicit about spending discipline. He said the company would invest in customer acquisition only as long as the incremental return justified it, and he rejected the idea that LTV to CAC is the only metric that matters. He argued that payback speed is what counts. He also said the company was "not a hype company" but "a buzz company."

As of the interview, SnapLogic was expanding aggressively in Europe and Australia, with a one-to-one ratio of SDRs to sales reps in those regions. Dylan declined to confirm the company's revenue. When asked whether it had passed nine figures in ARR, he would not confirm, saying only that it was growing and that revenue could double as it had for years. The host's own back-of-envelope estimate, based on the customer count and average contract value, was far higher, but Dylan did not confirm it.