Hello, everyone. My guest today is Derek Steer. He's a CEO and co-founder of Mode. Prior to co-founding

Mode in 2013, he was an early member of Yammer's analytics team. There, he led sales and marketing

analytics drawing upon his experience on the monetization analytics team at Facebook and his background

in antitrust economics. Derek, you're ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right. So I want to jump right in with Yammer.

How many people, when you were building out these tools at Yammer, how many data

scientists was Yammer employing to work on this problem?

So we had, when I arrived, the company was probably like 140, 150 people.

We had a team of maybe five analysts.

And then there was, I forget whether it was right when I started, but my Mode co-founder, Josh, eventually split out to start a data engineering team that was responsible both for building out data pipelines and managing the quality of our data, and also for building internal software that looked a lot like mode for us to do our jobs. And that was something that a lot of folks were doing

at the time is like they were hiring up teams of developers to work on these sorts of internal tools.

So what I want to get to now is I imagine you probably had a cushy salary at Yammer.

When did you put up a conference to say,

you know what, I'm taking a risk. We're going out, we're going to build this, and we're

going to build it for everybody. Well, the cushy salary only came after the acquisition by

Microsoft. Okay. You know, I, the decision to go and start a company really had to do with the fact that I was waking up every morning thinking about this particular problem and going to bed every night.

And when I talk to other would-be founders, the advice that I give them is make sure you're obsessed because it's pretty hard.

And, you know, I think that obsession with making the lives of analysts and data scientists better is what has gotten me through some of the challenges of just starting and running a business.

And so, actually, can you share, I always like to measure opportunity costs on those sorts of things.

I mean, can you share what salary you gave up when you left?

Well, it's, I'd have to go do some stock math because my Microsoft shares at that time were worth a fraction of what they would be.

They're better now.

Yeah, yeah, if you look at the price now, it was a seven-figure annual type of amount. were worth a fraction of what they would be now. Yeah. Yeah.

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