Introducing Joshua McKenty, Co-founder and CEO of Delving

Sara Lindquist:

I'm Sara Lindquist from FUSE. We're an early stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more: more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability - more of everything. And we aim to deliver. Join me as I introduce each of our portfolio
companies in the FUSE family to date.

Today you'll hear from Josh McKenty, Co-Founder and CEO of Delving. Join us as we discuss the discovery process and entrepreneurship journey - and how Delving is going to transform and supercharge the way we engage with Excel and every other spreadsheet tool.

Let's get started!

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Sara:

All right, Josh - thank you for being here, my friend. It's so great to be with you!

Josh:

Absolutely delighted to be here!

Sara:

Well, I appreciate you taking the time and I'm really excited for you to share a bit about your personal journey and the Delving journey. So to kick things off, it would be great if you could share a quick overview about what Delving is and how it will serve customers.

Josh:

So spreadsheets, and in particular, Excel files are the secret operating system of every business in the world. Behind every million dollar decision, there's someone making magic in Excel, but they have really not changed in 35 years. And in particular, the workflows around Excel spreadsheets are missing. So think of sending a file to a friend, receiving some changes,
understanding those changes, controlling who makes what changes to which files. These are things that every other part of the business, we have better workflows and better tools that support.

So Delving sits alongside your favorite spreadsheet tool, whether that's Excel or Google Sheets or Smartsheet and helps teams inside business work better with their tabular data. That can be financial data, marketing or sales operations data, to-do lists, kind of anything that people stick in Excel. It will be easier with Delving.

Sara:

And so, Josh, thank you for what you're building, by the way. Because I think everybody listening in right now can personally attest to the beauty and pain of Excel. So I appreciate what you're focusing on here. So walk me back in time a little bit. When did you first know that you needed to build Delving? What was that key aha moment?

Josh:

Honestly, this goes back to when I was still at NASA and I was working on data projects at NASA. So everything from deep space network data to mapping the surface of Mars and the surface of the moon, to global climate change data. And every month, every week, every day I would run into some science team inside the agency that was using Excel. And I would sort of
freak-out. I was like, "Wait, what? Like this is some data. This is big data. This is a big data project. Like why are we back in a spreadsheet?" And they're like, "No, no. This is like - data for scientists usually means spreadsheets." And that was shocking to me.

So that was true at NASA. It was true when I started working on earthquake modeling. I was just so surprised that the catalog of every fault in the world was basically a spreadsheet. The historical catalogs of every earthquake that ever happened in history. Those were spreadsheets. So every time a scientist said database, they meant spreadsheet. And I lived in the programmer world where we made fun of them. We're like, "Oh, that's not a database. Stop calling it a database." And then eventually I was like, "You know what? It actually is a database" and that's fine.

Spreadsheets are amazing. They're magical. The reason we make fun of them is because they're missing a lot of the rest of the tooling that as programmers we're used to. We're used to version control, we're used to concurrency, we're used to error checking - we're used to all of these things that make it easier. And most of the people in the world don't have those
tools.

So I think going back to 2008, I was sort of nagged by this idea that the data ecosystem was missing tooling. We didn't have for data what we had for software or what we had for applications. And so when I went to Pivotal, I had gone there to work on the intersection of apps and data. And at the time I was like, "Data means big data. It means Hadoop" And sure
enough, I was back in the real world. I was like, "No, data means spreadsheets."

Sara:

Here we are again.

Josh:

Here we are again! So it just kept coming around like, "Ah, I'm going to go off and work on like data privacy." I spent a year working on data privacy research, thinking all of this personal data and all of this HIPAA data, and all this medical data was going to be databases. And it wasn't. It was like spreadsheets with your lab results and spreadsheets with your Social Security number. And finally, I was like, "Let's stop pretending that we're going to someday stop using Excel and let's just bring the rest of this tooling and this ecosystem to the Excel users."

So it was really last summer that we said, "Okay, we want to solve what's really the hardest problem in data today. What is that hard problem?" And we're like, "Well, the hard problem is the edge between the data scientists and the rest of the world and the edge is the spreadsheet, so let's go work on that."

Sara:

That's awesome. And so you've obviously been building out your team, so I'm curious in your words - why is your team the team to do this?

Josh:

That's a great question. And I think the answer is because we are so different from each other. The members of our leadership team come from so many different parts of the industry - from working with public sector and management consulting, from working inside a Fortune 100, from in my "case, working in the science community and international science community, from working in Silicon valley with startups for a decade.

And so we each relate really personally to a different set of stakeholders. The big challenge for us with Delving is there are a billion people who use spreadsheets at least once a month. And so there isn't a like "here's what spreadsheet users are like". They're of all ages, they're of all genders, they're of all language ethnicities and-

Sara:

Verticals and use cases. Yeah.

Josh:

Yeah. And so there's really no way to ignore or simplify those personas. So having a team where we are all very different from each other as well gets us started on the right foot of saying, "We have to be very formal and rigorous about how we think about what problem we're solving and who it's for and how we explain it."

And that discipline has made us kind of great from day one at saying, "We're really very data-driven" to overuse that term in terms of deciding what feature matters and what to build next, and how to run the next experiment. When you're trying to solve a problem that's been around for 35 years and affects a billion people, you kind of need some rigor.

Sara:

I would say so. Yeah. Well, that's great. I appreciate you calling that out and having different experiences and, and talents there. It just reflects more of the people you're serving, which is a lot of people. So you kind of touched on this a little bit, but if there's one word or a couple words that you think would best sum up your culture, what would that word be or words be?

Josh:

I guess it's a little ironic and maybe it's a little bit Canadian, but I would say our team is unusually humble, which I feel like most of the rest of the team members would feel like they couldn't even say that about themselves. Because it might be a little arrogant to say, "Oh, we're the most humble team," but most of my leadership team - they have been CEOs
themselves. And so we have a lot of folks playing roles that they are definitely overqualified for in some sense. And yet, everyone is doers as well as leaders and managers.

So we don't have that typical, "Oh, well we just want to hire 20 people to go do this." We're like, "No, we'll just do it ourselves." That feels really important as a startup that can like be
effective from day one and grow really fast, which I think is what we're going to have to do. So far early indications are this is not a problem we're going to solve with a small team or quickly, but we're going to move really fast over the next few months.

Sara:

Yeah. I think that's spot on and certainly reflects the leader at the helm, being you. So it's an awesome team you're building. Okay, so my next question for you, Josh. This isn't your first rodeo - and being a founder and a leader of a company is obviously hard work and comes with all sorts of challenges. So in the midst of that, what keeps you going perhaps even in
moments where others would throw in the towel?

Josh:

I've had to answer this question a number of times over the years and I never feel my answers are great, but I'll give you two. And I think they're both true and maybe one or the other of them is-

Sara:

That's what we want. Give us the real stuff.

Josh:

I want to make a dent in the universe. And there's a certain sense of - I don't know if it's just that I'm driven to feel like I've finished things, but I've worked on a lot of big projects like OpenStack, like Cloud Foundry, like the Global Earthquake Model where the potential of those projects is so huge that even when they're massively successful - like Global Earthquake
Model runs the national earthquake models of 40 countries, but it doesn't run 160 countries. It didn't really get to be the model. It's now just the most popular model, but not the only model.

It feels like there's potential that wasn't fulfilled there. And I was very fortunate early in my career to work on the Netscape Browser, which had tens of millions of users and AOL Toolbar, which had tens of millions of users. And I sort of got really addicted to having impact. But often afterwards I was like, "I really wanted my impact to be more meaningful. I want people to know and be grateful for the experience" as opposed to just like so many people in the world hate OpenStack. I am very well-known as one of the co-founders of a piece of software that everyone's like vaguely disappointed in. And I was like, "Okay, well, that's an accomplishment, but I would like to do better."

Sara:

Josh. Yeah.

Josh:

So I think that's part of it. And the other is that I love being on great teams. I love being a part of a team that just hums. And where there is that sort of feeling that you know what the team's trying to get done and everyone is helping to move it forward. I was in a dance troupe at one point. I ran a circus, so circus and acrobatics have that similar feel. When you're doing acrobatics like you really trust the people you are working with because you'd get injured, otherwise. You're looking out for each other. And occasionally I have found those kinds of teams working for other people, but it just always feels a little easier to build that kind of team myself. So I think the startup thing is partly driven because I like those kinds of teams and I'll just create them.

Sara:

Yeah. I love that. That's awesome, Josh. Okay, so in closing here I have one final question for you. What right now do you need more of? How can anyone listening in on the worldwide web - how can they help or get involved?

Josh:

That's a great question. We are in invite only mode right now. So if you want to try Delving, you need to sign up for the waiting list, but we would love to have folks sign up for that waiting list at Delving.com. And really what we're looking for right now is folks who spend a lot of time in Excel or in Google Sheets and work with teams around those spreadsheets. So
they're not just making their own model and then consuming it forever. They're building it for someone else or they're collaborating with others around their files.

And if you're willing to sign up and spend some time with us trying to do things with Delving, giving us feedback, reporting bugs, asking for features, then you're a great candidate for that early access program. So that would be one. And the other is we need your worst spreadsheets. We have a corpus of kind of the gnarliest spreadsheets anyone has ever made.

Sara:

I've got to see that, by the way! Will you show that to me?

Josh:

It's getting scary. Things people have done in spreadsheet that you didn't realize were possible. 3D models of homes, using it as like a rendering program. Yeah, it's turing-complete so you can actually build any piece of software ever in Excel, but we need the worst because we're trying to make sure that Delving can handle every possible permutation of everything
people do with spreadsheets.

So we need your worst spreadsheets and if you want to share those by email, that would be amazing. It's joshua.mckenty@delving.co. And I'm always happy to get an extra spreadsheet and an email.

Sara:

Awesome. Josh, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing your awesome story. And we're super excited to see what you're going to do and the dent you're going to make in the universe, my friend.

Josh:

I'm super excited to be part of the FUSE portfolio. So thanks again for having me on.

Sara:

Well, we're grateful to be a part of the journey so thank you.

Josh:

Cheers.

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Sara:

You heard him. Calling all spreadsheet users out there, bring it on. Please be sure to pass along any sheets that you use with your teams directly to Josh. Also, be sure to sign up for the product wait list right on Delving's website. Thanks for listening! We'll see you on the next one.