IA40 Spotlight: Fivetran CEO George Fraser on Data Replication and Connectors

Founded & Funded

This week Madrona Investor Sabrina Wu talks with Fivetran Co-founder and CEO George Fraser. Fivetran is fundamentally a data replication company — that’s how George explains it. But the company actually started out trying to solve a completely different problem when it was founded in 2012 and pivoted to strictly data integration in 2015 after multiple customers started asking for help. But in attacking that problem differently than it had ever been done before — by only focusing on replicating people’s data into the desired destination w/o getting sucked into any of the workflows that the user intended to do on the other side — they’ve come out as a leader in the space. Fivetran landed a $565M series D last year and made two acquisitions. And – it was named one of our top 40 Intelligent Applications in 2021. In this IA40 spotlight episode, Sabrina and George not only dive into the story behind Fivetran and how it has taken time and patience to get to where they are now. But Sabrina also gets some hot takes on the modern data stack, reverse ETL, query federation and why Fivetran doesn’t open source. He also has some great advice about coming up with a company name, but you’ll have to listen to get it, so I’ll hand it over to Sabrina to dive in.