Dashboards Are Dead: Sigma’s BI Revolution for Trillion-Row Data

Listen to this episode from The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck on Spotify. Sigma Computing recently hit $100M in ARR — planning on doubling revenue again this year— and in this episode, CEO Mike Palmer reveals exactly how they did it by throwing out the old BI playbook. We open with the provocative claim that “the world did not need another BI tool,” and dig into why the last 20 years of business intelligence have been “boring.” He explains how Sigma’s spreadsheet-like interface lets anyone analyze billions of rows in seconds, and lives on top of Snowflake and Databricks, with no SQL required and no data extractions.Mike shares the inside story of Sigma’s journey: why they shut down their original product to rebuild from scratch, how Sutter Hill Ventures’ unique incubation model shaped the company, what it took to go from $2M to $100M ARR in just three years and raise a $200M round — even as the growth stage VC market dried up. We get into the technical details behind Sigma’s architecture: no caching, no federated queries, and real-time, Google Sheets-style collaboration at massive scale—features that have convinced giants like JP Morgan and ExxonMobil to ditch legacy dashboards for good.We also tackle the future of BI and the modern data stack: why 99.99% of enterprise data is never touched, what’s about to happen as the stack consolidates, and why Mike thinks “text-to-SQL” AI is a “terrible idea.” This episode is full of "spicey takes" - Mike shares his thoughts on how Google missed the zeitgeist, the reality behind Microsoft Fabric, when engineering hubris leads to failure, and many more. SigmaWebsite - https://www.sigmacomputing.comX/Twitter - https://x.com/sigmacomputingMike PalmerLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-palmer-51a154FIRSTMARKWebsite - https://firstmark.comX/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCapMatt Turck (Managing Director)LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturckFoursquare: Website - https://foursquare.comX/Twitter - https://x.com/Foursquare IG - instagram.com/foursquare (00:00) Intro (01:46) Why traditional BI is boring (04:15) What is business intelligence? (06:03) Classic BI roles and frustrations (07:09) Sigma’s origin story: Sutter Hill & the Snowflake echo (09:02) The spreadsheet problem: why nothing changed since 1985 (14:04) Rebooting the product during lockdown (16:14) Building a spreadsheet UX on top of Snowflake/Databricks (18:55) No caching, no federation: Sigma’s architectural choices (20:28) Spreadsheet interface at scale (21:32) Collaboration and real-time data workflows (24:15) Semantic layers, data governance & trillion-row performance (25:57) The modern data stack: fragmentation and consolidation (28:38) Democratizing data (29:36) Will hyperscalers own the data stack? (34:12) AI, natural language, and the limits of text-to-SQL