Cloud Pipe Dream

Let others worry about what it all means. FIVETRAN is proving there’s a fortune to be made just by piping data from place to place.

- Kenrick Cai

Long-Term Relationship

Fivetran cofounders George Fraser (left ) and Taylor Brown’s families have been friends for four generations. “My great-grandparents gave his grandparents for their wedding this frog doorstop,” Brown says. “It’s a weird gift , but we now have it as our [company] mascot.”

On a brilliant summer day in August 2021, George Fraser was trying to relax at his family’s lakeside cabin deep in the woods of Wisconsin. Instead, the CEO and cofounder of Fivetran was worrying about his job and the company he had spent nine long years building with his childhood friend Taylor Brown, whose family also summered in the same patch of northern pines.

The two had a great idea: Help companies gather data from all sorts of disparate sources—Twitter mentions, credit card transactions—then charge them to funnel it to a big-data analytics firm like Snowflake or Databricks, which could, ideally, tell them what it all meant. Fraser and Brown had gone through Y Combinator together. They had raised about $160 million. They had spent countless hours sweating the technical details. But they still didn’t have a product designed for large companies.

“For years it was always the big problem we needed to solve,” Fraser says. “We were looking at a multiyear journey.”