Monte Carlo’s Barr Moses on creating a playbook for a product that’s never been built before | S2E9

In 2018, Barr Moses was looking to start a company but wasn't sure which idea to pursue. She decided to work on three different startup ideas in parallel to see which one gained the most traction with customers.

One of those ideas was Monte Carlo, a solution to address the challenges around data reliability that Barr had experienced throughout her career— dealing with broken data products, wasted time, lost trust, and firefighting data quality issues. As Barr met with potential customers, it became clear that there was significant demand from technical leaders grappling with the consequences of data downtime across their organizations. 

Today, Monte Carlo has successfully created a new category and firmly established itself as the end-to-end data observability platform for companies like Cisco, Fox, American Airlines, and more. Now, in the era of AI, the role of data quality has never been more critical. 

In this episode of Spotlight On, Barr and Accel’s Steve Loughlin reflect on Monte Carlo’s unique origin story, explain “Hell Yeah Moments” as a company success metric, and dig into why they chose speed, focus, and customer impact as core values. Barr also peels the curtain back on why she decided to launch the company alongside an entirely new category—Data Observability—and the grit and determination it takes to build and sell a product that’s never been built or sold before. There’s no playbook for that, but Monte Carlo created its own.

Conversation Highlights:

• 00:00: Monte Carlo’s origin story
• 3:54: How Barr discovered the idea of “data downtime,” which became the foundation for Monte Carlo and validated customer demand
• 7:19: Successfully raising Monte Carlo’s seed round and acquiring its first customers—despite a lackluster slide deck
• 10:31: The team’s maniacal focus on making just one customer happy and how that informs PMF
• 12:00: “Hell yeah” moments as a metric to measure customer success
• 13:40: What are the signals to move from a freemium to a paid product?
• 15:58: How Barr’s leadership style has evolved as the company has scaled
• 18:26: Why competition in a new category is a good thing
• 22:48: What it’s like building and selling a product that’s never been built before, and how Barr screens for “risk-takers” 
• 29:46: The future of the Data Observability category and the crucial role that quality data will play in enabling safe and accurate generative AI
• 33:10: The most rewarding part of Barr’s entrepreneurial journey thus far

Featured: Barr Moses, Co-Founder and CEO at Monte Carlo, and Steve Loughlin, Partner at Accel.

Learn more about Accel’s relationship with Monte Carlo:

• Launching the Data Reliability Category with Monte Carlo
• Secrets to Scaling with Monte Carlo’s Barr Moses