Why We Chose Insight Partners

We recently announced that Insight Partners is leading a new $14 million investment in Golden Analytics, bringing our total funding to $21 million. Here is the press release with all the details, but I wanted to share a more personal perspective on why we chose to partner with Insight.

I’ve never thought about venture capital primarily in terms of the money.

Of course, capital matters. Building a company takes resources. But the way I think about investors is much closer to how I think about building a leadership team. These are people you’ll work with for years. People you’ll call when things are going well, and especially when they aren’t. The best venture relationships aren’t transactional. They’re partnerships.

When I started Golden, there were three people I reached out to almost immediately for advice: Madison Faulkner at NEA, Mark Nelson at Madrona, and George Mathew at Insight.

I’ve known George for more than sixteen years, going back to his time as President of Alteryx. He knows this category as well as anyone. More importantly, he’s seen what it looks like when a company gets it right, when a product clicks, a community forms around it, and momentum starts to build.

Since then, George has gone on to become one of the leading investors in AI. But what I’ve always appreciated about him is that he brings both perspectives. He understands analytics because he’s lived it, and he understands where AI is taking our industry because he spends every day talking to the builders shaping the future. That’s a rare combination.

I’ve also known Ganesh Bell for many years. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about enterprise software, data, and company building. Ganesh has been an operator, and that matters. He's worked in analytics since the early days of SAP and Business Objects. He understands the hard parts because he’s lived them himself. I value that perspective enormously.

What struck me as we started talking with Insight was how little we talked about the financing itself.

We talked about customers. We talked about the product. We talked about the future of analytics and the opportunity in front of us. We talked about what Golden could become if we keep executing and keep listening to the people using our product every day.

And maybe there’s something fitting about it. With “Insight” in the name, it almost feels like they were built for this. You could say they’ve spent their whole existence preparing for the opportunity to help companies scale insights. After all, if we’re going to scale insights, who better to do it with than Insight?

Corny? Maybe. But after spending time with George, Ganesh, and the broader Insight team, the name actually fits. They genuinely care about helping founders build enduring companies, and they’ve already been an incredible partner as we think through the next chapter for Golden.

The opportunity is enormous. Every company in the world is trying to figure out how AI changes the way people work with data. We think analytics should be simpler, faster, and accessible to everyone, not just the handful of people who know where the dashboards are hidden.

We’re already seeing incredible momentum, but we have much bigger ambitions. We want to build THE company that defines what analytics looks like in the AI era.

To do that, you need more than capital. You need people who challenge your thinking, who’ve seen great companies scale, and who genuinely want to help.

That’s exactly what we found in Insight.

The rocket ship was already moving. We wanted a partner who could help us go farther and faster. From my very first conversations, George, Ganesh, and the broader Insight team have already been incredibly generous with their time, their experience, and their ideas.

I’m excited about what we’re building together.

LFG!