Tulip: Company Details, Growth, & Culture
Transcript of Interview with Erik Mirandette, Head of Product & Ecosystem at Tulip
Continuing our deep dive into Tulip Interfaces, we came across this great interview hosted by Keith Cline at VentureFizz, welcoming Erik Mirandette, Head of Product and Ecosystem at Tulip.
To help raise awareness of the conversation, I decided to create a word-for-word transcript of the conversation, eliminating any errors in the automated transcript. It is my hope that others interested in learning about Tulip can now find this content more easily.
The source video is here:
Transcript
Keith Cline: Eric, thanks so much for joining us.
Eric Mirandette: Hey, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me, Keith.
The Details on Tulip and What They Do
Keith Cline: I’m excited to talk to you because we last chatted like three years ago about Tulip, and it’s awesome to do these videos where we can see progress three years later. So if people aren’t familiar with the company Tulip, your tagline is that you’re building the premier frontline operations platform. So what does that mean? What does the company do?
Eric Mirandette: Yeah, at the end of the day, we want to give people who run the front line of operations the right tools to do their job better. So we believe deeply in citizen development. We believe that the people who are closest to the problem, who know their operations inside and out, are also the best positioned to solve these problems. We’re all about giving them the right tools and making their jobs easier.
How It All Works
Keith Cline: So this is obviously focused on the manufacturing industry, which is a very complex industry, and this is a complex platform. So how does it all work?
Eric Mirandette: Well, the way it works is, our platform is a no-code app platform. What that means is that if you know how to use PowerPoint, if you’re comfortable with Excel, and you understand if-then-else logic, you can build applications that solve very specific problems in your operational environment. You can then connect these applications with one another to create mesh network of software that solves very specific problems in the operation but also captures really important and hard-to-capture production data. So, if a line went down, why did the line go down? If a machine is off, why is the machine off? A lot of times, this information has to be combined across both the machines and the people who are actually working in these environments. So, first-pass yield of a product, quality defect data, production tracking. These are some of the use cases that our customers take on with Tulip.
Keith Cline: It’s working in an industry that’s vastly underserved, that being manufacturing, so I think Tulip has really made a major impact to the ability to automate a lot of the processes.
Eric Mirandette: Yeah, it’s pretty wild. You know, you step into many of these production environments. I mean, if you think about it for a moment, everything that we interact with in our day-to-day lives was built somewhere by someone. I mean, it sounds kind of obvious, but if you actually stop to reflect on that for a moment, it is massive on a scale that kind of defies comprehension. And if you were to step foot in any of these environments, what you see, it’s like stepping back in time. It’s as if the internet never happened, you know? So you see pen and paper, you see checklists, you see printed work instructions, you see grease boards, you see stopwatches, tickers. It’s kind of wild to think that if you were to approach an engineer today and say, “Hey, I’ve got to solve this very complex data problem,” you know, they’re going to say, “Okay, put the supercomputer in your pocket away. Put that down, and let’s pick up a pen and paper and start doing some manual calculations.” But that is actually the reality that 99% of manufacturing operations and life sciences operations globally are actually in today.
Erik’s Career and What Led Him to Join Tulip
Keith Cline: Right, so you’ve been with the company for about eight years now. I thought it would be helpful to talk about how you got involved with the company and your career progression since joining.
Eric Mirandette: Well, the company certainly changed a lot in the last eight years. So when I joined, we were just fresh out of the lab. I think we had, five engineers and three dogs or something like that. And when I first jumped in with the team here, I really led a lot of our business development work. So, think first 10, 20 customers, figuring out what their pain points were and how we could help partner with them to solve their problems. And then, about a year or so into that, moved over and built out and ran our post-sales operations for what ended up being almost four or five years. This is customer success. This is professional services, application engineering, support, account management, project management, as well as some other teams that evolved under the post-sales operation. And then a few years ago, about two and a half years ago, moved over to my current role, which is head of product and ecosystem. Head of product is fairly straightforward. So that’s product management, design, and operations. Ecosystem is a little bit unique to Tulip, but this basically describes all the domains that are adjacent to the core platform. So think about our product education, Tulip University, the knowledge base, our community, the developer program, our library of best practices, and things like this.
Keith Cline: I think that’s a perfect testament for how someone can shape and really grow their career at Tulip, and it speaks highly about your culture. So let’s bring everyone up to speed on the state of the company. Where did things stand since we last chatted three years ago?
Eric Mirandette: I think last time we had this call, we were all working remote, taking calls from our bedrooms and figuring out how to navigate the pandemic. But we’ve been busy these last couple of years. So I think when we last spoke, we had probably just under a hundred folks. We’re north of 300 employees today. Our headquarters is here in Boston. We’ve got about 30,000 square feet here in Boston. We also have offices in Budapest and Munich. So we’ve really expanded into a global company in the last couple of years since we’ve talked. And our customer base has sort of followed a similar trajectory. So, north of 10x scale factor in terms of total customers served, as well as the total number of individuals interacting with our platform day-to-day to solve their problems.
Culture at Tulip
Keith Cline: All right. So you’re continuing to grow, which is amazing. What’s the culture like working at Tulip? What’s the day-to-day like?
Eric Mirandette: Well, first of all, I think we’re a very aggressive company. So we have ambitious goals. We work really hard to achieve that. You know, if we look at the scope and the scale of the problem that we’re solving, as I said before, massive, massive total addressable market for us and massive opportunity to solve this problem across frontline operations generally. And I think that sense of mission and that opportunity really drives the sense of urgency, the sense of focus, and the sense of mission back here at Tulip. So Tulip is a very transparent place. It’s a meritocracy through and through. We don’t do politics. We’re here to get the job done, and we’re here to work collaboratively to get that done. So, blameless postmortems, we celebrate the ideas that are best, and often times it’s hard to figure out exactly where that idea originated from, but we work together and we work hard.
Why the should be on your radar
Keith Cline: All right. So regardless of economic conditions, you know, the top-tier talent that there’s always options in front of them to choose where they want to work next. So why should Tulip be on somebody’s radar?
Eric Mirandette: I mean, I think you alluded to it a little bit earlier, but, you know, if you want to come in and you want opportunity, and you want responsibility, and you want to grow, the best place to do that is a company that’s solving a really big, hairy problem that is also growing, and that’s certainly the case with Tulip. So, I think this is a place where, if you come in and you want to be challenged, you want to grow, you want to increase your total responsibility and the types of problems that you’re going to be solving, Tulip’s a great place to do that. The other thing I would say is this is the smartest crew of people I’ve ever worked with in my life. You know, maybe I shouldn’t say this on record, but it’s totally true. But I often walk into a room and feel like, man, I’ve got to be the dumbest person in this room because there are a lot of just brilliant, brilliant people here. And they’re brilliant in all sorts of eclectic ways across the board. We’ve got phenomenal engineers, phenomenal product thinkers, phenomenal project managers and sales experts. So, if you want to get in and be exposed to truly the best people who are working on really interesting and hard problems, grow very quickly, but then also maybe you don’t know where you want to be in five years or 10 years, and you’re sort of figuring this out, Tulip is still at the stage where you can see what are these other roles, and we very much support lateral moves, promotions from within. So I think it’s a really special place in that regard.
Keith Cline: Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Tulip, just to reiterate what Eric said, this is a massive opportunity. The manufacturing industry is going through radical transformation, and Tulip has the platform to make it all happen. So go to their company page on VentureFizz to see all their job listings. Go to https://venturefizz.com/tulip, and you’ll see their job listings there. Eric, thanks so much for taking the time to bring us up to speed on all the great things happening at the company.
Eric Mirandette: Hey, really my pleasure, Keith. Thanks for having me.
Keith Cline: Well, I hope you enjoyed this video at VentureFizz. Our mission is to share the stories of companies, their people, and culture. So, if you’re interested in more interviews with founders and executives in the tech industry, make sure you click on the subscribe button. Thanks so much for watching.
