Why I Left Palantir and Faced 50 RejectionsㅣMosaic, Bijan Moallemi

Bijan Moallemi spent seven years at Palantir building financial infrastructure from scratch, realizing that relying on static Excel spreadsheets severely delayed strategic executive decisions. After serving as a CFO at venture-backed startups, Moallemi co-founded Mosaic to consolidate cross-departmental data into real-time financial planning dashboards. Despite receiving over 50 rejections while learning how to sell as a technical founder, Moallemi scaled Mosaic into a Deloitte Fast 500 enterprise. In this interview, Moallemi shares how competitive tennis taught him to handle startup setbacks, why dedicated rapid-response engineering teams protect core roadmaps, and how to modernize the office of the CFO.

I'm Bijan Moallemi. Mosaic is a strategic finance platform. We hook into data sources across the business and automate a lot of the manual work that finance teams would traditionally be doing.

We debuted as number 97 on the Deloitte Fast 500, which ranks the fastest 500 growing tech companies from a revenue perspective. Pretty happy to be top 100 on that list, and I think it's a testament to all the team's hard work over the last few years to hit those numbers.

My dad moved to the United States when he was 18 to escape the revolution in Iran. He worked three jobs to pay for college and sent money back to his family, and he ended up getting two degrees in three years. I think that work ethic, that tenacity, was something that he had and something that my mom had, and it was the way that I was raised.

The first time that I really started to see that in myself was on the tennis court. I played competitive tennis growing up. I was never the most talented person and never the most athletic on the court, but I felt that if I was training harder than everyone, I would have a chance to win any match.

Before I'd get ready for tennis tournaments, there were always these national tournaments over the summer and they would be in the hottest places. So San Antonio in August, which is 100 degrees and 100% humidity. Or maybe it's Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the weather here doesn't really get you prepared for that. What that would mean for me is going out to Palm Springs and training in sweatpants and a hoodie in 100 degree weather for a week, getting ready for those tournaments. That's definitely the attitude that I've taken with me throughout my entire life. I think that's the attitude where you can't really lose, because you're always getting better, and in the long run we feel like that'll help us win.

Palantir is an amazing company. The company was just over 100 people when I joined. The finance function wasn't really built out yet, and so we went on this incredible journey for seven years, building and scaling the finance team and doing close to $3 billion in revenue by the time we left.

When you've got a rocket ship and you've got a company that doesn't have their finances in order, the business was asking these reasonable questions. What's our cash balance? How much revenue do we have? Who owes us money? Early on, because we didn't have the infrastructure, we couldn't answer those questions.

Ultimately, we were working really hard. I remember I was living in San Francisco at the time, and we were taking the first Caltrain down to Palo Alto in the morning and the last Caltrain back up. But because we were doing our work the old fashioned way, which is using Excel to do everything, we were spending so much time pulling data, cleaning data, mapping it and doing the analysis that if the business asked us an important question, it would take us days or weeks to answer it. And with the pace of business these days, if it takes you two weeks to answer the question, people have moved on. They need something that is faster. They need something that's real-time or proactive.

Palantir was step one. My co-founders and I each went on to be CFOs at other high-growth VC-backed companies. If you don't have the billion dollars on the balance sheet like Palantir had at the time, and you don't have a technical finance team, which most teams don't, you're actually at a big disadvantage. The problem that we were solving at Palantir is mission critical, because every company needs to understand their finances.

We realized that everything we did at Palantir is actually something that's needed and it's ubiquitous for all companies. It's not just a Palantir specific problem.

As we were getting the company built, we spent a really long time thinking about the name. We bought a dictionary, and my co-founder and I probably spent two or three hours a day just paging through the dictionary.

We landed on Mosaic. If you think about a mosaic tile, one tile on its own could be one system of data, and that's valuable, but it's only so valuable. But when you zoom out and you've got 1000 tiles representing all the data across the business, you can actually paint a beautiful mosaic, this beautiful vision about the company.

We're a small startup and we hadn't raised any money at the time. There are other mosaics out there, it's a somewhat common name, and we landed on the .tech domain because we're a technology company first and foremost. Mosaic is really all about pulling in data from various systems across the business and using that data to plan, forecast, analyze and do all the most strategic, important work that a finance team is responsible for.

For myself and one of my co-founders, we're finance people. We're not the most outgoing, and selling isn't really the most natural thing for us, but it had to be done. Given the way that we sold and the way that we were probably presenting ourselves, we got a lot of no's, and it's not always fun to get no's when people tell you, no, I'm not interested, or they don't really understand what you're selling. It probably took a few months and 50 or 60 no's for us to really start to figure selling out.

The memorable no that we have is actually more on the investing side. I remember early on there were a handful of investors that we were talking to, and we felt like our pitch was pretty good at the time. We were starting to get a little bit of traction and we got fairly late stage in these processes with these investors. I was in the closet, because the room that was my office had seven or eight people in it, so I'm in my master bedroom closet getting a call from an investor, hoping for a yes, and we got a no. That was super painful.

We weren't ready for that, but it motivated us to be better, to move faster, to build the product faster and to build the business faster. Things moved on, and later that year we were raising a Series A. That same investor came back around without us reaching out, saying, "I've heard about the progress. I'm seeing everything you guys are doing. I'd love to be a part of the round."

So I don't see no as a failure. If I'm doing the same thing over and over and not learning, that's failure. But if there's mistakes along the way, if there's something that goes wrong and I'm learning from that, I actually see that as a positive thing. I don't necessarily see that as a failure. Ultimately that's just part of the journey.

In a tennis match, if I'm playing a match and I lose a point, I can't worry about the point that I lost, because if I'm still thinking about the point that I lost, I'm going to lose the next point in the next game and I'm going to lose the match. So you need to have this attitude where you analyze it and ask what you can do better. But then, as you're starting the next point, it's water under the bridge and you move on.

The same is true in a startup for everyone that's involved, but I think really for founders, you feel it orders of magnitude more. The highs are high, the lows are low, and there's days where you don't want to get out of bed and you don't know what the next step is. But I think it's really all around persistence and giving 110% and doing that day in, day out over a long period of time. If you're thinking about starting a company, are you ready to be persistent? Are you ready to overcome those tough days? Are you ready to do that for many years? If you are, being a founder is the most amazing thing, but it's not for everyone.

One of our core beliefs across the business is champion the customer. We have three core values, and that's the first one. The way to improve your retention is to really understand what your customers want and what they need, and the more time that you can spend with them, the better off you're going to be.

When it comes to listening to customers, I think two things are important. First, you have to make sure that you're listening to the right customer, and the right customer from last year may not be the right customer for today or tomorrow. That's something that you have to keep in mind.

For us, the customer that we were serving early on was the SMB, the small market customer. The things that we were hearing from customers when we had those customers was everything that they cared about in the SMB. Now, for the last couple of years, the focus for us has been pushing up market, really trying to wean off of some of those smaller customers and focus more on the mid-market and the upper mid-market.

We do still have customers that are in that SMB space and we'll sometimes sell to them, but the feedback that we hear at this point is that we're going to listen more to the mid-market customer than we are to the SMB customer. That's just because of the business that we want to build and where we're trying to go. Second, it's really easy to fall into the trap, when you have a large customer, of bending the roadmap and doing exactly what a big customer wants you to do. You have to make sure that you're listening to the broader customer base and not focusing on what one individual customer might be saying.

Our approach, and I'm really proud of this, is that we've spun up a team we call the rapid response team, where it's a handful of engineers. It's a smaller team, but it allows us to take the requests that we're hearing from customers, and if they're smaller or medium type features, we'll try to weave those things into the roadmap. It's a nice way to get quick wins for customers and make them feel like their voice is heard, without actually bending and changing the bigger roadmap that most of the team is working on.

I think customers value it, but at the same time it's allowed us to stay very focused. I think focus is probably the most important thing as a startup. It's less around what are you building, it's actually more around what are you not building.

As we started Mosaic, we saw other folks across the business at Palantir, folks in legal, folks in HR, folks in sales, folks in marketing and all the other departments, and they'd been blessed with these amazing technologies. These tools made them better at their job and made their work faster and easier. On the finance side, for the most part, over the last 40 years things haven't changed. You're still doing your work in spreadsheets, in Google Sheets and Excel, it's rows and columns, and the technology hasn't really advanced.

So we felt like there was an opportunity to really push forward and bring this technology to the finance persona, a persona that has been needing innovative technology for years now. It's something that we're passionate about, and I think if we can play a part and make the role of the CFO a little bit easier, I'd be proud of what we're building.