Insights from Gabriel Hubert, co-founder and CEO at Dust.
With a background in engineering, Gabriel Hubert co-founded Dust – a software platform that unifies siloed internal data streams at organisations to create tailored AI assistants to enhance team productivity.
Gabriel talked to 3THINKRS about how company success comes down to ‘making something that people really want’, and a relentless commitment to changing the environment or market that you’re serving. With that, he says, you’ll have the energy to keep going, another day, week, or month.
Can you tell us about yourself and Dust?
I started a company shortly after university with Stan Polu, which was eventually acquired by Stripe in 2015. In 2023, I reunited with Stan to start Dust. I think our experiences in between our first company and Dust illuminated how information chaos was rampant in fast-growing environments. It was the knowledge silos that existed between teams and functions that were breaking down collaboration and preventing an understanding of what was going on from one team to another.
We saw the opportunity to help organisations reformulate that information with software. It has this uncanny ability to extract structured information from unstructured data flows, and regenerate translated versions of that data in a context or language.
Dust provides companies with a layer of intelligence that sits above the different software platforms that people are typing into all day. We extract the useful information from those data sources and turn them into workflow assistance to help teams operate more effectively without having to find or generate new information.
We’re excited about being a very horizontal solution that can work across all teams within a company. The upside for teams comes from the ability to work more closely together, despite not having the same software or skill sets, since the software helps bridge those gaps.
You started a data analytics company that was acquired by Stripe in 2015. What’s the secret to launching a business and positioning it for acquisition?
It’s about striking the right balance between staying focused on your mission and listening to the signals within the market. Being excessive on either is probably not a good thing.
How do you drive growth and build an effective brand as a CEO?
It’s a simple statement but it is very important: make something that people really want. If you can pinpoint what people want or need, then you can build something that solves a real problem. This makes building an effective brand easy.
As a co-founder, I think the top lesson is to think hard about the mission of the company that you’re starting, and how excited you are about spending the next ten years on that mission. Driving growth is only ever as effective as your commitment to changing the environment or market that you’re serving. If that is rock solid then, come hell or high water, you will always have the energy in the tank for you to carry out another day, week, and month. I think that’s something too few people spend enough time thinking about.
It really makes the difference when it comes to growing your company. It’s always those that stick around the longest that reap the benefits of that hard work.
You had a presence at VivaTech. What do you hope to get out of events like this?
I guess you can say it’s a strategy to drive awareness. Gen AI is a hot topic and so people are eager to learn from the teams that are using it. Our customers are inviting us on panels to discuss how great it is that Dust is helping them be at the forefront of AI. It’s just an opportunity to share our point of view with different companies, and put a focus on the product and the actual experiences of our customers. It’s what’s going to give people the purpose to adopt this new technology.
We’ve seen you land coverage in Sifted. How does PR play a central role in your marketing?
Our main marketing aim is to explain why Dust has been transformative. I think customer testimonials are always the most powerful way of showcasing this. We’ve had customers tell us that the ability to explore, iterate, and then deploy assistants in their own customised way has led them to discover use cases they had not even anticipated. Sharing these experiences from our customers helps drive growth. We rely heavily on the excitement of our users to pass the word on, so gathering their feedback and then building on this in our communication through our websites, PR, and social media outlets is rewarding.
How do you balance paid, earned, and owned communications when promoting a new technology?
I wouldn’t say we do a ton of outbound marketing yet, because it’s still early days. It’s much easier to have qualified inbound requests from customers that have heard about you rather than initiating paid campaigns.
With a product that’s still exploratory and quite modern, it pays to be slightly discreet in the early days. It means the people who really know what they’re looking for can find you. And you can have a pretty open and transparent conversation about the value they’re trying to get out of the product.
Is there a particular use case that comes to mind where Dust’s technology has helped marketing teams?
There is a wide variety of use cases – from engineering to HR and marketing. The software is transformative because the assistant helps non-technical people write data analysis queries. For example, when it comes to marketing – Dust is able to directly send an update when the code base of a particular product has been changed. Previously, marketing would have had to ask the company’s engineer to confirm what the actual change does, whereas instead the software reads the code and starts writing, for instance, an e-mail campaign about that feature update. That update can then be changed for a specific customer segment.
Share
