Every now and then we like to highlight a new IAB New Zealand Member we think our community will find interesting. Today we meet Thomas Sutton-Walsh, Enterprise Account Executive at Fivetran.
Please give us some historical background about Fivetran as a company.
Founded in 2012 by childhood friends George Fraser (a neurobiologist) and Taylor Brown (a designer), Fivetran emerged from an unlikely blend of scientific rigor and creative problem-solving. While the duo initially entered Y Combinator* with an analytics idea, they quickly pivoted to solve a more fundamental "unglamorous" problem: the manual, error-prone struggle of moving data.
By 2015, the company shifted its focus entirely to zero-maintenance data pipelines. This mission was forged through a hands-on obsession with uptime - at one point, Fraser manually monitored log files until midnight to ensure the 99.9% reliability that remains their gold standard.
Fivetran’s growth mirrored the rise of cloud warehouses like Snowflake and Databricks. Key milestones include:
Defining the Industry: Taylor Brown is credited with coining the term "Modern Data Stack," positioning Fivetran as the essential "power socket" for enterprise data.
Unicorn Status: The company hit a $5.6 billion valuation in 2021 following a $565 million Series D.
Strategic Expansion: The 2021 acquisition of HVR allowed Fivetran to tackle complex enterprise environments like SAP and Oracle.
Today, Fivetran is a global leader headquartered in Oakland, providing automated data integration for thousands of companies worldwide with a growing presence across Australia and New Zealand.
Do you have a hero product or service that you're most proud of?
If Fivetran were to claim a "hero product," it wouldn't be a single flashy feature, but rather our High-Volume Agent (HVA) connectors, specifically our HVR technology. While we are famous for our "plug-and-play" SaaS connectors (like Facebook Ads or Salesforce), the HVA architecture is where the real engineering magic happens. It’s the product that allows us to move massive amounts of data from complex, legacy enterprise databases (like SAP or Oracle) into the cloud with near-zero impact on the source system.
The "Invisible" Engineering is why this is our hero product. It uses Log-Based Change Data Capture (CDC) so instead of querying a database and slowing it down, it reads the database’s internal "transaction logs" to see what changed. It’s like reading the kitchen’s order tickets instead of walking into the kitchen and asking the chef what they just cooked. It handles terabytes of data daily for some of the world's largest companies, ensuring that their data is synced in near real-time. In the world of data integration, "no news is good news." Our hero product is the one that stays quiet, doesn't break, and ensures that when a Kiwi business leader opens their dashboard at 8am, the data is 100% accurate.
Tell us a bit about your company's mission and vision:
Fivetran’s mission and vision are centered on the idea that data should be a utility, something that is always there, always working, and requires no manual effort to access. Our mission is to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity. This is the core "North Star" for Fivetran. Just as you don't think about the power grid when you flip a light switch, Fivetran believes data engineers shouldn't have to think about the "plumbing" of moving data. The goal is to eliminate the manual work of building and maintaining pipelines so that teams can focus on what actually creates value: insights.
The Vision Fivetran envisions a world where every organisation, from small Kiwi startups to global enterprises, is powered by an "always-on" foundation of accurate data.
While the early vision focused purely on centralised analytics, the 2026 vision has expanded into three key areas:
Data Democracy: Empowering "future Thomas Edisons" innovators who may not be technical experts, to use data to solve world-changing problems, from medical breakthroughs to social good.
The Foundation for AI: Fivetran sees itself as the bedrock for the AI era. Their vision is that AI agents and large language models (LLMs) are only as good as the data they consume. By providing "governed, reliable, and real-time" data movement, they are essentially building the nervous system for modern AI.
Zero-Maintenance Infrastructure: A future where the "Modern Data Stack" is entirely automated. In this vision, data flows seamlessly from any source (like a marketing platform or a legacy database) to any destination (like a warehouse or an AI model) without a single line of code being written by the user.
To achieve this, the company lives by three simple, grounded values: 1 Team, 1 Dream: Prioritising collective success over individual ego. Get Stuck In: A bias toward action and solving hard technical problems. Do the Right Thing: An emphasis on integrity, especially regarding data privacy and security.
If you could invite three people, dead or alive, to dinner who would they be?
This is really is a hard one but I would invite my late Grandfather Norm - I miss him everyday plus he would be such good entertainment, Michael Jordan - childhood hero as a huge basketball fan, and Tiger woods as I am a golf fanatic.
What's the best piece of advice you've ever received, or like to share with others?
There are two that come to mind.
I love Rocky Balboa quote about getting back up which is, "It ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!". This iconic line highlights that true success comes from resilience and persistence, not just strength.
'Do what you say you will do', my first ever sales mentor lived by this and I also follow it to this day and into the future. This advice is around setting realistic expectations and delivering on those expectations. This builds the foundation of a strong high-trust relationship.
To find out more about Fivetran and what their team is up to check out their website here
*Y Combinator is a prestigious American startup accelerator based in Silicon Valley. Twice a year it selects a small batch of early-stage startups, invests a small amount of cash in exchange for equity, and puts the founders through an intensive three-month programme culminating in a Demo Day where they pitch to hundreds of investors.