Colin Zima

Colin Zima is co-founder and chief executive of Omni, a business intelligence platform where people ask questions of their company’s data and get answers backed by a shared semantic layer. Before Omni he spent years at Looker, the analytics company Google bought for $2.6 billion, where he was chief analytics officer and vice president of product.

First Job at UBS

His first job out of school was as a quant at UBS, building complex spreadsheets. His boss there taught him that how the work appears matters as much as getting the analysis right. “It’s the only soundbite piece of advice that I ever got that I think about all the time,” he said on First Round’s In Depth podcast.

Joining Looker from Hotel Tonight

He and Jamie Davidson later worked at Hotel Tonight, which became Looker’s fourth customer. The two were heavy data users and ended up promoting the product to other companies while still Hotel Tonight employees, before Zima joined Looker as an early employee. There he built its hands-on customer support team, which First Round describes as a cornerstone of Looker’s advantage.

Reuniting to Build Omni

Zima, Davidson and Chris Merrick met in college. Davidson had worked with Zima at Looker and Google, and Merrick had worked at Stitch and Talend. In 2022 they reunited to start Omni, according to the company. They had watched data teams choose between getting answers quickly and spending hours fixing mismatched numbers, or adding controls that slowed everyone down. Zima has said Davidson is the one who got him out to the West Coast, and that Omni is their sixth job together.