Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2010 that “all the data created in human history is now generated in two days.” And we’ve come a long way since 2010; we now produce that volume in just a few hours. The cloud – where most of that data is stored – is a $730 billion industry employing almost four million people.
How do we organize it all? More than 90% of executives aspire to lead “data-driven” companies yet fewer than half say they are succeeding, according to the Harvard Business Review. Surveillance, security, privacy, and even identity are the focus of deepening anxiety and harsh debate over data. As we know in this year of elections at home and around the world, "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.”
Enter data.world, formally founded and launched on July 11, 2016 (7-Eleven’s Slurpee Day!) to provide that “comprehensive view” of all data. All too often, we examine and understand data in isolated, siloed, and such limited fashion, making the most important resource of the 21st century a form of dead capital. Having your data assets scattered, disorganized, and incompatible isn’t even like having your money hidden under a mattress. It’s more like cash left in a basement, where the elements and the fauna nibble it away.
data.world’s origins
Let’s roll back the clock eight years, a blink of an eye in historical time, but an eternity in technology. When we unveiled our plans to tame the reactive, chaotic, and fragmented — but exponentially growing — realm of data, the challenges were fresher, this Cambrian Explosion of data less mature, and data governance was less evolved.
I was more than two years into semi-retirement after taking my previous company, Bazaarvoice, to an IPO and unicorn exit in 2013 (today, Bazaarvoice is much bigger and under the very able leadership of my good friend Keith Nealon.) The creation of Bazaarvoice followed that of Coremetrics, my first large company and australia whatsapp number data a pioneer in the SaaS business and technology model. Founded in 1999 as I was wrapping up my MBA at the Wharton School, Coremetrics was an analytics window into the interacting elements of early ecommerce companies, including Walmart, The Home Depot, Expedia, and hundreds of others. It’s now called IBM Digital Analytics, for the iconic company that ultimately acquired it.
Pondering a return to the arena of technology entrepreneurship, I reached out to two former colleagues. One was Matt Laessig, the “team builder” (and American Ninja Warrior) with whom I was also classmates at the Wharton School. The other was Jon Loyens, the “architect philosopher”, who brought deep insight into the nature of knowledge. Soon we were joined by Bryon Jacob, the “technology savant.” The three were then working for Homeway.com (now Vrbo). I had not worked with Bryon before, but we know one another from Austin’s startup incubator, the Capital Factory, where we were both mentors, and Bryon had intersected with many of my past co-workers who had worked with him at Trilogy, including Jon. Jon and Matt were essential leaders at Bazaarvoice, so they were completely proven in my mind. Together, we formed the original executive team of data.world, and all four of us are still here today.
Integrating data from disparate sources was top of mind, but our ambitions were larger. Then as now, we oriented around Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the internet as a universe of linked datasets beyond merely a massive collection of linked documents. We have, in fact, just this year brought that vision closer with our latest product, our AI Context Engine, to make structured data accessible to Large Language Models like OpenAI’s GPTs, Meta’s Llama, and others for the first time.