7 ms·

I started a company with the same premise 9 years ago, during the prime "big data" hype cycle. We burned through a similar amount of investor money only to real

I started a company with the same premise 9 years ago, during the prime "big data" hype cycle. We burned through a similar amount of investor money only to realize that there was not a market opportunity to capture. That is, many people thought it was cool - we even did co-sponsored data contests with The Economist - but at the end of the day, we couldn't find anyone with an urgent problem that they were willing to pay to solve. I wish these folks luck! Perhaps things have changed; we were part of a flock of 5 or 10 similar projects and I'm pretty sure the only one still around today is Kaggle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4

ritchiea 7y ago
Yea this idea has been tried and never found a market at least a dozen times over. It's not impossible for the market or execution to change (e.g. Dropbox) but given the recent software is eating the world boom, it's hard to imagine that the market has changed dramatically so recently or their execution is going to be so much better than other teams who have tried and failed.
reggieband 7y ago
Sometimes an idea has a time. It may seem obvious now but it isn't like Instagram and Snapchat were the first image sharing applications developed. Slack was nowhere near the first chat app. I happened to have a long discussion on the topic of data businesses last night with a friend. We brainstormed datasets that would be a combination of hard/expensive to obtain while also having resell ability to thousands of customers who would be willing to pay a high value for them. I don't want to get involved in datasets that are easy to obtain (too many competitors, no bar to entry) or datasets specific to a particular company (too much dependence on a small set of customers, cost of acquiring new customers also includes cost of acquiring data, no economy of scale). It's easy to start with the tech problem: how to collect, clean and analyze data. But reasoning backwards from the business side is much more difficult. Expensive data I can sell once feels easy. Cheap data I can sell frequently feels like a race to the bottom. Expensive data I can re-sell 1000s of times to a niche audience feels like a perfect middle ground ... I just can't think of any examples.
- AznHisoka 7y ago
  What makes a dataset hard/expensive to obtain?
  - jb775 7y ago
    One aspect I know of is internal private-business analytics. For example: - How many truckloads of widgets did the widget company ship out of Warehouse A compared to Warehouse B in 2019 vs 2018. - What is the purchase ratio of titanium to steel for Company X over the past 5 years? This type of data is valuable to seek out emerging trends, risk minimization, stock analysis, etc. Very hard to find legitimate data on your own.
  - reggieband 7y ago
    One example is that it could require a significant amount of human legwork - e.g. Google street view. Another example is it might require significant dev effort to clean and combine several raw data sets into a refined output data set.
  - ska 7y ago
    A really good example of this is labeled medical imaging data. Some key contributing factors: multiple stakeholders & consent/approval issues, legal & technical constraints on access, depending on the application labeling may only be possible using very expensive experts. Lot's of human interaction.
    - reggieband 7y ago
      I agree it is expensive to gather but is it something that can be sold at high cost to 1000s of customers? It seems the market for purchasers of that data might be limited to a small number of companies, probably hoping to build ML models.
      - ska 7y ago
        The question I responded to was what made it hard and/or expensive to obtain, which I think I answered. Commercial viability of doing so for profit is a different issue, but I see that's the other part of your original comment. It's not an obvious answer, partially because there are a lot of different scenarios within that blanket "medical imaging", and what the putative customer might want to do with it.
0x00000000 7y ago
I can almost guarantee you that they are building this to address some specific NSA problem and their entire business strategy hinges on getting a massive DoD contract
- peteforde 7y ago
  Let's at least pretend to give them the benefit of doubt.
samstave 7y ago
Gosh I share this lament, and hope... I have started and failed at several endeavors that were too early for the market, investors, hype... And when recognized as good ideas, I was crushed by those with more resources to execute than I... I feel a bit numb over my career arc at this point.

ritchiea 7y ago

Yea this idea has been tried and never found a market at least a dozen times over. It's not impossible for the market or execution to change (e.g. Dropbox) but given the recent software is eating the world boom, it's hard to imagine that the market has changed dramatically so recently or their execution is going to be so much better than other teams who have tried and failed.

reggieband 7y ago

Sometimes an idea has a time. It may seem obvious now but it isn't like Instagram and Snapchat were the first image sharing applications developed. Slack was nowhere near the first chat app. I happened to have a long discussion on the topic of data businesses last night with a friend. We brainstormed datasets that would be a combination of hard/expensive to obtain while also having resell ability to thousands of customers who would be willing to pay a high value for them. I don't want to get involved in datasets that are easy to obtain (too many competitors, no bar to entry) or datasets specific to a particular company (too much dependence on a small set of customers, cost of acquiring new customers also includes cost of acquiring data, no economy of scale). It's easy to start with the tech problem: how to collect, clean and analyze data. But reasoning backwards from the business side is much more difficult. Expensive data I can sell once feels easy. Cheap data I can sell frequently feels like a race to the bottom. Expensive data I can re-sell 1000s of times to a niche audience feels like a perfect middle ground ... I just can't think of any examples.

AznHisoka 7y ago
What makes a dataset hard/expensive to obtain?
- jb775 7y ago
  One aspect I know of is internal private-business analytics. For example: - How many truckloads of widgets did the widget company ship out of Warehouse A compared to Warehouse B in 2019 vs 2018. - What is the purchase ratio of titanium to steel for Company X over the past 5 years? This type of data is valuable to seek out emerging trends, risk minimization, stock analysis, etc. Very hard to find legitimate data on your own.
- reggieband 7y ago
  One example is that it could require a significant amount of human legwork - e.g. Google street view. Another example is it might require significant dev effort to clean and combine several raw data sets into a refined output data set.
- ska 7y ago
  A really good example of this is labeled medical imaging data. Some key contributing factors: multiple stakeholders & consent/approval issues, legal & technical constraints on access, depending on the application labeling may only be possible using very expensive experts. Lot's of human interaction.
  - reggieband 7y ago
    I agree it is expensive to gather but is it something that can be sold at high cost to 1000s of customers? It seems the market for purchasers of that data might be limited to a small number of companies, probably hoping to build ML models.
    - ska 7y ago
      The question I responded to was what made it hard and/or expensive to obtain, which I think I answered. Commercial viability of doing so for profit is a different issue, but I see that's the other part of your original comment. It's not an obvious answer, partially because there are a lot of different scenarios within that blanket "medical imaging", and what the putative customer might want to do with it.

0x00000000 7y ago

I can almost guarantee you that they are building this to address some specific NSA problem and their entire business strategy hinges on getting a massive DoD contract

peteforde 7y ago
Let's at least pretend to give them the benefit of doubt.

samstave 7y ago

Gosh I share this lament, and hope... I have started and failed at several endeavors that were too early for the market, investors, hype... And when recognized as good ideas, I was crushed by those with more resources to execute than I... I feel a bit numb over my career arc at this point.