Thought Leaders in Big Data: Radhika Subramanian, CEO of Emcien (Part 1)

More commentary on how Big Data’s rise leads to massive automation, productivity growth, and elimination of jobs! Exciting technology trends, scary human society predictions.

Sramana Mitra: Radhika, let’s introduce our audience to yourself. Tell us a little bit about you and how you got to Emcien.

Radhika Subramanian: My name is Radhika Subramanian. I am the CEO of Emcien. Emcien’s product is automated analytics for Big Data. Having said that, let me take a step back and let me tell you about me. I am from India and I’m an engineer. My undergraduate degree was Electronic Engineering. I came to Georgia Tech and did my masters in Industrial Engineering. I ended up starting my first company completely by mistake because I was in the computational group at Georgia Tech. This is way before Big Data became sexy.

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Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So your system recommends where to move the dollars to?

John Wallace: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: How do you sell this solution? What part of your organization is buying and how is the sales cycle? >>>

Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you could be more granular, how do you account for that? What data can you work off of and how do you tie that to how you charge?

John Wallace: I thought you were going in the direction of how I know what they spend. So you mean how do we measure TV?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

John Wallace: We measure all channels simultaneously. The technique that we use comes from the field of medical research. In a study, you can’t infect people on purpose to see the spread of the disease and you can’t withhold life-saving drugs if there’s no discovery. But you still have people trying to understand how this disease affects the population. >>>

Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What were the backgrounds of these other two companies? Were they using a vertical approach?

John Wallace: No, they’re horizontal. I think what they have in common is that they have simplified the problem by collecting data off of Excel. They try to get themselves on the website. It makes the day of living hell more uniform. We’ve taken a different approach to on-board people’s data because for a lot of people that we want to analyze, we can’t pick up the data off of Excel anyway. We might have to on-board data a little deeper. We just said, “Let’s go ahead and be a completely open system.”

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Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about that?

John Wallace: The problem now has a name. It’s not an ideal name but it has a name. It’s called marketing attribution. It’s looking at the effectiveness of marketing spend. The field closest to that would be approaches of this in Statistics in the past 20 years – by week, how much we’ve spent and see if we can sort out changes in our revenue based on changes in spend. We chartered a model like that. They just couldn’t fall in love with it. We asked them why. They said, “It doesn’t take into account which consumers have been exposed.” They had this catalog modeling background where they’re used to looking at households and whether or not to spend money or not. That was a problem we decided to address.

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Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in terms of revenues in the first couple of years?

John Wallace: It probably took us four years to get to a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: How many people were involved?

John Wallace: There were about four people. My original hypothesis was that there would be a lot of short-term contracts and that people need specialty skills. Once they’ve seen it in action, they would try to copy it and do it themselves. That’s not at all what happened. >>>

Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were kind of an applications engineer?

John Wallace: It was a great opportunity.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2003?

John Wallace: Yes. In 2003, I started a firm doing analytic consulting. I thought that I would be more impartial to what software we use to solve a problem and be more focused on the problem than selling a particular license. I think that the growth that we have as a service firm is tied to that era of computing where in order to practice our trade, we needed to follow and work with very large corporations with major investments in warehousing, technology, licenses, and servers. >>>

Bootstrapping a Big Data Company Using Services: DataSong CEO John Wallace (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.

We maintain that one of the best ways to identify complex problems worth solving inside enterprises is by offering services to them, thereby gaining exposure to the domain. Datasong is yet another case in point. Related reading: Bootstrapping Using Services.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning. Where are you from? What kind of a backstory leads up to the entrepreneurial story?

John Wallace: I grew up in the South from a pretty modest background.

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