The biggest tech companies have put a lot of time and money into building tools and platforms for their data science teams and those who work with them to glean insights and metrics out of the masses of data that their companies produce: how a company is performing, how a new feature is working, when something is broken, or when something might be selling well (and why) are all things you can figure out if you know how to read the data.<\/p>\n
Now, three alums that worked with data in the world of Big Tech have founded a startup that aims to build a \u201cmetrics store\u201d so that the rest of the enterprise world \u2014 much of which lacks the resources to build tools like this from scratch \u2014 can easily use metrics to figure things out like this, too.<\/p>\n
Transform<\/a>, as the startup is called, is coming out of stealth today, and it\u2019s doing so with an impressive amount of early backing \u2014 a sign not just of investor confidence in these particular founders, but also the recognition that there is a gap in the market for, as the company describes it, a \u201csingle source of truth for business data\u201d that could be usefully filled.<\/p>\n The company is announcing that it has closed, while in stealth, a Series A of $20 million, and an earlier seed round of $4.5 million \u2014 both led by Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The seed, the company said, also had dozens of angel investors, with the list including Elad Gil of Color Genomics, Lenny Rachitsky of Airbnb and Cristina Cordova of Notion.<\/p>\n The big breakthrough that Transform has made is that it\u2019s built a metrics engine that a company can apply to its structured data \u2014 a tool similar to what Big Tech companies have built for their own use, but that hasn\u2019t really been created (at least until now) for others who are not those Big Tech companies to use, too.<\/p>\n Transform can work with vast troves of data from the warehouse, or data that is being tracked in real time, to generate insights and analytics about different actions around a company\u2019s products. Transform can be used and queried by nontechnical people who still have to deal with data, Handel said.<\/p>\n Data is the world\u2019s most valuable (and vulnerable) resource<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n The impetus for building the product came to Nick Handel, James Mayfield and Paul Yang \u2014 respectively Transform\u2019s CEO, COO and software engineer \u2014 when they all worked together at Airbnb (previously Mayfield and Yang were also at Facebook together) in a mix of roles that included product management and engineering.<\/p>\n There, they could see firsthand both the promise that data held for helping make decisions around a product, or for measuring how something is used, or to plan future features, but also the demands of harnessing it to work, and getting everyone on the same page to do so.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a growing trend among tech companies to test every single feature, every single iteration of whatever. And so as a part of that, we built this tool [at Airbnb] that basically allowed you to define the various metrics that you wanted to track to understand your experiment,\u201d Handel recalled in an interview. \u201cBut you also want to understand so many other things like, how many people are searching for listings in certain areas? How many people are instantly booking those listings? Are they contacting customer service, are they having trust and safety issues?\u201d The tool Airbnb built was Minerva<\/a>, optimised specifically for the kinds of questions Airbnb might typically have for its own data.<\/p>\n \u201cBy locking down all of the definitions for the metrics, you could basically have a data engineering team, a centralized data infrastructure team, do all the calculation for these metrics, and then serve those to the data scientists to then go in and do kind of deeper, more interesting work, because they weren\u2019t bogged down in calculating those metrics over and over,\u201d he continued. This platform evolved within Airbnb. \u201cWe were really inspired by some of the early work that we saw happen on this tool.\u201d<\/p>\n The issue is that not every company is built to, well, build tools like these tailored to whatever their own business interests might be.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a handful of companies who do similar things in the metrics space,\u201d Mayfield said, \u201creally top flight companies like LinkedIn, Airbnb and Uber. They have really started to invest in metrics. But it\u2019s only those companies that can devote teams of eight or 10, engineers, designers who can build those things in house. And I think that was probably, you know, a big part of the impetus for wanting to start this company was to say, not every organization is going to be able to devote eight or 10 engineers to building this metrics tool.\u201d<\/p>\n And the other issue is that metrics have become an increasingly important \u2014 maybe the most important \u2014 lever for decision making in the world of product design and wider business strategy for a tech (and maybe by default, any) company.<\/p>\n We have moved away from \u201cmove fast and break things.\u201d Instead, we now embrace \u2014 as Mayfield put it \u2014 \u201cIf you can\u2019t measure it, you can\u2019t move it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n