Matt Turck

Our business lives are full of optimization problems – scheduling, time management, resource planning, pricing, routing, risk management, network optimization, financial engineering, etc. Simply defined, optimization is the science of making the best decision possible, given a set of constraints.

Historically, optimization has been the province of PhDs with deep backgrounds in mathematics, using a generation of software that was developed for academia and large defense contractors.

Enter Nextmv (proncounded “Next Move”), a company in which I’m a proud investor. Nextmv is reinventing the space for the cloud era, making optimization and simulation technologies available to every developer.

It was great to welcome Nextmv’s CEO, Carolyn Mooney, at our most recent Data Driven NYC to talk abotu the space and the company.

We covered:

• What is decision intelligence, and how does it differ from business intelligence and data science?
• What is the overlap with the area known as “operations research”?
• How decision intelligence is broadly horizontal area
• How Nextmv is democratizing decision intelligence with its cloud product
• Bonus: Nextmv’s policy of radical transparency on team compensation

Below is the video and full transcript.

The world of data governance is not the most visible part of the data revolution, yet it is of critical importance. As more and more data floats into the enterprise, and its role is ever more mission critical, one needs to be in full control of it – understand where data resides, who can have access to it, which datasets can be trusted or not, etc.

Enter Collibra, a startup that has had a long march towards success, as it was founded in 2008. Collibra has now become an impressive industry leader and raised a $250 million Series G at a post money valuation of $5.25 billion last year.

We had had the chance to host Stan Christiaens, the co-founder and CTO of Collibra at Data Driven NYC in 2017 (video here), and this time we got a chance to chat with the company’s CEO, Felix Van de Maele.

We had a great conversation, starting with a round of definitions that should be interesting to anyone curious to better understand that side of the data world.

Below is the video and full transcript.

The last couple of years have seen a dramatic acceleration in the adoption of graph databases, a category of databases that stores nodes and relationships instead of tables, or documents.  That acceleration has clearly benefited Neo4j, which had a banner year in 2021, surpassing $100M in ARR and closing a $325M series F financing round at over $2B valuation, which it calls “the largest funding round in database history”.

That would make Neo4j an overnight success, except for the fact that Neo4j started in 20007, pioneered the space and literally coined the term “graph database”.

Neo4j’s CEO, Emil Eifrem, had spoken at Data Driven NYC back in 2015 (the same night as the CEO of Snowflake and the CEO of Airtable, a pretty stacked line up considering those three startups combined went on to represent many billions of market cap/valuations).

So it was particularly fun to have Emil back at the event and exciting to hear about the major progress the company has experienced over the last few years. Emil spoke from Sweden at around midnight his time, bringing impressive energy despite the late hour and it was a great conversation.

Below is the video and full transcript.

I’ve been interested in the intersection of AI and crypto for a while (see AI & Blockchain: An introduction), and Numerai is one of the most exciting companies I came across in that world. Numerai is a new kind of crowdsourced quant hedge fund, which provides data for free and enables any data scientist around the planet to contribute models they believe will beat the stock market. Numerai offers its own token, called Numeraire, to incentivize participants.

As it turns out, this model delivers exciting results, and Numerai announced a few months ago that it had outperformed market neutral hedge funds by 29%.

It was a real pleasure welcoming Richard Craib, founder of Numerai, to Data Driven NYC to talk about the very exciting work Numerai has been doing.

Below is the video and full transcript.