Others brought the original kernel of technical ideas to the brainstorm: the prototype versions of our foundational technologies, the data catalog and the knowledge graph. These have become, in their much evolved states, the nervous systems and brains of the enterprises we serve today.
Still others brought a formidable set of soft and hard skills to help us build the team that would make this all happen. I brought my experience from earlier companies and my drive as an entrepreneur to be the choreographer that every CEO must be.
Above all, we all brought the belief and commitment to organize ourselves as a proud and public benefit corporation – a B Corp in today’s parlance (and we are proudly Certified too) – whereby we codified in our bylaws our responsibility to employees, community, and the environment along with the equally important obligations to returns on shareholder investment.
After one of the first media interviews back in 2016, technology journalist John Battelle, the founding editor of the Industry Standard and co-founding editor of Wired, framed it this way shortly after our launch:
“... data.world sets out to solve a huge problem — one most of us haven’t considered very deeply. The world is awash in data, but nearly all of it is confined by policy, storage constraints, or lack of discoverability,” Battelle wrote of us in our infancy. “In short, data.world makes data discoverable, interoperable, and social. And that could mean an explosion of data-driven insights is at hand.”
Indeed, the mission we set out for ourselves australia whatsapp number data endures today: “To build the world's most abundant collaborative and meaningful data asset."
With more than 2.8 million members of our community, thousands of users on our cloud-native, SaaS platform, 82 patents and counting, and a host of new tools like the AI Context Engine, we are well on our way.
As technology evolves, we evolve in tandem to create coherence out of chaos as the data and AI age is only beginning. We help enterprises deal with complex, high-dimension data, finding patterns, insights and solutions to make better decisions amid that vast and unpredictable explosion of data and the complexity of artificial intelligence and machine learning. We’ve also been named one of Austin’s best places to work eight years in a row. At the top of this article, I referenced the work of Polybius: a Greek historian who lived more than two millennia ago. That may seem an odd way to explain the founding of our company, but the wisdom of Polybius captures an essential of data.world.
Polybius was talking about a very different kind of complexity 2,100 years ago. But his insights on viewing and adapting to larger patterns in interconnected events are relevant today.
Today, we are contemporary and cutting edge, but our wisdom and search for truth amid torrents of information is as deep as that of the ancients.