Data Collective | New Dawn for Big Data Entrepreneurs
A tweet by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer on August 9th caused a stir in the tech scenes. A new venture fund had been launched, not because it was her husband’s but it was a totally unique and different fund and a timely move.
The Thursday launch of Data Collective demonstrates the increasing uptake of Big Data and signals a new door for entrepreneurs building Big Data companies.
She tweeted;
So proud of my husband @zackbogue for the launch of his new fund, DataCollective (@dcvc)
Founded Two Years Ago
Data Collective based in San Francisco was launched by Zachary Bogue, Matt Ocko, Michael Driscoll and Bradford Cross. The firm is not new; the fund has been around for two years with investments in more than 45 firms as listed here.
According to Silicon Beat, Data Collective has been in “stealth” mode but as its is raising a new venture fund, its investors wanted them to go public.
Bogue told Silicon Beat;”There is great opportunity, we feel like we’re at the front edge of a tectonic shift that will be caused by Big Data.”
Matt Ocko also revealed to Silicon Beat that they have been getting a lot more press inquiries due to the number of deals they were doing. Bogue and Ocko work full-time as partners at Data Collective, while Michael Driscoll and Bradford Cross work full-time in their firms but also consult, help find deals and evaluate technologies in return of a stake in the fund.
Big Data Shift
A 2011 McKinsey Global report says Big Data is the next frontier for innovation,competition and productivity, this could be reason the seasoned investors and executives believe these are big data days.
They say, “We believe another even larger scale disruption is underway and we are poised to help our entrepreneurs take advantage of it”. They base on the shift from kilobits and kilobytes to megabits and megabytes in the 1980s and another shift from megabytes to gigabits and gigabytes in the 1990s which they say created hundreds of billions of dollars of value. The founders say in over 20 years they have helped build more than $15 billion of outcomes for entrepreneurs and investors in more than 35 exits.
The founders say Big Data companies capture, store, secure, transmit, transform, and analyze data for economic advantage, either with huge volumes (terabytes to exabytes), or at tremendous speed (microseconds to seconds), or both. The Big Data companies solve hard infrastructure problems, taking leadership in vertical B2B markets, or as truly data-driven consumer products.
Strong Network, Operational Experience and Technical Background
Not worried about huge volumes of data in terabytes or exabytes the founders say they have operational experience and discipline to solve data problems at novel scale, speed, or level of insight, and ideally all three. On their website the founders say, “Our strong network, operational experience and technical background delivers unique value to entrepreneurs.” Data Collective founders say they still read code and understand chip architecture and how to build racks. They say they have run Hadoop jobs and built VM farms. The founders profiles are laid down in detail here.
35+ Equity Partners on board
The founders are not alone, they have a strong network of over 35 Equity Partners with experienced technical founders and executives, engineers, data scientists, and leading researchers with significant current or previous tenures at big firms Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Intel, Oracle, Amazon, Cisco, PayPal, VMware, NetApp, Zynga, Salesforce, Stanford University and UC Berkeley.
Doors open
The good news is Data Collective fund is now open to the public.
