Nick Jordan - Find the Winners

On Episode six of Superpowers, Bill and Chris dive into data markets with an entrepreneur who traversed the competitive landscape of computer science during the Dot-com bubble: Nick Jordan, now the founder and CEO of Narrative, a data marketplace for companies to acquire and monetize raw data sets. Nick took Bill and Chris on his journey from developing software for startups, to holding leadership roles at tech heavyweights like Adobe and Yahoo. Along the way, the hosts identified Nick’s superpower: His intuition. Nick can “identify the winners” in his industry, even when many end up losing. Nick’s superpower has helped him find needles in tech sector haystacks where others aren’t looking. When Adobe refused Nick’s pitch to build a software that aggregated mobile and web data, Nick pitched his idea to the media company Tapad, helping adapt their technology to provide the same service. Nick joined Tapad’s team, working with the company to make powerful software solutions and “run product and strategy to help them build something that was incredibly valuable.” The idea for Narrative came to Nick While working at Tapad. He found that collecting data was extremely inefficient. “We had a team of data scientists and they were constantly coming up to me and saying, ‘we need more data to build better AI,’ and we would go try and find it for them. That process just sucked... It just wasn’t scalable, and it took 6 months to go from them having a request to us getting it for them.” “I said this is a problem that I’m having and I’m sure other people are having it. Someone must have solved this... so I looked around for probably two months… I found nothing.” Six months later, Nick founded Narrative to address that very problem. What started as a small operation has now blossomed into a 40-person company. Nick sat down with Bill and Chris to talk about Narrative’s – and his – growth and transformation: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices