Why I left Bloomberg to join Siren

Why did I leave the News, Data and Analytics giant Bloomberg LP?

The answer is simple – to join a feisty start-up with a big idea!

The team and the product

In the world of Data, most founders are Consultants or Engineers who take the leap into entrepreneurship. They think like their customers as they used to be the customer. Inevitably you get into the non-stop buy versus build argument – “Why can’t I just build this myself without the hassle and expense of a new vendor”. Vendor and customer share the same DNA.

I wanted my next start-up to be with Data experts who have massive, inherent Intellectual Property. To work with Data contrarians who think differently to the mainstream view of Data.

Giovanni Tummarello PhD and Renaud Delbru PhD founded Siren. They see the world differently. They are the world’s leading academic-based research authorities in Semantic technologies. Based out of Ireland’s DERI institute they worked in partnership with MIT researchers on their core research. They have been working in this area for 20 years. They are backed up by a multi-national Siren engineering team across Ireland, Cambridge UK, Bordeaux France and Italy.

So what is Semantics? Semantics is the core search for meaning in data.

Ask anyone if they would like more “meaning” from their data. There is only one answer – yes!

When I saw the Siren product in action it was the best visualization of real world semantics I had ever seen. Nothing I had seen in the past had better expressed the “meaning” of data to the Domain Expert. Explore the videos on siren.io for yourself.

The challenge

In the current drive for more and more value from Data, every large corporation in the world has invested in many different Big Data technologies e.g. Hadoop, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Spark, Solr, Elasticsearch, Splunk, Data Lakes etc.

These technologies have largely been used to load and store lots of data. Lots of data collection, not a lot of business value delivered to the business seems to be a consensus out there.

The upshot of this is the promise of Big Data has not been met. Nobody has unified these technologies into a solution to deliver on the promise.

The end user, i.e. the Investigator, Data Analyst or Data Scientist, has been left most disappointed of all. Domain Experts are still asking IT to write complex SQL and code even after all this investment.

The opportunity

Siren’s unique approach to Data Intelligence is to provide a unifying layer on-top of all this Big Data infrastructure which combines Search, Semantic Drill Down, Global Joins and Advanced Graphing capabilities.

We are changing the Domain Expert experience from writing dense requirements documents for IT to one where they are in control. Siren provides a fast, intuitive environment built to visually represent some of the most complex data problems in the world.

We are working with Researchers in Life Sciences, Data Analysts investigating Cyber Security threats, Data Scientists working in Law Enforcement looking at trends in human behaviour, and Financial researchers looking for trends to drive investment decisions.

The beauty of Siren is that all these clients are using the exact same product. The other common denominator is they are all dealing with hyper-sensitive data.

We have one common client – the Data Domain Expert.

Making a positive impact

At a macro level, we are helping to solve real world problems for some of the most interesting users of Data in the world.

Siren is helping law enforcement agencies keep their populations safe, pharma companies discover new drugs, IT departments protect their computer systems from cyber attack and helping Financial services firms drive investment operations.

I am privileged to lead a great team as their CEO.

Also published on Medium.