But that didn’t necessarily help you on the tactical side of things. Tad Martin: One, you could go out in one of the Big Five consulting firms and hire them to come in and do an analysis on your business, which would result in a presentation of a strategic roadmap. Jeremy Levy: By 2003, when Tad was the COO of Overstock, there were only a couple choices when it came to solving the company’s big data challenges.
And all of the sudden we started to get to this place where we couldn’t produce the analysis we need to do to be capital efficient. We were doing $250 to $300 million of revenue. And we had 700,000 skews, and we were repricing our products every week, and so you start thinking about, how do you do that? And so if you think back to 2003, we had been public for a year. And this goes back, I mean in the early 2000 when Excel even had the row limitation. Now, it’s probably not going to surprise you that as an earlier stage or a growth stage-type business thinking very much like a startup, our data systems or analytical systems were SQL and Excel. And it’s interesting because we actually got to the place in 2003 where the size and scale of our data outgrew the systems that we were using to analyze it. But at that time, thinking about being able to analyze terabytes worth of data, well it was a huge, it was a huge undertaking. Tad Martin: If I look back at the size and the scale of the data we’re talking about, I mean it seems so small now compared to the way we have now. “…we actually got to the place in 2003 where the size and scale of our data outgrew the systems that we were using to analyze it.” Jeremy Levy: The Internet forced companies to confront massive amounts of data like they had never seen before. Things that we ultimately got to the place where we started to say, what’s the best location for a product in the warehouse so we can optimize pick paths? And so if you look at one of the reasons that Overstock was able to survive that recession of 2000, I think a big part of it was how we were able to make decisions by data, which led us to be very capital efficient. Everything that we did was supported by data in one way or another, whether it was how are we going to acquire customers, what types of products are we going to purchase, and how do we price them to optimize the revenue we’re going to get from them. We were very data-driven in the decisions we made. And I think we were very fortunate at Overstock that we ran our business by those principles. Tad Martin: Half, if not more than half of the Internet world just went away because you had this massive dot-com recession where people realized that there are some basic business fundamentals that you need to run a business. At the time of the dot-com bubble burst, Tad Martin had recently started running ’s merchandising group after it had acquired his startup,. Jeremy Levy: Back in 2000, the world learned that it was not ready for what the Internet had to offer.
Tad told us about how far big data solutions have come within the past twenty years, and what to look for in the future. It uses that data to make predictions about the most effective ways to sell to target companies. It’s a platform for sales professionals and managers that collects data about the sales process from all the companies in its network. We’re talking with Tad Martin, the co-founder and CEO of Collective. Today on the show, we’re exploring how a few data points can be amplified across a network to generate powerful insights. Lauren Feiner: You’re listening to Deciding by Data, the podcast that brings you into the C-Suite to learn how data drives successful businesses.
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