Fireside Chat

Featuring 

Auren Hoffman

CEO & Chief Historian, SafeGraph

Co-hosted by

Michael Seidler, Founder & CEO

Boris Fridman, Managing Director

Madison Alley Global Ventures

October 13, 2021 @ 1 – 2 pm ET

EXECUTIVE HIGHLIGHTS

Introduction  

MadisonAlley.tv virtually hosted an exclusive Fireside Chat featuring Auren Hoffman, CEO & Chief Historian of SafeGraph.

SafeGraph is a geospatial data company focused on making data an open platform for all.

Overview of Auren Hoffman

• CEO & Chief Historian of SafeGraph
• Former CEO and Co-founder of LiveRamp (NYSE: RAMP) — the largest middleware provider in marketing technology.
• Served on the Board of BrightRoll (acquired by Yahoo for $640 million), former Chairman of Stonebrick Group, CEO of BridgePath, and CTO of Kyber Systems

 Snapshot of SafeGraph

• SafeGraph builds and maintains data sets to help accelerate machine learning and AI
• Founded in 2016 by Auren Hoffman and Brent Perez
• Led by Auren Hoffman, CEO & Chief Historian
• Headquartered in San Francisco, CA
• $61 million in funding through four rounds

-Interview-

Entrepreneurial Beginnings

Though Auren founded his first company while in college at UC Berkeley, he learned his most important lesson as a serial entrepreneur in the past 10 years. As a leader, do everything possible to avoid good opportunities so you can spend time and energy pursuing great opportunities. With age and experience, he began using a different rubric to evaluate opportunities and now knows that patience for “great” opportunities pays off.

As a self-described contrarian, this mindset of pursuing the best opportunities has influenced Auren’s strategy in founding and investing in businesses. He prefers to seek companies in smaller, fast-growing markets with less competitors, allowing for better opportunities to move into adjacent markets as the company expands, rather than the low hanging fruit in bigger markets with less room to dominate the market share.

Founding of LiveRamp

At the time of founding Auren’s first significant venture, LiveRamp, the common view was that the number of marketing technology vendors would decrease. Auren’s contrarian perspective led him to believe that this market would grow, not consolidate.

As the number of martech vendors fragmented in the 2000s, LiveRamp was able to focus on middleware, attaining 75% market share by the time it was sold to Acxiom, which it currently still maintains.

LiveRamp’s Strategic Exit

Before LiveRamp’s strategic M&A exit in 2014, the Company raised relatively little funding, hindered by the challenge of explaining the market opportunity and technology to venture capitalists. Given the chance today, Auren believes he could better impart how the industry works and why it’s worth investing in.

In retrospect, Auren believes he should not have sold LiveRamp to Acxiom for $310 million, that LiveRamp would have grown faster as an independent company. At the time, LiveRamp was growing 100% annually with an amazing team supporting its successful growth. Auren believes that the hardest part of starting a company is creating “lightning in a bottle”.  It’s taken five years and a lot of work to build something similar at SafeGraph.

Though he made the decision to sell Acxiom for financial reasons, ensuring security for his wife and children, Auren asserts that he will never sell SafeGraph.

SafeGraph

Auren’s title is CEO of SafeGraph, and also holds the unique title of Chief Historian, signifying that the only data the Company provides are facts. It does not provide analytics or services. Facts are representations of history and are a historical truth.

SafeGraph is building a historical archive of data on places, thrusting him, as CEO, to also fill the esteemed and distinctive role as Chief Historian.

Data as a Service (DaaS)

Beyond his experience at LiveRamp and SafeGraph, Auren is passionate about Data as a Service. While data spans the four categories of people, places, organizations, and products, Auren believes it’s harder to build a data company than a traditional SaaS company, due to the lack of funding interest. The data market is still young and many investors are not inclined to invest in data. When considering unicorn companies, there are thousands of SaaS business, but very few DaaS organizations primarily because of this capital raising challenge.

The regulations around data, specifically data about people, also make building and growing a data business difficult. That said, new emerging technologies that will allow businesses to share data without being able to access any underlying data could change the game. Auren references this capability as the ability to, “have our cake and eat it too.”

The Importance of Connection

Auren believes that over the course of time, the importance of “what you know” has become increasingly more important than “who you know,” stripping credence from the age-old adage, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” While connections are still important, the internet has democratized the field, granting much easier access to connect with people and learn from them, even if from an online video or article and not the individual themselves.

In terms of “what you know”, it’s important to know things well and across “random fields”, creating a joined category that an individual can specialize in. Auren’s most recent venture, his podcast, “The World of DaaS” has been an opportunity to expand his focus on “what you know”.

Q&A

How will data privacy and explicit consent affect the sale of data globally?

– Benjamin Barokas, CEO, Sourcepoint

Auren believes that homomorphic encryption, a technology that will allow the joining of data, in a safe way, protecting any underlying data and simply revealing results, will address the problem of privacy and explicit consent. Auren is most excited for this technology’s role in health data, expounding that this will allow our society to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

What is the best path to a single source of truth or ability to tap into multiple data sets?

– Pearl Collings, CEO, Contently

The real power in data is when you join them together. To attain this power there is a need for a join key. The join key (i.e., the standard for interpreting the data) doesn’t have to be the best, but it’s something that everyone within a particular industry needs to agree upon.

How is SafeGraph impacted by Apple’s new privacy standards for mobile app developers?

– Matt Koppel, Executive Director, McKinney

The only product that SafeGraph offers that might be influenced by these standards is Patterns—a tool that aggregates data to inform users when a particular place is busy—SafeGraph’s focus on places rather than people absolves them from any impact Apple’s new policy may have.

If a Company is getting data from iOS or Android, that business is at the whim of these behemoths who frequently change their mind, creating a huge swing for a smaller company. The best way to safeguard one’s business from these changes is to organize the business in an agile manner.

You’ve been actively investing—what are areas of interest to you and opportunities that you see? – Michael Seidler, CEO + Founder, Madison Alley

Auren prefers to invest in businesses that have a similar makeup to those that he starts—at least 50% market share in their niche. SaaS companies usually don’t qualify. Auren is passionate about discovering businesses that can own their niche.