81 START-UP ALLEY Pickaxe
over several days, but of a specific genre? Our system looks at these details to evaluate critical business patterns that become actionable information for that business.” Equally, it’s important for subscription- based services to assess the cost of acquisition, and Pickaxe can demonstrate this by offering its customers a more holistic view of marketing spend. Dern says, “We’re a MarTech system, which is the blending of technology and marketing. Instead of just telling our customers, for example, how much their spend was on Facebook and what the cost per views were, we can tell them this and more. We can tell our customers what their users’ behaviour was like over a certain period of time and we can put these users into a particular cohort of personas – and from this, our customers can build look-a-likes as a way to find additional users and optimise their marketing strategy.” Linking back to Dern’s initial frustrations with complicated data analysis systems, Pickaxe is extremely user friendly: “We help our customers get it up and running, we help them get all of their data into the system, which is easy because we’ve got a library of data connectors that can pull data from hundreds of different sources.” He adds, “We then work with our customers to create useful and attractive dashboards – part of our goal is that we want our dashboards to look and feel like the quarterly reports large organisations put out. We want beautiful dashboards that read like infographics!” When the data is brought into the system, Pickaxe simplifies it into a universal schema so it is easy to understand. You don’t need to know archaic field names or database structures, or anything about the underlining data at all. “If you want to find out how many views your video got on Twitter, for example, you can just ask the system that – instead of knowing that Twitter offers seven different field names for this particular data, which it actually does,” adds Dern. He concludes, “Our goal is for it to feel a bit like magic. Unlike other dashboards, where you’re just looking at graphs and charts, we’re pointing out things to you – like, hey, there’s a spike here, but you don’t need to worry about it. We’re constantly providing pivots around every single data point so our customers always understand the context of what they’re looking at, and how to understand it.”
PICKAXE
COUNTRY: US STARTED: 2016
Pickaxe is a data analysis system that provides businesses with the power of hundreds of data scientists in one box. It analyses every single piece of data – from ropes to cisco analysis to time series analysis. All the basic kinds of work that data scientists would normally be doing, Pickaxe automates. “We do this to free up resource, because so much time gets wasted crunching numbers into spreadsheets just to create daily dashboards,” explains CEO and co-founder Joshua Dern. This vision for time efficacy comes from Dern’s own personal experience with data in the media and entertainment industry. “I ran digital at Atlantic Records and was senior vice president at Viacom, and the biggest issue we had was getting access to good data. We spent most of our lives in Excel, which is not the most productive place to be. When I left corporate life to do a start-up based on computer vision, I found myself running into a similar problem: I couldn’t get access to the data and I couldn’t get a good sense of how to interpret it. All other tools that were out there at the time were just out of reach, even to large businesses, because they were either too costly or too complicated.”
Dern took this as an opportunity to solve the problem for himself, with the belief that it might also solve problems for other people. He co-founded Pickaxe in 2016, and its current customers include NBCU, NBC Sports, Fox Networks, BBC Britbox, First Look Media and more. As well as getting on top of statistical data by automating it, Pickaxe uses AI to interpret the data. Dern explains, “Our system can tell you not just what is happening, but why it is happening. It can predict how well a company’s content is performing on its own sites and through social channels. It can even do things like predict which customers are likely to convert from a free trial to paying customer, as well as which customers are likely to churn.” Pickaxe can also look at behavioural data and predict at an aggregate level which types of users – for example, paying or free – prefer certain things. “If you’re a subscription-based service and you’re acquiring customers, you need to figure out what behaviours indicate the likelihood of a customer converting to paid. Are they the kind of people that watch five things in one day regardless of genre, or are they the kind of people that watch two things
OUR SYSTEM CAN TELL YOU NOT JUST WHAT IS HAPPENING, BUTWHY IT IS HAPPENING
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