Horizon & the Opportunities of Data

Horizon & the Opportunities of Data

It's hard to call the data transformation over the last fifteen years within companies of all shapes and sizes anything but meteoric. Data Scientists and Data Engineers have gone from job titles most had never heard of to one of the most in-demand jobs in the market because companies have recognized the importance data can play in improving the bottom line for their businesses. In fact, in 2017, the Economist ran a cover titled "The World's Most Valuable Resource" in which they described "Data are to this century what oil was to the last one: a driver of growth and change." In 2020, the Economist went even further by rebuking their previous position by stating that oil isn't a sufficient analogy for data. Instead, they suggest that it should in fact be likened to sunlight because "it will be everywhere and underlie everything" and that harnessing its potential for businesses will require having the necessary infrastructure in place to collect, transform and ultimately deliver it to where it can be best utilized.

Not surprisingly then, technology companies have invested in data at extremely high rates. However, while data has become ubiquitous to the point where it might seem easy, the supermajority of companies utilizing data have done so in a surprisingly immature fashion. This has led to a consistently high rate of data initiatives failing to deliver ROI according to multiple studies conducted by Gartner research between 2016 and 2020.

The reasons for these failures are too numerous to fully enumerate here, but the two most prevalent ones are worth discussing. These are a lack of data expertise - particularly at the leadership level within companies but also with cross-functional collaborators that don't know how to operate effectively in a data-driven environment - and an insufficient or underdeveloped data environment - this across the entire data stack, infrastructure and lifecycle as so many tend to adopt overly simplified solutions with surprisingly large fundamental value gaps. Without these two key ingredients, the likelihood of data being successfully operationalized within an organization is low. And despite there being a number of highly-successful data-driven companies to serve as case studies, the majority of companies ignore those learnings because the truth is that data may be easy, but good data is hard and the investment can be daunting. Like the sunshine analogy mentioned above, data is everywhere these days, and so it can be easy to conflate its presence with the effective harnessing of it for value creation in a business.

HorThe Camber team has been involved in numerous companies over the last decade that have successfully operationalized data to improve the execution and ultimately the outcomes of those companies. We have seen firsthand just how powerful data can be, when done well, for the accelerated growth and improved retention of B2B technology/SaaS companies. We want to bring that competitive advantage to the companies in our portfolio. To that end, Camber is making an ongoing investment into building out and maintaining a data platform for our portfolio companies, called Horizon. Many growing B2B technology companies with >$20MM ARR are already starting to implement these kinds of platforms themselves. In doing so they see accelerated growth and greater likelihood of achieving successful outcomes from the insights they are able to derive from their data. Smaller companies are often unable to compete and can suffer lost ground against larger competition as a result. With Horizon, Camber is able to enable data-driven, cross-functional execution at smaller companies in our portfolio, ultimately helping them grow faster and more predictably in ways they would not be able to by themselves until they were significantly larger to resource the efforts themselves.

Horizon is, however, just the beginning of the data journey for companies in Camber's portfolio. It serves as the foundational platform on which to build data-driven organizations. In our collaboration with our companies, we also bring our learnings on how to operationalize data effectively to realize its potential. We work closely with leaders in our companies to ensure that data is driving decision making and execution. When this is successful, the data is not just reporting the news, it's helping the company make it. Too many companies conflate data with reporting. You don't drive your car with a historical report of your speeds on previous trips extrapolated out into a forecast for your next trip, you use the real-time speedometer readout. And yet, this is exactly how most data is operationalized inside a company. With the Horizon platform and the data resources and expertise that Camber brings to its collaboration, we help our portfolio companies go beyond the basics and build data-driven organizations that can harness data as a competitive growth advantage without the resourcing and investment limitations that all small companies face.

Posted October 27, 2021

By Scott Ernst