Starting up... Causata

We’ve been motoring away in stealth mode since the end of March this year and I am delighted to announce the launch of Causata!

For years I had been watching large companies struggling to deliver a high-quality and consistent experience for customers across their various channels. During the same time I had seen many solutions proposed and implemented, most of which seriously failed to address the needs of the customers. When I left Omniture in 2008 I had the luxury of taking some time out (and it was every bit as good as I had hoped). During that time I thought how one might approach this problem starting with a completely clean slate. It had to be something that addressed all communications channels with the customer, of which the web channel is only one, but an important one.

I knew that previous experiences in machine learning and real time targeting of web content had provided a unique foundation for understanding how such a solution should be approached. There had been many lessons about how to deliver real time decisions with high accuracy and very low unit cost, how to process large volumes of unstructured data that had low information density, and how to do so with high efficiency and with low latency.

Prior to starting Causata I had some interesting conversations. So much has changed technology-wise that I decided to ask a few of the technologists whom I most respected 'how would you go about building that?' Probably the greatest consistency across the range of answers was that one would approach the problem 'very differently from how you might have done it even just three or four years ago'. That seemed to be the perfect validation that it was the right time to start a new company!

So... I reached out to Bruce Golden at Accel who agreed to help me build out a team, and to create an exciting new product. The long story short is that we're on a path to building a solution that we hope will transform billions of customer relationships.

The announcement that went out today outlines the types of problems we’re tackling. We haven't said a lot about the product publicly yet on purpose. For now we’re focused on developing and working closely with a few lead companies.

I do want to take this opportunity to mention how thrilled I am about the team we've hired. It is one thing to identify a business need, but it takes a highly talented team to turn that idea into class-leading technology. We've been fortunate to attract so many top calibre people and they've done some outstanding work so far. This makes me even more confident about what lies ahead.

Building an ambitious company is not easy. We are excited to be working with Bruce Golden and Sonali de Rycker at Accel. They and their firm bring decades of deep experience in building category-defining companies and we know we have big shoes to fill.

I'd also like to welcome our other board member Paul Wahl. Paul is a tough cookie. You don't get to be at helm of companies like Siebel and SAP unless you know how to win. I know he's going to push us and ask the hard questions at times. That's what helps make great companies.

Keep an eye out for us on Twitter and stay tuned to this blog. We've got a lot of information to share over the next few quarters.

Paul.