#1 - Auren Hoffman: Data Disruption, DaaS vs. SaaS, and SafeGraph

Auren Hoffman is the Founder & CEO of SafeGraph, an angel investor in over 120 technology companies, and the host of World of DaaS Podcast. In this episode, Auren and Florin dive deep into how SafeGraph trains their machine learning models for Places Data, how investors should screen for good data companies to invest in, and why now is the right time to start a data business. Auren's Twitter: https://twitter.com/auren Auren's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/auren/ SafeGraph: https://www.safegraph.com/ World of DaaS Podcast: https://www.safegraph.com/podcasts PODCAST INFO Podcast website: https://podcast.veridion.com/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/data-on-the-rocks/id1641696416 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4QVTmqp1i6Hvn8VoPEHo2E RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/7635cea8/podcast/rss Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@UC8m4RLlG3s0D5miqf3GkEkw SUPPORT & CONNECT Florin Tufan is the Co-Founder & CEO of Veridion, the host of Data on the Rocks Podcast, and a data enthusiast passionate about seeking Truth. Florin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/florin-tufan-3b0b66173/ Veridion is a big data startup that leverages advanced scraping and ML technologies to ingest hundreds of billions of webpages every week and perform at scale human-like ML based research to create and maintain a database of 50+ data points on 70M+ companies. Clients vary greatly in terms of domain (from insurance and banking to procurement and private equity) but share a core common trait: the need to perform business decisions at scale. About Veridion: https://veridion.com/about-us/ Veridion's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/veridiondata Veridion's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/veridiondata/ Veridion's Twitter: https://twitter.com/veridiondata OUTLINE (00:00) - Introduction (00:49) - Optionality vs. Commitment (04:11) - SafeGraph's Niche (04:57) - The right time to start a data company (06:02) - Buying external Data (08:40) - Why SafeGraph was created (15:41) - Most important thing about Data (19:56) - What's an entity for SafeGraph (21:22) - ML model training for Places (24:45) - SafeGraph innovation milestones (27:02) - Definitional problems & parking lots (31:45) - Companies that use Data better (34:03) - Data disruption within industries (36:43) - Amazon & Data adoption in Retail (40:09) - Data tech upgrades over the recent years (41:48) - Cross-dropping insights & Places data points (46:11) - Companies that use SafeGraph Data better (48:42) - Places transformation & Death rates (50:20) - Keeping track of changes & Place Keys (58:03) - Joint Keys & Creating new standards (01:05:28) - DaaS vs. SaaS companies (01:08: 58) - Types of Data companies (01:12:06) - Investing in Data companies (01:14:43) - 30-year-old Auren's outdated belief (01:16:14) - The Dataset that will save our future (01:19:53) - Auren in the 1800s