December 16, 2022

Episode 136: Nick Jordan, CEO of Narrative I/O

Nick Jordan is the CEO and founder of Narrative. He has spent his career at technology-driven companies like Adobe and Yahoo. Prior to Narrative, Nick was the SVP of product and strategy at Tapad, where he helped evolve the company from a media business into a data and technology licensing business.

Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today I have Nick Jordan, CEO of Narrative I/O, uh, which is a data commerce platform that simplifies the buying and selling of information by eliminating the inefficiencies and data transactions that hold businesses back from maximizing the success of their most important data-driven initiatives.

Thank you so much for joining the show. I'm really excited to chat with you and your background, your experience and in particular you know, this whole phenomenon about data, I keep hearing it more and more from founders who are working to kind of eliminate either data silos or inefficiencies. So really excited to not only learn what your company is doing now, but you know, the future of data as more companies become online and online dependent. But before we get into all that, what were you doing before you started Narrative?  

Nick: So before I started Narrative, I ran product management at another startup. I was the chief product officer. And before that I worked, uh, at another startup that was bought by Adobe. Before that I was at Yahoo, all sort of in data adjacent, uh, businesses, uh, largely helping design, uh, and execute product strategy.

Julian: amazing. And what was, like, what was the experience of taking or working for a larger company like Yahoo, Adobe and what do those companies do well that maybe that, that you use to translate over to Narrative?  

Nick: You know, big companies aren't really for me, you know, and I think they have all the capital in the world, but I think ultimately what they do well is they create these machine, these p and l machines yeah.

But at some point they're more protective over the p and l than they are looking sort of, you know, very forward looking. in terms of how do they, you know, build a great product that will last the next 20 years? Yeah. To the extent they do that, they do it through acquisition versus building it in-house.

I think I'm naturally a builder, and so I see a problem. I want to go build the solution to that problem. And oftentimes at larger companies that's not really their focus. . Yeah.  

Julian: When you're going through the building process and coming from that perspective kind of what is your, whether it's a philosophy or a plan of action, how do you kind of define what to build and extract what the important parts of the problem are necessary to build for?

Nick: Yeah I'm not as formulaic as some product people and some founders are. I mean, at the end of the day I kind of just put myself in the shoes of the customer, of the problem that I'm trying to solve. , I started Narrative because in my previous company I found a problem. My, my previous organization was a large.

Acquirer and also a licensor of data. Yeah, so we did this stuff all the time. It was giant pain in the eye, and so I kind of naively said certainly someone has solved this problem and looked around for a solution, and then I didn't find one. I said, oh, shit, one doesn't exist. I guess I have to go build one.

And to this day, I mean, that was five, six years ago. To this day, I still put myself in the shoes of the person that would use the platform and say, will this make my life easier? Will this, you know, will this be a product I'd be happy to use? Would I be a customer? And use that as the guiding philosophy around what we build.

Julian: Yeah. And what do you think, you know, from, I guess from your perspective, benefits you as a kind of product minded founder are, do you kind of lead you know, the development, uh, like do you do product led development, customer led development? What is what are the benefits that you have that you think from your background experience?

And then how do you kind of approach the development of Narrative? You know, is it customer feedback or is it kind of the idea leading it?

Nick: I think it's the idea. I mean, you know, luckily we have a great product and engineering team that has spent a lot of time going and talking to customers and getting feedback.

But I think, yeah, we generally start with a thesis around what's broken, what needs to be easier, what we could fix, how we could fix it, and, you know, we'll test that with our customers and we'll make sure that what we're building, you know, isn't gonna be a complete flop. But I think we start from, you know, what is the problem we're trying to solve?

And do we have a novel Yeah. And great way to solve it. And I think. You know, that's probably my superpower is being able to come at the problem, you know, from that angle. I think there are other sides of being a product like founder that are potentially negative. Like, you know, I'm not a natural salesperson, you know, I don't come from a finance background, so I don't spend a lot of time, you know, in my day-to-day thinking about the p and l again, we've got strong teams that do that, and I've certainly, you know, learned some of those areas over time, but I still see myself as a products ceo.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What do you think, just out of you know, curiosity, what do you think companies don't do well when they're designing or building product? Is it not considering, you know, the user experience? I, you know, I feel like it's distinctly obvious when. , somebody doesn't like using a product or if you personally don't like it, and it's distinctly obvious when a product's so easy to use that it then gets involved in a lot of the day-to-day that, uh, of what companies are using it for. What do you think companies are not doing well or not considering?  

Nick: I think from a, from an execution perspective, certainly I think user experience is really important and we spend a lot of time thinking about user experience. We build B2B software and I think especially in B2B software, people say you.

The user's a big enterprise, you know, it can be, yeah, shitty user experience. At the end of the day, everyone in a large enterprise is using consumer products all day. Their expectation is that their experience is gonna be, you know, as if they were using a consumer product. And so certainly UX is very important.

I think maybe the bigger problem, you know, a lot of people have is. , you know, they see a problem and we see this in our space. They see a problem that, you know, more and more companies are buying and selling data. Yeah. Therefore, we're gonna go build a, you know, something that allows people to go to buy and sell data.

And so they build a platform around the market. , uh, versus building a product around the problem. You know, people have been trying to sell, buy and sell data for, you know, hundreds of years in, in, in one form or another. You know, the it's not that we're missing the capability to do that we're, or what was missing was the ability to do that easily or removing the friction in that process.

Yeah. And we've seen a lot of companies that have built products that you know are centered around how do we allow people to buy and sell data, but they hadn't really focused on how do we make it easier? How do we solve the problems that exist today around buying and selling data.

Julian: Describe the problem that, that Narrative in, in, in particular, that you saw, uh, the need you know, previously to starting Narrative, and obviously that inspired you to continue to solve the problem. Describe the problem that companies are having with data and describe how the technology enables people to, you know, solve that.

Nick: Yeah. I think one of the first problems is and I'm just as guilty as this is everyone, but we talk about data as if it's. homogenous asset, right? Like it's data. It's a widget. When in reality it comes on in an almost an infinite number of forms, right? It's at the end of the day it's ones and zeros, at least one's expressed digitally.

And I think that is where almost all of the friction comes from. Is that data in your organization looks very different than data in my organization. Yeah. Even if it largely represents the exact same thing. There is no universal standard for data. And the way I like to think of it is almost like, Yeah.

And there are, you know, people that speak French and then French Canadian, and then Louisiana, French, and then English and Spanish, and every other language. If you put all those people in one room, they can't really have a conversation or the conversation is so disjointed because they speak different languages.

It just doesn't work. And that's basically how data has worked across organizations and sometimes even within organizations historically, is everyone's speaking a different language. And so, you know, one of the big pieces of innovation on our side was to build a piece of technology that we call Rosetta.

Which, you know, borrows on that analogy and says, you know what if we could create a universal translator for data so everyone can continue to speak their own language? We're not forcing people to try to speak other people's languages, but we give them a common, uh, framework, a common currency by which they can have those conversations.

And once you remove that friction of the fragmentation of data, then all of the other problems are much more attractable.  

Julian: Yeah. You mentioned was looking into Narrative a little bit more and there's this concept of replacing, uh, data brokers this idea behind replacing data brokers who are data brokers and what is being replaced in this whole process that Narrative kind of enables.

Nick: Yeah. You know, data brokers historically have just been service. and , if I'm gonna stick with the language analogy, you know, they're luck, they're roughly translators, right. They're the people that will go talk to one party, translate it, and give the translation to another party, and further trouble, they'll take a big piece out of the middle.

Yeah. They'll often also make it so the two parties don't know who each other are. So they tend to be opaque. And so, you know, we offer a translation layer, but we do it in technology. So we let two companies work directly with each other without, you know, having Narrative, being intermediary. And we give them the capabilities to speak the same language, but we do it without removing any of the control or any of the transparency into that conversation that they're having.

And I actually think a lot of people are surprised by this, cuz you know, data sounds very technical, sounds like you know, something that happens, you know, to, to very technical savvy, organiz. For the most part, data businesses, and especially data brokers, have been very sales and services oriented. It's more biz dev than it is technology.

Uh, and we've kind of flipped that model and said, you know, e everything that happens needs to be done through automation and through technology, not through endless conversations and, you know, six to 12 months of back and forth.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And what are, you know, I guess, you know, There might be some obvious ones here, but what are some of the benefits that companies are now seeing kind of, uh, uh, creating a more efficient translation process and understanding their data and kind of decreasing the amount of friction?

What are some of the positive benefits that you've seen, uh, your customers have that gets you excited?  

Nick: Yeah, I mean, there's some really obvious ones like time to market, so, if you don't have to have a translator in the middle, everything just happens, uh, quicker. there is data quality. So, you know, by having this translation layer, by knowing where the data comes from there, there's just more control and more insight into what data's gonna be good and what's not gonna be good. Cost tends to go down right. As you remove people and time and effort that goes into something by, you know, almost by definition the, you know, the cost will go down just cuz there's less resources that are poured into it.

Yeah. The one that gets me the, you know, the most excited is you can actually optimize your data strategy over. You know, when a contract in in, you know, the old way of doing things takes six to 12 months to get done. You know, once you're done with that contract, you don't wanna go do another one, right?

You don't have an infinite number of resources to go sign a hundred different data contracts and a platform that all of this stuff can be done programmatically. You can test some data. For a couple of weeks. If it works, you can buy it on an ongoing basis. If it then, you know, something about your strategy changes, something about the data changes, something about the, you know, macroeconomic environment changes, you can actually change your strategy in real time along.

Yeah. With everything else that, you know, literally never happened, uh, before. And, you know, one of our challenges as a business is to get people to realize that they can think about this problem in a different way. It's, you know, they don't have to think about data like they thought about it five years ago or 10 years.

They now have a lot more benefits and opportunity, but you know, it requires people thinking differently and inertia is real. And I think that's one of the hard things about. Creating a startup, especially one that creates a new product category or a new type of product, is you have to convince people there's a better way to, to do the things that they're doing.

Julian: Yeah. You know, with a lot of recently there's just been a lot of uptick in, in in, in companies and web three and crypto and blockchain kind of, uh, getting involved in data and specifically more so data storage, but also we're seeing kind of an influx in that type of te. really kind of going into so many different industries.

And how does that affect Narrative and are you currently looking to incorporate any of that technology in your services? Or is that so, so new that it's not necessarily you know, a cons, not a concern, but I guess on the roadmap at this point?  

Nick: Yeah I'm kind of old school. It's not really on our roadmap.

I think there's a number of reasons, not the least of which is, like I said we're already trying to get people to adopt sort of a new paradigm to layer that on top of, you know, you know, web free or blockchain or something that requires even more sort of a fundamental when we think of how people do things, I think is, yeah is a challenge.

Also, you know, I. From a pure scalability perspective, you know, some of those technologies still have a little bit of a ways to go. Yeah. One of the ways that our platform works is we allow companies to buy and sell individual records of data. So, you know, think of one row in a database. Now no one buys one row of data.

They buy. Millions or hundreds of millions or trillions of rows of data, but they do it sort of, you know, in these little micro transactions , you know, try, trying to do that outside of some very special purpose technology that allows that, you know, is problematic, uh, in a lot of ways.

And actually we've pushed a lot. technology boundaries ourself. Just try, you know, trying to allow, you know, a billion transactions to happen over the course of five or 10 minutes. You know, again, these are very micro transactions, but we track each of them as if they were an individual purchase.

Julian: Yeah. And who are, who's buying data from whom?  

Nick: You know, it's really broad based. So it's companies that, it's technology companies that are trying to build a data specific product. So we've worked with some companies that do sort of gig economy delivery type things and they're trying to better understand the patterns of both their couriers and, you know, their customers that are ordering things.

They're buying data. We have folks that are looking at how weather patterns impact financial markets and they're buying data around that. So like, it's interesting, you know, when we talk to investors, they often say who's your, you know, who's your ideal customer? Or, you know, what vertical are you attacking?

And you know, we see our services more into a database than to a, an industry specific vertical. Yeah. So, No one asks Snowflake. You know who, you know, which industries use your database. Cause they're like, every industry uses our database. We have different sales team. They go focus on those different industries.

But it could just as easily be a small mom and pop or you know, a rocket scientist at Boeing that's using a Snowflake database. And I think we see our, the application of our software just as broadly.  

Julian: Tell us a little bit about the traction. What, where is the company at now from, obviously it's conception, I think, but six, seven years ago to, to where it is.

What has been excited about this year and what are you excited about in terms of the next stage of Narrative and where you're heading to.  

Nick: Yeah. So, you know, we're about 40 full-time people now growing pretty significantly next year. You know, I think there's an interesting, uh, I guess I can't speak for all startups, but I can speak for us.

Yeah. There, there's been a number of different points within our growth that we feel like we've hit product market fit. Yeah. And still at those moments I feel like, you know, we had made step function improvements in terms of our product market fit, but then, you know, nine months later, 12 months later, it feels like, oh no.

Now we've really hit it because now we don't have to explain the value prop. Now customers are explaining the value prop to us and just asking us, you know, you know, how they can get started. And so, you know, it's been a continuous rise, uh, throughout the company's trajectory. I.

we've actually accelerated growth this year versus last year. And plan to do so again next. You know, the big question mark, I think remains the macroeconomic environment and interest rates in a current recession, or impending recession or no recession, depending on who you're talking about. And so, you know, I think the biggest frustration we have right now is There's a lot of, uh, externalities that, that impact our ability to fundraise or to grow or to do the things that we wanna do.

And by definition we don't have very much control over those externalities. So we're doing the things that we can do and we're building a healthy business and, you know, hopefully things play out well going into the next 12 months.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What, what has been a key factors to, to the growth that, that you've seen recently?

Is it is it just the compounding effects of, you know, reiterating and finding a product that, that extremely fits the market or improving the technology? Is it, you know, having the right people and growing either the sales motion or acquisition? What's been kind of a key feature to the growth.  

Nick: Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think everyone hates this answer, but it's all of the above. And I think this is the thing that I didn't appreciate when I was a product manager and honest d is like, you could have the best product in the world, and if you don't have anyone to sell it or market it, it doesn't matter. Yeah. You could have, you know, the best sales team and marketing team in the world, and if you got a shitty product, it doesn't matter.

You could have, you know, all of those things, but you know, you don't, uh, you don't service your customers well, and it doesn't matter. Uh, so, you know, it really, it, it takes a village. And I think that's, you know, we've built a great team. The product has had, you know, incredible improvements over the last 18 to 24 months.

We've actually scaled our sales team and put some sales leadership in place that, you know, has given us a much more repeatable motion. You know, any one of those things on by themselves would've been okay. And doing all of those things and continue to do all of those things is what really causes the growth.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. As a founder, what's been the hardest part of about hiring you? You mentioned you, you put in some sales leadership, you're expanding different teams, obviously that takes a lot of, you know, energy, momentum, and resources. What's been a challenging part about hiring and how have you overcome that?

Whether you were, you're better at something now that you weren't previously or or kind of mentorship or advice. What have you done to to kind of go through the, I guess the growing pains of hiring? .  

Nick: Yeah. I think for me it's been delegation. I'm not particularly good at hiring or evaluating talent or any of those, you know, the things that you quintessentially want to do that well.

And so we hired a coo, which I guess I can take a little bit of credit for at least doing that hire a couple years ago. And then he's really taken on a lot of that, that, uh, the growth aspects onto his shoulders. Yeah. And I, you know, To the extent it takes a village and you have to do all of these things, right?

I think if I could go back and tell the, you know, pre founder version of myself that, you know, you need to rely on people more, you need to ask for help more, you need to, you know, get, you can't do it all. I was actually a solo founder, so I had no co-founder, and so I think that was even harder for me.

Yeah. But, you know, I'd like to think that over time I've sort of identified the things that I'm good at, and the things that I'm bad at, and where I'm bad at something, you know, I try to make myself better. I try to, you know, lean into those things, but I'll also rely on others and hire others that, that can help with that.

Julian: Yeah. What's particularly hard about your job?

Nick: That's particularly harder? I don't know. I don't. Nothing. I guess I, I mean, yeah, all jobs, I mean, they call them jobs for a reason. If they didn't have challenges, they would call them funds and I don't I don't like to fall into the trap of feeling sorry for myself because some, you know, particularly part of my job is hard or I don't like, or whatever, you know, it's long hours.

There's pressure, there's, you know, e everything. But that sort of comes. . Yeah. You know, maybe from a purely personal level, like I I'm a natural introvert, so, you know, spending, spending time in, you know, with groups and with people who actually takes energy out of me. And so, yeah, maybe the hardest part is that's kind of the job, description.

And so at the end of every day I'm tired, not because, you know, not for any other reason other than I'm an introvert.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Somebody mentioned to me once, it was like, uh, the difference between introverts and extroverts is like if you had game tokens and introverts essentially spend tokens when they are in a group of people and versus extroverts um, game game tokens when they spend time with the group of people.

So it's energy interesting that the cost to or benefit the cost and benefits to both types of personalities. Obviously both function with both can't function successfully. But how it actually affects the individual. Uh, what do you do outside to kind of recharge yourself and or stay motivated and stay, uh, honestly stay sane when building companies?

Nick: It's funny, I was reading a New York Times. During the pandemic sometime, and it was like, you know, if you don't have a hobby, you know, here's some hobbies that you can try. And I was like, I don't have a hobby. I maybe, I, maybe I should get a hobby. The hobbies they listed were cooking. I already cooked, so I was like, oh, maybe I do have a hobby working out.

You know, I run every morning, so I already did that. They're doing the crossword puzzle. I do that already. So, you know, I, apparently, I have the very generic New York Times, uh, I think from a pure sanity perspective I live and work in New York City I live in Brooklyn and our office is in the city.

I actually, I walk, uh, from Brooklyn to Manhattan every morning and then also walk home at night. Yeah. You know, on the way in it's more of a, you know, organize my day in my head, like, think about the topics of what I need to do today on the way home. It's more of a decompression, but it's like, you know, again, being an introvert, it's having an hour, you know, on the way to, on the way home from work every day by myself where I can kind of, you know, keep sane from everything that happens in between.

Julian: Incredible. I can't believe you walked from Brooklyn Heights to to what it is like lower Midtown, right. Where your office is like 20th, you said?  

Nick: Yeah. Yeah. Where? 27th and Park. So it's like an hour and five, hour and 10 minutes. Geez. Which, you know, if I took the, if I took the train, it would probably still take me 35 or 40 minutes.

So it's really only adding 20 minutes to, to my commute and I get a little bit of exercise. And I don't have to be on the New York City subway system.  

Julian: I love that. Back to Narrative. What are some of the biggest risks that the company faces today? I know you mentioned macroeconomics wise, but anything else outside of that, uh, that you're always thinking about or that keeps you up at night?

Nick: Yeah. You know, we don't have a lot of the existential fears about, you know, is Google gonna do this? Is Amazon gonna do this? I mean, certainly they could and you know, I'm not gonna sit here and be like, here's a hundred reasons why Amazon couldn't build what we're building . Like, they've got more resources in God, I'm sure they can figure out if they needed to

You know, I, I also don't, you know, there, there are. , I'd say broad challenges around data from a regulatory perspective. I, I think, you know, the way we've built our product from the ground up, the, you know, the, you know, the size and the scope and the thoughtfulness of our customers, that doesn't really worry me.

I mean, really it's a macroeconomic, you know, end of the day startups have no business succeeding, right? If you think about it from, you know, starting with nothing, no customers, no product, no brand. You know, no team, like you start from a place that if you were placing a bet on it, you would almost, you'd always short a company succeeding.

We're not at that point anymore. We've moved beyond that point, but, you know, we still spend more money then we than we earn. And so we have to go fundraise in, in a climate where the macro economy is a little bit more unsure, fundraising is hard. And, you know, we don't have. Hundred million war chest to, to fall back on if for some reason, you know, something goes awry.

And so that's the thing that keeps me on and frankly, probably most startup founders up at night about.  

Julian: Yeah. Uh, if everything goes out what's the long term vision for Narrative?

Nick: You know, again, going back to being a product led ceo, you know, I think of I tell people kind of jokingly, kind of not jokingly that I have a hundred year roadmap in my head, . It's, I'm surprised how many people get really scared when I say that. You know, we're trying to build a great company.

We're trying to, you know, Be a place that people wanna work and where they can, you know, grow their careers and have customers that, you know, we make their lives easier and give them a really good product and we wanna build that great product. And so, you know, whether that looks like us staying in private or being acquired or going public or you know, somewhere in between, I don't think, I really think in those terms.

I think about how do we build a great company and my assumption, and, you know, may be naive and may not be, is that if you do that good outcomes will happen.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I always like to ask this next question as, uh, for my audience, but also for selfish research purposes. Whether it was early in your career or now, uh, what books or people have influenced you the most?

Nick: you know, an interesting thing about me is I don't really look back at all. I don't know if it's related to my introversion or not. Like I literally couldn't tell you things that happened six months ago and certainly not six years ago. . You know, I, I've had a lot of luck in who my managers have been in the companies I've worked at over the years.

Yeah. Many, if not all of them, have given me a lot of leeway in terms of what I've done while still, you know, Helping me improve in, in the areas that I've had challenges with. So, you know, certainly when I went to a company called Dex, the company that was acquired by Adobe, Chris Robinson, there was my manager and was really influential.

Uh, before that I, uh, yeah, when I was a Yahoo, I was hired by a guy named Ryan Christensen who's now actually on our board and has been really influential in my career. And so I've really lucked out, although maybe. Piece of luck in my career was my first job. I was hired, uh, by a guy named Joda Sorbo, and I was right outta college, I think was actually still in college when he hired me.

And he basically hired me to be the CTO of a startup. And I kind of put startup in air quotes because it was, you know, This was, you know, before, uh, you know, the current startup culture existed. And he's like, oh yeah, you know, I've got this idea for a product. I want you to go build it. And, you know, I was literally just gotten outta college.

I had no idea what I was doing. I had a degree in computer science, but I, you know, I literally like, had never written a line of production code in my life. And he kind of dropped me into the deep end with no life preserver. And I either had a sink or. and you know, I figured out how to swim. I, you know, I think if I went back and looked at the code now and looked at the things that we did, I'd be embarrassed by it cuz it would be so bad.

But at the end of the day, it worked. And actually I think that was the most that, that's the thing that changed my career the most. Because, you know, had I gotten a job at a big financial services institution and I was an intern, or I was, you know, forced to sort of, you know, be a lap dog of a senior developer somewhere, not actually given anything interesting to work on.

I think I would've gotten used to that. I think getting uncomfortable and being dropped into the deep end is a, can be a harrowing experience, but can be really formative for people that are willing to do it.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. I always like to give my guests a chance on, we're coming to, to the end of the episode here, but I always like to give my guests a chance to give us your plugs.

What, where are your LinkedIns? What are your websites? What are your Twitters? Where can we get involved and be excited about? A versions of Narrative and follow the story in the journey.  

Nick: Yeah, so I mean, the Narrative website is Narrative.io. Uh, you can find Narrative I/O on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn.

I think I'm Nick. Nick Jordan, all one word on LinkedIn. I'm technically on Twitter at Nick underscore Jordan. I have, uh, I am protesting the current state of Twitter and I haven't been on there in, in a month and a half. I'm not on Macedon, so I can't give anyone sort of averse, uh, handle or anything.

But, you know, search for me, search for the company, you'll find me. But Google's your friend.  

Julian: Amazing. I hope you enjoyed yourself. Nick. Thank you so much for being on the show.  

Nick: Thanks a lot, Julian.

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