Mattermark sheds light on tech specifics
Data-driven start-up provides insight into often private worlds of non-public companies
When Danielle Morrill was 18, she quit college and took a job handling logistics for a major shipping company near Seattle.
“I was fascinated by what was inside each container and who was shipping what and where,” says Morrill, 30. “Those sorts of details tell much bigger stories.”
That curiosity ultimately fueled the tech start-up junkie’s current venture, Mattermark, which parses through voluminous details about private companies and displays the data in easily consumable bites.
Wondering what new company with less than $10 million in funding has doubled its staff in the last year? Or about how a new venture’s social media presence is trending? Mattermark is a tool to help those on both the buy and sell sides gain insights into the often opaque worlds of non-public companies.
Mattermark is one of 10 finalists for USA TODAY’s Small-Business Innovator of the Year Award. A winner will be announced in December.
“The big publicly traded names that we all know about represent about .1% of the 250 million companies out there, and our goal is to help anyone who wants to invest in or sell to the other 99.9% get insights into how and what they’re doing,” Morrill says. “You can Google things, sure, but that’s really aimed at consumers. We’re like a Google or Wikipedia for private companies.”
When Morrill and her husband, computer programmer Kevin Morrill, started Mattermark in 2013, it was a tough sell. Some venture capitalists saw its value — Morrill says investor Marc Andreessen “cold-called me when we stack-ranked (ranking things from best to worst) their portfolio to say, ‘We should be doing this’ ” — but few envisioned a broad market for the start-up.
But that has changed. The past year has seen broad growth for Mattermark, particularly among parties that want to sell to tech start-ups, among them cloud- and sales-platform companies eager for insights as to when a particular start-up may need such services. The 40-person company, which has raised $10.9 million to date, now has 500 subscribers who pay $6,000 per year per user.
“Right now we’re following around 1.2 million high-growth Internet companies,” Morrill says. As for competition, while she acknowledges that a range of raw source material already exists — from Hoover’s to S&P Capital IQ — “those typically provide unranked data to which you have to spend the time to apply a ranking.”
She’s convinced that — a good business gut aside — ultimately data drives all important decisions, especially when it comes to allocating precious funding. And while management consultants and investment bankers have always relied on quantified analysis to do their work, “about 80% of their time often is spent just compiling information as opposed to analyzing it. We can provide that edge.”
Mattermark’s downtown offices are all exposed brick, gleaming glass and open floor plans, in other words the epitome of a buzzing tech start-up hive. But Morrill and her husband almost packed it in after their Y Combinator-backed venture — a version of Amazon and Jet.com — flopped in 2012.
“I got real jaded about Silicon Valley, because if you didn’t have something to do you sort of immediately stood out, and not in a good way,” she says with a laugh. “I decided just to blog (about tech companies) and say whatever I wanted, and then we’d just leave.”
Her metrics-focused posts quickly caught on, and soon Morrill had a small amount of seed money from giant VC firm NEA, which even offered to bring the couple on as in-house analysts. But Morrill decided if NEA was interested, then perhaps there was a business here after all.
Although there were some tough days — “VCs have a lot of money to invest, but they can be cheap when it comes to investing in research,” she says — the couple eventually netted some publicity which in turn generated interest around Silicon Valley. Perseverance was critical.
“The key message I have for entrepreneurs is just because someone says your idea is too small, stick with it if you believe in it and have a group of people who clearly understand that what you’re doing has value,” Morrill says. “In our case, it was just a matter of believing in a simple principle: that providing more data would allow people to ask deeper questions.”
Morrill is convinced that any venture that brings a clean computer interface to often complex data inevitably will be embraced.
“Our generation, the Millennials, we’ve grown up using Facebook and expecting software that feels friendly,” she says. “The world is bigger than ever and feels less knowable, but it also doesn’t have to.”
“I’m not saying I recommend not going to college, because that’s not for everyone. But I will say that I did have a lot of time to really understand what moved me.” Mattermark CEO Danielle Morrill