Our Investment in LiveStories
We were first introduced to Adnan Mahmud and the LiveStories team through TechStars Seattle. Tom, Howard and I each had spent some time with Adnan on various phone calls and each of us came out of those calls blown away by the product.
LiveStories makes it incredibly easy to take a complex data set (Excel, Salesforce, etc.) and to automagically visualize the data in a beautiful and customizable manner. It’s possible to do similar work inside of Excel and Salesforce, but you’d need to be a combination of a skilled data analyst and a designer to be able to make the magic happen. Even those that have the technical skills might be missing out on insights that the tool automatically generates as it takes an even deeper level of analysis and thinking to know what you’re looking for before you see it. Further, once the visualizations are available, LiveStories allows you to publish the data to your constituents in a very simple and intuitive way, helping to share knowledge and insights faster.
Although anyone, in any industry, can use the product, LiveStories has had a lot of early interest and traction in the government and not for profit sector. These sectors generate a tremendous amount of data, even more so recently with initiatives like OpenData.gov, the Affordable Care Act, and a general move to greater accountability and transparency, and yet they are not equipped to analyze and truly understand the data that they have. LiveStories is at home with those sectors as it was originally seeded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. LiveStories is proving that their story is resonating with that group they have active projects with numerous city and state governments, as close to us as California and as far away as the Nigeria. In California, LiveStories is working with the county health departments to help them be more data driven. Here’s an example of some of the insights that can be derived from public data about the draught, using the product.
Their initial sales traction and the product had us very interested, but we were won over when we met Adnan in person and saw him present at TechStars Seattle back in November. Among other things, Adnan made it clear that this is the company that he was born to lead. We believe him and looking forward to working with him and his team as he scales his dreams into something massive. As a start on that path, LiveStories has announced that they have raised $1 million dollars to help them achieve their goals.
If you have some data that you’d love to get a better handle on, give LiveStories a try at: http://livestories.com.
Originally published at www.socialleverage.com on April 22, 2015.
