A brief history of Paradime
For the last 6 months we have been working tirelessly to solve the problem of data collaboration in the enterprise and now we have our MVP. It feels a bit surreal but after ~800 Jira issues, on 12-May-2021 we released our v1.0.0 (rogue-one) — it was a psychologically major milestone for our team — we went into PROD!
And we have a NEW website too 🥳
(still in stealth, but we can now get you early access to the platform 🚀)
Hence, it’s the right time to reflect on the history of paradime.io so far.
2018 — Crypto ETF
Back in 2018, in a crypto-currency bull market, Stuart Sheppard, Sam Handfield-Jones and I thought it would be pretty cool to build a crypto ETF fund.
So on a Saturday, we went to Royal Festival Hall in London (because they have free wifi) in the morning to start this project. Sam was building the business plan, Stuart was building the design and marketing concept and I was building the website using a bad stack of Wordpress and cPanel on GoDaddy! And that was when Stuart came up with the name of the fund and I ended up buying the domain!
paradime.io = paradigm but instead of “digm” use “dime” (because it stands for coins aka crypto-coins and sounds kinda cool)
However, that was also the last day we worked on that project. End of the day we went for a few 🍻 and that was it and I kept the domain.
2019 — Analytics consultancy
Towards the end of 2019, Alex Garcia, Fabio di leta and I were thinking that analytics consultancy was a good idea for a side hustle. In 2019, the Modern Data Stack was taking off, ELT was becoming mainstream and plenty of analytics consulting businesses had sprung up across the UK. All these shops were migrating legacy SQL to dbt, migrating bull-shit data stacks to Fivetran / Stitch on the data ingestion, dbt for transformation and Looker / Tableau / Mode for visualisation. And because we were struggling to find a name for this business, we chose paradime.io because it was a domain I already had, and it still sounded pretty cool!
Soon after embarking on this journey, we realised
- consulting is not for us even though Fishtown Analytics still seems do it well while running the dbt community,
- it’s notoriously difficult and costly to scale,
- and we really don’t like the idea of constantly pitching with no product focus
2020 Q1 — Selling vegetables
Towards end-Q1, 2020, covid-19 was in full swing, and we had moved on from analytics consulting and then came the great 5-day pivot!!!
As the pandemic started, restaurant food suppliers and corner shops had surplus perishable items while super-markets ran out of food. So over a weekend we built a Shopify website to sell vegetables and guess what domain we used for it? of course paradime.io — and once we went live, overnight someone bought a vegetable box for £15 that we did not really have!!! We actually had a sale with just pictures on a Shopify website — it’s crazy! We realised while looking for a box of vegetables to send the buyer that we did not have the depth of skills to make online grocery selling work. So we refunded the money and closed the Shopify shop.
2020 Q2 — Data Collaboration in Stealth
Finally in Q2, 2020 Fabio di leta and I started working seriously on the problem of data collaboration because it was something that we faced in our jobs at Octopus Investments, The Guardian and Revolut respectively and so paradime.io was born again where people met data.
We have been working on it ever since — the more we work on it the more excited we get about the problems we are solving. Since our 2020 beginnings, we raised a round, put together a team, got a few enterprise design partners going but our website was extremely bare — it was quite bad.
2021 Q2 — Collaborative Data Fabric
So, welcome to the new bright and shiny website with some three.js magic.
If you are running your data operations on the Modern Data Stack (so Fivetran, dbt, Looker / Tableau / Mode etc.), we would love to hear from you — you can sign up to our Early Access Program and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve built.
So there it is the paradime.io journey:
crypto ETF → analytics consulting → selling vegetables → collaborative data fabric 🤘 = paradime.io
