Faces of Uncountable
Meet Co-founder and CEO Noel Hollingsworth
Noel highlights Uncountable’s customer-oriented approach
We’re happy to present a series of interviews with members of the Uncountable team. The purpose of these is to shed light on the people behind our platform, including their professional backgrounds, what led them to join our team, and what they work on behind the scenes.
Today’s interview is with Noel Hollingsworth, Co-Founder and CEO.
Employee Profile: Noel Hollingsworth — Co-Founder and CEO
Uncountable (UNC): How did your past experience lead to your founding of Uncountable?
Noel: First, meeting people on the way. I met [Uncountable Co-Founder] Will Tashman at school at MIT. We played basketball and built a really deep trust there. Then I met [Uncountable Co-Founder] Jason Hirshman at Second Spectrum. Being able to meet those two incredible people is what led to this company.
When we think about why Uncountable exists, what we saw was that software was eating the world. Software is this big, important thing, and it’s taken flight in a lot of newer industries — media, advertising, things like that — it hasn’t really affected these old industries that have operated the same way for the past hundred years — materials, construction, things like that.
And so we said, “Ok, is there an opportunity to take these machine learning techniques that we know a lot about but now apply them to these industries that might be underserved?”
What we found was that even machine learning might be too early for some of these industries; they still need software. Software at the level of databases, system of records, and good editing tools the way that other industries like sales and marketing already have.
We try to be very customer oriented and not arrogant to assume that we know the answer to these customers [problems] better than they do. We’ve wound up working mostly with PhDs and research scientists who have, usually, decades of experience working in their fields, and we would never presume to know their field better than they do. The way to understand their problems best is to talk to them, go make phone calls, and see who’s willing to talk to you.
That’s how we got our first customers in the field. Cooper Standard was our first materials company; we got them from Will looking through the MIT directory and phoning up every materials company he could get his hands on. Every time there was an alumni working for one of those types of companies, he went and spoke to them. That’s been here since day one.
UNC: What’s changed in Uncountable’s approach since the founding of the company?
Noel: In terms of what the company does, I think we started out a bit more machine learning-focused. What we found was that the base support for machine learning was not there in a lot of different companies.
There’s a famous quote from Peter Norvig, who’s Google’s Director of Research, and he says: “We don’t have intrinsically better algorithms than everyone else, we just have a lot more data.” And that’s the truth of machine learning; it always works best with 10x more data than a 10x better algorithm.
That’s what we’ve seen. [These companies] don’t have the data ready, so we need to create the data so they’re ready to do machine learning down the road.
So, that’s one way the company has changed is the product delivery. We’ve brought on great people that we’re super excited to work with every day. But in terms of how we operate, it’s always been a customer-focused and very technical company. Those things persist today.
UNC: Has the decision to not take VC funding been a conscious choice?
Noel: It’s been a conscious choice. We’re not one hundred percent against VC funding, but we have not thought it was the right decision to make with the company at this time in our lifecycle.
The biggest change that it makes is we don’t have to operate with the mindset that we have to raise the next round. There are VC [backed] companies that raise a round and the company’s existence is predicated on being able to raise another round in eighteen months. We never have to do this. The consequence of that is that we can operate with the long-term in mind. We can always say, “Is this the right decision for the customer two years down the line?”
That has a lot of effects — we prioritize customers to a very high degree here and I think that’s partially enabled by the bootstrapping.
UNC: What would you tell someone considering coming to work at Uncountable?
Noel: Apply! It’s a great company and you’re going to love working here if you operate a certain way. We’re not the right fit for everyone. If you want to work for a company with thousands of employees and has really well defined procedures that they’ve put together over the last ten years, then this isn’t the right fit for you, and that’s OK too. But if you want to work at a smaller company — under a hundred or two hundred people — that’s making an amazing impact in the world, I think we’re a great fit . I encourage you to apply, and there’s nothing you need to do before applying.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
