Faces of Uncountable
Meet Co-Founder/CRO Will Tashman
Will talks about the founding vision behind Uncountable
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 Will Tashman, Uncountable’s Co-Founder
Employee Profile: Will Tashman — Co-Founder / CRO
Uncountable (UNC): What’s your role and background, and how did you come to help found Uncountable?
Will: I’m one of the Co-Founders here at Uncountable, though I’m technically the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). My background is actually in materials science; I got my degree in Materials Science from MIT, where I met our CEO Noel Hollingsworth.
After MIT, I ended up working for Apple on their Product Design team. We would design and test and validate all of the Macbook Airs, Pros, and other models. That was a very interesting process and a very timely company to be working at — this was back in 2013–14 when Apple was really growing into its total domination of the tech space.
What I picked up from Apple was the culture that the Mac PD team brought on, which was very hard working, but also a very flexible and positive work environment. That really impressed me as to the type of cultures I wanted to be a part of going forward.
About three years into the Apple job, Noel approached me with the idea of starting Uncountable. He and Jason [Hirshman] were already speaking to each other on that line. I’d known Noel for a very long time and had a great deal of trust.
It was an interesting start to the relationship, but one that has clearly been fruitful so far.
UNC: How has the direction of Uncountable evolved since its founding?
Will: All along, we wanted to build products that made scientists’ lives easier and accelerated the R&D process. We’ve talked about accelerating R&D by a factor of 10 as sort of a core mantra for Uncountable.
From our perspective, the product has always been about the customer. The fact that we were bootstrapped made us very hyper-attentive to the customer.
We started with a machine learning focus, so a lot of the analytics tools were around making that possible, but we pretty quickly realized that in order to make machine learning more scalable across teams and organizations, they needed the right data infrastructure.
We thought most of these companies would have a database in place already. But it turns out that, of all of the companies we’ve spoken to, which is in the hundreds at this point, maybe three or four had a true structured environment. And, even then, it was messy and not always usable by scientists.
So we shifted our focus; we didn’t drop the development of the ML, but we shifted the focus to solving that data pipeline [problem] and making that infrastructure easy to use and flexible and complex to handle the nuances of our customer’s data. And [so we can] use that data pipeline to get into these more advanced models.
UNC: When did you first come aware of the need for ELNs (Electronic Lab Notebook) and the other pieces that make up Uncountable’s solution?
Will: We started seeing this path make itself known back in late 2017. Little things in the platform would start to pique people’s interest because they didn’t have anything like it. The more companies we talked to, the more it seemed like this was a problem they were having and there was no good solution; it’s a very complicated problem.
That’s what sparked the move to create an ELN, plus a LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System), plus a database, plus data visualization and analysis tool, all in one environment. One that’s easy to use and coherent and flexible.
The conversions with customers led us down this path, not necessarily us being brilliant and coming up with this idea seven years ago before we talked to anyone.
UNC: Did your materials science background help in finding the right path for Uncountable?
Will: I spent time in labs, I tested a lot of materials, whether at Apple or MIT, [I] reported on those materials and the testing, the hardness of this glass, or the scratch resistance of this coating and things like that. So I was certainly aware of how informally this data was gathered. Certain companies do a better job than others, but for the most part, [it’s] “this is my spreadsheet versus your spreadsheet.”
What created that impetus was that we saw machine learning being beneficial to customers, but in these small pockets. There didn’t seem like a way to stitch all those pockets together without something like a unified platform, so it became clear at that point that we needed to force the issue here and accelerate this development and give something to our customers that connected this information for us.
UNC: How do you think about balancing home life with work at Uncountable?
Will: We want to be able to provide a supportive work environment, so if things happen at home, you’ve gotta go do something… the world’s not falling apart here at Uncountable, that’s not how we treat this.
We think it’s really important that people have the time to be with their kids, their friends, their family, whatever that may be. That matters most. If all you do is think about work, you’re going to not do a good job eventually because you’re going to be too burnt out if you don’t have that appropriate balance with non-work stuff.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
