This post originally appeared on Tech In Chicago. Visit Tech In Chicago to listen to more interviews with Chicago’s top startup founders and venture capitalists.
Dan Wagner is the Founder and CEO of Civis Analytics, a startup that helps companies, non-profits, and campaigns leverage their data to develop smarter strategy, make better decisions, and build stronger, data-driven organizations.
Before founding Civis Analytics, Dan Wagner was the Chief Analytics Officer on President Obama's 2012 campaign, overseeing a 54-person team of analysts, engineers and organizers that provided analytics and technologies for voter contact, digital, paid media, fundraising and communication. After a discussion with Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., on election night, Dan decided to keep his team together and start a company.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
- How Civis Analytics started with great people and no set idea
- How President Obama built an empowered meritocracy in his 2012 reelection campaign
- The differences between building a company and a campaign
- How Civis Analytics got their first customers
- What you need to do excellent data science
- Why the government is getting involved in fighting cancer
- The timeline for making progress on the cancer moonshot
- Why they decided to build an innovative data science company in Chicago
- Why Dan would like to see more risky financing in Chicago
- The three things you need to ask yourself before starting a company
Selected Links From The Episode:
- David Plouffe, 2008 Campaign Manager to President Obama
- David Axelrod, Senior Advisor to President Obama
- Civis Analytics's Cancer Moonshot Report
- NCI Genomic Data Commons
A Few of Dan's Favorite Books:
- The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddartha Mukheriee
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
- "The Future of Data Analysis" (1962) by John Tukey
