Building a Cool Technology Company from Chicago: Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Then what?

Stuart Frankel: This was in the Fall of 2008.

Sramana Mitra: The financial crisis was coming up.

Stuart Frankel: Yes. I book-ended my time at DoubleClick. Just prior to closing the transaction with Google, I liked the idea of joining another PE-backed company. I wanted to join a company that was already in business with a good franchise and opportunity to grow. In the Fall of 2008, there weren’t any of those types of transactions. There were certainly companies that were owned by private equity firms, but there weren’t necessarily new transactions. That completely shut down for a bit longer than a year.

Rather than spending my time the way that I thought I would which was looking for the next deal, I did some things to keep myself busy. I took a couple of consulting roles. I helped a couple of friends who had businesses. A friend of mine who was a VC and had invested in a company here in Chicago had an emergency situation and needed a CEO to come in and help turn around one of his investments. I jumped into that for a few months and righted the shift and hired a full-time CEO.

In parallel to those commercial activities, I also started to hang around two Computer Science professors at Northwestern University. As I was leaving Google, I was introduced to two professors at the School of Engineering, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum. We got introduced by the Dean of the School of Journalism actually. Kris and Larry had a research lab. Their background is in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. They were doing a lot of interesting things in their research labs and, ultimately, wanted to commercialize some of the technology that was being developed in their lab. The Dean of the School of Journalism had met them and introduced us and said, “Maybe you guys can work together.” He knew I had experience commercializing software.

I just started to hang around their lab. I would go every Friday and spend a couple of hours with them. Typically, we would grab lunch and talk about the things that they were working on. Sometimes, they would show me things. Sometimes, they would introduce me to students who would show me things. I didn’t necessarily have an agenda at all. Nor did they. I wasn’t necessarily looking to start a company. As I mentioned, certainly starting something was at the bottom of my list, but I liked these guys. I thought they were really smart. I thought they were doing really interesting things and truthfully, I didn’t have a lot of other things to do. This was late 2008 to mid 2009. It provided me with an opportunity to have some time to spend with them. We started looking at a few things more deeply.

The luxury of having the time to hang around a university is that you get to see a lot of things, most of which, you won’t necessarily turn into a business. Most of the technologies worked on in universities are not something you would roll out. Nor should it be. From time to time, there are things that are developed within universities that are really exciting and are potentially, game changing and need to be moved out of the university to get the proper investment to allow these things to develop and grow. We found one of those. The first thing we looked at was a social listening tool that was developed in Kris and Larry’s lab. Now, it’s a typical technology, but at that time, it was fairly unique in that it would allow you to understand what was going on over Twitter and what people were talking about. It would also allow you to respond to these types of conversations. It’s something that everybody has today and there’s lots of these platforms. In 2009, there weren’t nearly as many.

We started talking about whether it would make sense to commercialize it. We actually built a prototype and got an alpha customer. It really wasn’t something that interested either of us. It certainly wasn’t something that I felt like I could back. That market ultimately took off. None of us really had a deep interest in committing several years of our lives to building that. We ended up shutting that down.

Along the same time frame, I got a demo of another technology that was developed in a class. Kris and Larry got a visiting professorship at the School of Journalism through a joint class that was taught by some Journalism professors and some Computer Science professors. A piece of software was developed by this team that wrote stories about baseball games purely from data. It would take score information, play-by-play information, some historical contextual data, and it would automatically generate a report of the game that sounded like an Associated Press reporter was at the game. It worked really really well.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Cool Technology Company from Chicago: Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel
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