Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay, so we’re doing an Entrepreneur Journey story. I need a journey. So give me timelines. When did you do what and what led to what and so on. So, you were trying to do this business and your Alabama college education was from what year to what year? Seven years, you said.

Josh Jones: I was at the University of Alabama from 1998 until 2005.

Sramana Mitra: So in 2005, you finished undergraduate from University of Alabama. At this point, you shut down the software company for managing internet cafes?

Josh Jones: I didn’t shut it down. At the time, we just stopped selling the software. It wasn’t a major company. There were other options on the market. I was distracted with school and starting another business.

Sramana Mitra: Internet cafes were becoming irrelevant. So, what happens in 2005, let’s say?

Josh Jones: At this point, I had started a web design firm and did a lot of work for small to medium businesses. This was before WordPress, so it was pretty tedious and time consuming to build websites. We were selling websites for anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000.

Sramana Mitra: It was in Alabama or everywhere? What was the geographical configuration?

Josh Jones: Most of our clients were in the Southeastern US. I think we had a few outside of that territory, but it was pretty much confined to that area.

Sramana Mitra: How big was the firm?

Josh Jones: We ended up with about 12 people.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a bootstrapped services company.

Josh Jones: That’s right. That company is still running today. They’ve rebranded, so it’s under a new name.

Sramana Mitra: So, you sold that company after how long?

Josh Jones: Seven years.

Sramana Mitra: You ran it for seven years from 2005 until 2012?

Josh Jones: 2000 to 2007.

Sramana Mitra: So, this overlaps with your school.

Josh Jones: Yes, the more notable experience for me was in 2013 when I started a data science and AI consulting firm. We ended up selling it to private equity in 2020.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the genesis of this data science and AI company. What prompts that? Where does your expertise for that come from? What’s the story of that?

Josh Jones: So, in 2013, I was in Emory doing my MBA. I had this background in technology and computer software engineering and did the MBA program. I had some great professors that were talking about the future of big data and internet of things.

I also started learning statistics – predictive modeling, regressions, neural networks, and that sort of thing. I’d always hated statistics, but the idea that you could figure out how to predict the future was compelling.

I started consulting for a distributor of ultrasound equipment, and we started doing their marketing work. That led to a large contract. We helped them continue to grow their sales substantially each year. They were a distributor at the time for Samsung. When Samsung found out that they were their number one distributor in the world, Samsung contacted them and said, “Hey, what are you doing different with marketing? Because you’re far exceeding all our other distributors.” They pointed them to us.

That’s how Samsung became a customer probably within about six months of starting the company. That grew to a very fruitful contract. Ultimately, our work there was seen by Toshiba. So we ended up doing work for Toshiba. The Toshiba healthcare division was acquired by Canon, so we ended up doing work for Canon. We also landed a big contract with Chick-fil-A. We were on their launch team when they launched their mobile app. We did a lot of predictive modeling for them. Ultimately, we had a team on the Chick-fil-A headquarters all year-round for a handful of years.

Sramana Mitra: What was that business? Did you have a product, or did you have data scientists who were actually doing the models? Or was it more of a services model? It sounds like it was the latter. Tell me more.

Josh Jones: It was certainly a heavy services model, but our product was what we called a Data Science Roadmap. The challenge with any company with any kind of new technology is that there’s this hype cycle that surrounds it. We see this certainly now with AI and generative AI as well. Everyone feels this pressure to invest in it without fully understanding it.

So, what we were doing that was different as a consulting firm is that we wouldn’t really take on data science projects until we did this roadmap. The roadmap was, let’s look at your entire organization. Let’s understand how you’re competing in the marketplace and what your competitive strategy is. What are the tools and technologies you’re using now? Let’s look at what your competitors are doing, but let’s also look at what the new cutting edge technology is and bring those together.

Through a framework that we built, we would identify where’s your maximum ROI, where are your risk factors, and where’s your data ready to be used? We’d build this comprehensive report that would say, these are the areas in which you need to execute data science and in this order.

Then from that, we would engage in data science projects. In some cases, a larger customer might take the report and say, “Thank you. We’re gonna execute on part of this.” In some cases, they might have Deloitte do a part, we might do a part, or KPMG might come in and do a part, but we would do these roadmaps. Then the services side of the business was essentially full data science delivery from end to end.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones
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