Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were you using third party software for these projects? What was the lay of the land in terms of tools and technologies for doing this work at that time?

Josh Jones: We ended up becoming Microsoft gold partners, but it was fairly tool agnostic. We used a lot of Python. In the early days we used R. We switched over to Python. We would build everything. So, there’s the consulting side and so you’re using PowerPoint and Word and then there’s your data acquisition, data hygiene so you’re using some form of Python SQL, something like that. And then when you go into your predictive modeling.

Sramana Mitra: It was not packaged software that you were doing services on top of. It was more basic stuff.

Josh Jones: Well, at the time there really wasn’t that much packaged software. There was SaaS, but it was incredibly cost prohibitive. This was before the stuff like DataRobot and Databricks became popular.

Sramana Mitra: I presume this is also a bootstrapped company since it’s mostly services.

Josh Jones: Well, we ended up raising about $1.5 for that company before we sold it.

Sramana Mitra: And that was from friends and family or…?

Josh Jones: We did some angel investments. I and one other partner put in the first checks, then we did some angel rounds, and then a strategic partner invested.

Sramana Mitra: All this is still happening in Alabama?

Josh Jones: We were based in Birmingham. We had an office in Atlanta at that point as well. We were doing a lot of work with Chick-fil-A and Southern Company. We had customers all over the world at that point but we were headquartered in Birmingham.

Sramana Mitra: You sold this company to private equity in which year?

Josh Jones: 2020.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level?

Josh Jones: I’m not able to disclose any of the terms of that. I know some of those details are on CrunchBase but what I will say that’s the, I guess the interesting part that leads us to today is QuantHub was actually birthed out of that company.

This is really the biggest software company I’ve built in the sense that at StrategyWise, we really wanted to build a product company and we saw this tremendous need for hiring the right data science talent as well as upskilling in data literacy. And I’ll tell you more about QuantHub but I’m happy to finish off any questions you have on StrategyWise if you want to go there first.

Sramana Mitra: So StrategyWise was sold in 2020?

Josh Jones: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: And this was before COVID or after COVID struck?

Josh Jones: So it’s funny, they made their offer in the first week or second week of March.

Sramana Mitra: So right as COVID was starting.

Josh Jones: Yeah, we did the entire transaction virtually. We had one meeting at an outdoor restaurant outside of Atlanta, almost towards the end of the deal, but it was almost a 100% virtual.

Sramana Mitra: All right. So when did you start QuantHub? You said it was birthed there. Was it birthed in the sense of the idea you found while you were doing StrategyWise? Or did you do some software development already inside of that company and then, you know, sold that, and went full time with this?

Josh Jones: Well, I knew that I wanted to start a product company. So we were gonna start something no matter what. So, we were looking for what is that first venture?

One of the problems that we found with data science and AI that our corporate customers were experiencing as well was that the skills were changing so rapidly that it was really hard to assess data talent. When you post a job for data scientists, you get a thousand resumes and they’re all using the same keywords and half the time you don’t know what the keyword means. If you do know, did they just watch a course on YouTube or Coursera? Like how well does this person actually know this?

So to actually vet that person, if you’re HR, your specialty is not data science. So you go pull an expensive data scientist off of a job. If you’re a data scientist, you’re wasting time calling through all of this. So it was just a really big pain point. A lot of data science teams were shorthanded anyway. So we decided to build adaptive software to vet data science talent.

At the time, there were code editors, there were a couple of ways to test computer software engineering, but data science is really this nexus of business IT and statistical modeling. Of course now it includes artificial intelligence, but because there’s that convergence of those three different skill sets, it’s a bit unique in your need to really test those different skills.

Then within the universe, there are all of these different roles that look entirely different. So a data analyst is different than a data engineer or a data governance expert or a data strategist or data storyteller. So we built these taxonomies and frameworks and then built an adaptive test for us to test our own hires. Ultimately, our corporate partners started asking us if they could use our internal product for themselves. That’s when we knew we had a product.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones
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