Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin (Part 8)

SM: What is your distribution of workers? How many people are in Corvallis and how many people are in Barcelona?

FM: We have 9 different offices in the world with 150 employees. Sixty-two percent of our people are in the States, the rest are in Europe. Corvallis has 42 people, Barcelona has 30 people, but we have small teams in New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, Seattle, and we believe in this model. We need to have small teams fully distributed instead of having everyone in the same place. There are people who do not want to live in Corvallis. On the other hand, I think when you have a team that is larger than 12 people it is very hard to manage it and get things to happen. We like things to be small enough that you can get results fast.

SM: I am very interested in what happens to your company. I think this is amazing.

FM: Part of the war is convincing people that this is going to happen, that recommendations are going to be key, and they are going to be part of the next the next step. Then you have to start implementing the vision. You have to start delivering and at the same time thinking ahead to the future.

SM: The fact you have the opportunity to operate as a B2B for a while gives you real data sets to start with. You can see your algorithm and tune it first.

FM: We have been living in a world where companies believed that the data they were collecting was only valid for them. We are changing into a world where we will see that the data belongs to the consumer. Once I have total control of all of my data, this type of tool becomes more and more useful. I will not be depending on the big companies. Data portability will be the issue. If I have collected my preferences in Netflix, Amazon and all of the other place and am taking these preferences to use them to get personalized content in other places.

SM: Those sites are not structured right now to lift anything. That is a major step for someone like Amazon to open up its recommendation system for consumers to take the data with them. I think we are a long ways away from that.

FM: It will be happening even sooner than we think.

SM: What makes you say that?

FM: We are strategically working on an approach to all of that. We are lining up (or aligning with?) a number of big companies who think that way. This is what we are seeing with OpenID, I can go everywhere on the Internet and not have different identifiers. You can get personal content. This can be useful in the real world when you go to a new city. You can immediately get a list of 10 restaurants which you are probably (or, ‘which you are likely going to enjoy because there is’) going to like because there is already someone like you who knows about them. When you go into a restaurant you can know what the most interesting dishes are. This all looks very futuristic but I think we are moving in that direction sooner rather than later. We are going to see applications that know who you are and what you like.

SM: Great! Good luck, it is an exciting story.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Towards Personalization: Strands Founder Francisco Martin
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