""It was sort of emphasized to us, and I take it with me still today, that you have to spend a lot of time on distribution," says Ugwi. "How do you enter markets? How do you build a brand? How do you recruit people? How do you get in front of people? How do you sell and scale? I'll say, I was kind of lacking in that area.""
""As a strat, you write code and build data models while working with salespeople and traders," he said. "You're supporting them.""
""Companies are going online, e-commerce is growing, leaving a lot of data trails where you can understand whether or not a company is going to do well," he said."
Gregory Ugwi began as a strategist at Goldman Sachs in 2008, writing code and building data models to support salespeople and traders. He observed that growing online activity and e-commerce produced data trails useful for predicting company performance. In 2014 Ugwi and college classmate Justin Zhen left their firms and founded Thinknum Alternative Data to collect web-sourced data. The startup joined 500 Startups, closed a $1M seed round before Demo Day, achieved profitability in 2016, and later raised an $11.6M Series A to expand. Goldman Sachs became a client. Key lessons include prioritizing distribution and building peer networks.
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