Good Data, a startup founded in the Czech Republic and with headquarters in San Francisco, has closed a second round of financing – $2.5 million from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, OATV and General Catalyst. The company has now raised a total of around $4.5 million in capital.
You don’t see a lot of startups coming out of Eastern Europe, and even fewer who receive Silicon Valley capital. But founder Roman Stanek is an exception and a highly fundable individual. He sold his first startup, NetBeans, to Sun for $10 million and his second, Systinet, to Mercury Interactive/HP for $105 million. And like his previous startups, Stanek has perfected the running of a tech company with operations in both the U.S. and Prague.
Good Data is disrupting a highly lucrative multi-billion dollar market – data analytics. This is a sector dominated by huge software companies like IBM (via their Cognos acquisition), SAP (via Business Objects) and Oracle (via Hyperion). Companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the software, plus large yearly maintenance fees. And now Good Data is offering a cloud based solution. For free.
Well, not free forever. It’s in open beta currently and there’s no charge at all for the dozen or so companies and hundreds of individuals testing the service. Eventually they’ll start charging a usage fee – they say they’re still finalizing how and what they’ll charge – but it will be far, far lower than the current solutions.
The company is entirely run on Amazon web services and boasts that they don’t own or lease a single server. That keeps their fixed costs down to a minimum, with zero capital expenditures and less need to worry about scaling. Too see more about the service check out the demo videos here.
the founder has a good track record. he is a serial entrepreneur
How do they manage with one server? Is it possible. Even a mid-sized company like us cannot forgo the need for owning multiple servers (including staging ones). It sounds quite surprising that this startup is able to do well without even leasing a single server. Anyhow, good job guys!
They’re using Amazon’s servers. So they can scale up to how many they need. I’m pretty sure this post didn’t specify exactly how many servers they use.
you need to reread . it says they dont have their own servers but instead uses amazon platform for their servers.
i think this good data should for free forever
This company could be worth$ 500 million. Go web 2.0. Recession is over http://iamned.com/blog/ market surging
Analytics is not just about price, it is more about system integration and scalability. That’s the reason why all the big 3 snapped up Hyperion, Cognos and BO. GD will give smaller and mid-size companies a chance to try out data analytics but it will not sway most of the companies away from the big 3. It is not easy to have a streamline process.
Having worked with Roman, I wouldn’t write-off Good Data for not being “the big three” — Roman has a great knack for *making* his companies be the must have solution to use.
He’s also one of the most focused and delivering entrepreneur’s I’ve known. And I’ve known a few.
It seems most like a web version of MicroStrategy desktop. The interface is pretty raw right now and not very user friendly, but there’s definitely potential here.
Microsoft Sharepoint and Performance Point products will become more of a force in this market also. There’s going to be a lot of price pressure as things get more competitive. Pretty damn good for SMB who probably will benefit the most.
As a Netbean user myself, Roman Stanek had done a good job on this excellent product to market.
I don’t know if Cloud analytics going to scale well. This is a domain (Cloud analytics) that I am very interested in, since I am working on such app. I have 2 options. Pre-compute everything as a priori (and update frequently) which guarantees scalability or be flexible and make everything computed on the fly (ie, real-time) which reflects world reality (ie, world’s data changes every seconds, minutes, hours, etc,…) but scalability is a very big issue. It will be interesting to see how cloud analytics evolve over time.
can somebody explain me why would one sell a company for $100M, and then look into cutting his new startup into piecies by giving out power and shares to raise only …. $2.5/4.5M ???
am I missing something here??
It’s pretty much a pissing contest from here. 100M mark is a wall ball compared to what he will make with Marc and the gang.
It seems most like a web version of Micro Strategy desktop.it says they don’t have their own servers but instead uses amazon platform for their servers.
Well, obviously Czech Republic is not in Eastern Europe…
Agreed, its kinda insulting to us, classifying us as Eastern Europe
ok you are central europe, but who really cares?:)
Are you located in Central Europe?
I prefer “New Europe”.
ok, central europe, whatever. key point is the country was previously owned and operated by the soviet union.
There’s quite a difference if you compare Belrus or Ukraine and CEE countries which were under soviet influence but had more freedom which is one of the reasons communism was abolished in Poland. Thats enough on history note:)
And why it’s insulting? Or do you think eastern Europe is sub-human or what? As Michael said, eastern/central Europe was owned by the former soviet union and that’s what he was referring …get over this.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s you that needs to get over it? I guess those based there are better qualified to make a point?
J.
“eastern/central Europe was owned by the former soviet union”
Learn something about history or shut up, nobody was owned by Soviet Union in Eastern and Middle Europe, you sucker!
Free free free. It’s disruptive because it’s free!
(but it’s free because the investors are paying for it, and when everything goes belly up, oh well).
How is this different from Aster Data Systems which MySpace uses? Thanks.
Did you read the article?
Yes: they will be free, then they will compete on price (”far, far lower than the current solutions”). If they wind up selling below cost, then they’re just dumping (as so many other companies do) with the savings footed by investors. The result is that competitors are forced to go below cost too, and everyone is devalued and eventually no one makes money but hopes to live off Google Ads. Then comes the Deadpool and everyone wonders why it’s so hard to make money on the web.
(hint: it’s because everyone gives away their work for free)
I cannot understand one simple thing. Imagine we have a customer – a retail network (a set of supermarkets). In their local MS SQL database they have 100 million rows increase per month, terabytes of data. And imagine they need to have BI.
Simple technical question: how will they upload this huge amount of data to some Amazon’s server???
First of all, this is technically complicated. Second, they won’t do this because of security: the customer will NOT agree to upload commercial data outside to some server which what they don’t see and don’t know where it is. Third, even if they did, are you sure that some Amazon’s “shared” server will be able to serve queries from 100 simulteneous users sending requests for reports for a long historical period (as this is normally done with local MS Analysis Services server)?
My company has a dozen of customers with such amount of data, and I am sure they wouldn’t buy such a service.
Well, I am not so sure about the data uplload capablity part.As of now there is a 10 mb limit in gooddata. But tell you what, some really important data is stored on salesforce’s cloud,And those companies are not dumb..
And yes, Amazon’s cloud does scale.I’ve seen that personally.
just my two cents!
10MB is nothing. You mention about salesforce. We made OLAP cubes on SFA databases (using MS Analysis Services) for 5 companies. The size of relational DB was from 0.5 to 3 GB, the size of cubes was less, but definitely greater than 10MB.
So, Good Data’s solution maybe will work for very small companies.
But if they are small companies with not too much data – they may simply use Excel pivot tables for data analysis: why should they upload something to Amazon?
You do understand the service is not fully baked right? Do you think a company with experienced entrepreneurs and investors such as these has not, and will not, be able to consider the issues that you are raising?
You sound like a PM inside one of these large organizations that is scared of change. Or, possibly intimidated?
I don’t think the service is oriented for that type of company – really this is a product to bring analytics to the SMB marketplace. As for the comment from Ihor about 10mb – I think that is just for the upload wizard, not a hard limitation – but maybe someone can provide greater detail?
If they can solve the data management issue – which is what I’m most concerned about – then a Salesforce.com type model would work well for larger companies.
I agree with the comment, however, about the complexity – their challenge is that such tools tend to be too complex for small businesses (so they default to excel).
Yes, I can confirm that the 10MB is certainly not a hard limitation. For example the public demo project that everybody can try at https://beta.gooddata.com/ goes way over this limit.
>You sound like a PM inside one of these large >organizations that is scared of change. Or, >possibly intimidated?
I am not a representative of a customer at all – my company is a BI-product and service provider. And I simply do not understand what is cheaper:
a) to buy a server with 8GB RAM, 2TB RAID for $3000 and to buy any BI system to install it locally
or
b) to hire a person who will solve remote data integration issues and will keep supporting it; to rent a high-speed internet channel for initial 1TB snapshot upload and each day 100 MB changed data upload
?
As “inthewoods” said, this service may be really oriented on SMB. But SMB does not mean “less data”: a local phone operator, whose revenue 1M per year, may have millions of records in their database.
More on this subject here: Friends Don’t Let Friends Overpay for BI
http://roman.st...overpay-for-bi/
Roman,
Very impressive. While it’s true that others have tried to address the need for cloud BI, your approach is unique and is addressing a future demand. I wish you the best of luck.
Scott
Good data is a very interesting project on Barcamp Riga I also meet guys from Latavian comapany ( can’t recall their name) that delivers interesting product for analyzing prices based on cloud data analysis mixed with geolocalization
As for CEE it is more about coping than innovation but there are execptions. One of most interesting is InteliWISE (http://inteliwise.com and http://avaguide.net) – a company run by founders of Wirtualna Polska – 2nd largest portal in Poland.
It currently has probably the most advanced and fully integrated solution in AI avatars on the Web.
Another great example is Nozbe.com (http://nzobe.com) online project managment tool based on Getting Things Done which rised to #1 in it’s niche over ca. 2 years mostly due to its charismatic founder Michael Sliwinski
And I hope the project I currently work with – http://justproto.com will also soon gain many users in US
Good article Mike. These posts is what brings me back to TC.
Im guessing their sales force is US based since its not exactly an easy sell for getting the stats service integrated into the sites of their customers.
that’s why they have have HQ in Silicon Valley I actually tried selling http://InteliWISE.com solutions remotely from Poland (cold calling, maillings, demos etc) but it’s super hard if you have a sophisticated and quite expensive (at least not in 100$ range) product – it simply need on site support and sales team
that;s why IW opened offices In Valley and hired US marketing and sales Vet as vice presiedent
on the other hand b2c can work remotely pretty well ( it still higly advicable to attend US conferences, barcamps etc. but you can be based out of US)
So Good Data is saying, we are the collaborative BI for SMB, yet what prevents anyone from building a widget on top of Google Spreadsheets or App Engine to do the same thing for free forever? Then you’ve got Qliktech, Microstrategy, open source(mondrian), Excel w/ performance point(the UI de facto standard for SMB), never mind the the un-reliability of AWS…..I highly suggest GD read the speculative data brewing about different compute response times for the SAME small/medium/large configuration from AWS. The data is coming from fairly advanced performance tests. When things are virtualized AND veiled by a corporate policy(ie. Amazon won’t tell you exactly what machine config your are phyisically getting) this is not exactly a place to put production or highly utilized resources right now.
Beyond that, good luck good data…..
checkers?
Czech Republic WATCH : http://www.yout...h?v=z5dgj7INDt8
Great post man. Keep it up. Always like to hear that people are able to keep their dreams going. It all takes a lot of work and dedication. Let’s rock and roll!
Happy Business!
Here is a link to a presentation I saw at the MySQL conference last week – http://www.brea...erence_bbbi.pdf. Look at slides 6 – 14.
It looks like Good Data can scale AND accept data from an unlimited number of data sources.
As far as sensitive data in a SaaS context – think SalesForce.com, Taleo, and others…
Andre
P.S. Prague is clearly the heart of Europe – almost as nice as Paris
There is a yawning gap between the analytics solutions for small businesses (such as MS Office) and those for Fortune 5000 firms. MS is trying to move upmarket with some of its latest initiatives, and may be successful there.
But SaaS companies like GoodData have a real chance of nailing an underserved, cost-sensitive market segment.