In this conversation, which you can also find on the a16z YouTube channel, a16z Enterprise Deal Partner Jad Naous talks with Operating Partner Frank Chen about how decision-making is changing across organizations of all sizes and types, and how this is creating opportunities for startups to re-tool the entire business intelligence data pipeline.
First, what does it mean for “decision-making” to change? We discuss three shifts in how teams are shifting the way business gets done:
- Decision-making is pushed further down in the organization, empowering everyone in an organization to make decisions rather than waiting for decisions to “flow down from headquarters”.
- Employees and managers make smarter decisions using relevant, timely insight based on actual data, rather than relying on top-down strategy or static rules or experience or gut instinct.
- More and more decisions are automated away altogether—think of Amazon continually updating prices for its products throughout the day.
To support this new style of decision-making, organizations need to store, analyze, and report on data in a fundamentally different way.
The good news is that startups and open source projects are starting to enable this new style of decision-making. We describe three categories of startup opportunities: platform tools, “full stack” solutions for specific roles, and “full stack” solutions for specific industries.