LA Tech Week: Data Informed vs. Data Driven Decision Making

According to LibGem Analytics founder Pranay Baid, data collection is helpful, but what you do with that data will determine how it impacts your company.

On Tuesday morning, the young entrepreneur led an open-ended roundtable discussion around data and how startups can utilize that information to further scale their companies. Forty founders, engineers and VCs gathered at the WeWork terrace in Santa Monica to share insights into how data is being used in their own company and listen to others discuss what has been working for them.

Baid told the crowd one concern many people have is that they have the infrastructure and tools in place, but still aren’t seeing results.

“That’s because there is no connection between your marketing, sales operations and teams,” Baid said. “Collaboration between the business people and the data people is a necessity to build an impactful data culture inside the company.”

The latter half of the conversation was focused on what it means to be data informed versus data driven. Data informed decision-making is when a company makes note of the collection and analysis, while being data driven is using hard data and numbers.

“So if you don’t have any action on the data that you have,” Baid said, “it’s pretty much useless.”

He added that it’s natural for early stage startups to lean into data informed decision making. Oftentimes, they have enough data on the market and trends, but not quite enough of the company’s data to analyze.

But Baid told the audience that once a company passes the seed stage, that’s when data driven decision making really comes into play.

Attendee shares her own insights into the topic being discussed. Photo by Decerry Donato

Some attendees also made public announcements that their companies are hiring for engineering roles and there seemed to be a lot of interest and head bobbing.

After the event, Baid told dot.LA that he created this space because he noticed there was nothing on the schedule centered around data strategy or data analytics.