View from the Office

In partnership with

_{Sign up to receive Surface Area or follow me on Linkedin or Twitter. Book a meeting here to talk about ghostwriting from my agency, Principals Media}.

I do this thing on LinkedIn called “View from the Office.”

It’s a series of short profiles of people I meet. I typically publish two to three a week. Most of the people, though not all, are founders of startups. 

It’s sort of like Humans of New York, but shorter and for business. 

The backstory is a good lesson in how to create content. Here it goes: 

I was sitting in Bryant Park on a beautiful day talking to a former colleague. The person asked where I was, so I tweeted a photo with the caption: “The View from the Office.” 

Someone else who had never been to New York City sent me a DM, saying effectively, “Wow, that is an insane office view you have!” 

I thought it was so funny that I started posting more “views from the office” from all over the city and anywhere in the world I happened to be working. 

On a deeper level it was a reminder that some of the best work gets done outside the cubicle. That the modern “office” is wherever you are. 

I was meeting a lot of people, in particular startup founders who were tackling crazy interesting problems with new technology. I wanted a way to share their insights, but didn’t have time to write long profiles of everyone. I needed a shorter format. 

And I wanted a name for it so that people would understand what they were getting. 

So I started posting short profiles under the header View from the Office. I included the location and what we were eating as a way to anchor each piece to a time and place.

It turned out to be a great way to share knowledge and connect people. 

I think the stories are educational since most of the people are building new products or providing new services. Also, they tend not to be well known. 

To me those are key ingredients for valuable, actionable content. 

The best social media content works like this. It is created organically to share insights and it is educational or entertaining, or sometimes both.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep doing these profiles. As long as I enjoy it, I guess. 

Here are three recent Views from the Office: 

The View from the Office.

I met up with Dan Entrup, the co-founder of AggKnowledge, at the Classic Car Club, where he is a member. The club, located on the West Side Highway in Manhattan, offers members a lively happy hour, screenings of F1 races and the opportunity to take hot cars out for a spin.

Dan gave me a tour of the club. We took the opportunity to sit in a 1969 Camaro before grabbing a table out back on the terrace beside the Hudson River to talk about AggKnowledge, a startup that helps expert networks, survey panels, and other organizations improve their biographical databases.

He started the company at the beginning of the year with Bill Ronkoski, a former GLG colleague, and Jon Zajac, a former engineering leader at Teamshares and HubSpot.

The problem AggKnowledge is trying to solve will be familiar to any professional who gets random calls and emails to verify employment, title, role, and subject expertise. Most of that info is either available online, has already been answered, or could be inferred with a high degree of confidence.

The issue is that most of these databases are both hopelessly out of date and not precise enough. This is a particularly big problem for expert networks which are trying to match clients with individuals with specialized knowledge.

AggKnowledge combines data feeds about people, companies, and expertise, with sophisticated entity matching powered by AI to enrich biographical information and filter out the noise.

Let’s say you are looking for a doctor who performs robotic shoulder arthroscopy using da Vinci surgical systems, and another who switched from prescribing primarily Ozempic to Wegovy. That isn’t likely to be on their CV, LinkedIn, or web profile, but AggKnowledge can pull this from data sources.

By including additional details, such as what a company does, its competitors, its size, revenue estimates, ownership information, and subsidiary structure it helps ensure the people you are reaching out to are appropriate matches.

Detailed biographical information would be helpful not just for expert networks and survey panels, but also companies hiring talent and organizations that are managing a community, such as universities reaching out to alumni.

Dan is a data geek. He was previously executive director of data strategy at Henry Schein and SVP of partnerships at FactSet. He also publishes a newsletter with 2,500 subscribers called It’s Pronounced Data that focuses on data, analytics, and information services.

Dan can be reached via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.

The View from the Office.

I met David Barboza in midtown at the offices of WireScreen, a company he co-founded with Lynn Zhang in 2019. It was late afternoon, so I had an espresso and snacked on some nuts.

David is a former New York Times reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize. He spent two decades at the paper, covering the stock market and Chicago before moving to China in 2004. He was Shanghai bureau chief from 2008 to 2015.

WireScreen grew out of a passion for China and a realization that there was a huge opportunity to provide data about the country because information about global business is increasingly important and hard to get.

WireScreen is a bit like a Dun & Bradstreet database for China. It has fundamental information on 12 million companies and 25 million people. You can look up, for example, owners, management, stakeholders, key suppliers and customers.

The database is both deep and wide. It cross indexes investors, companies and suppliers, providing an ability to evaluate supply chain risk and fulfill a basic business requirement to “know-your-customer.”

The company has raised a total of $18 million from venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital and Harpoon Ventures. As part of the latest round of financing, PitchBook valued WireScreen at about $70 million.

So far, WireScreen has focused on selling to government agencies, multinational corporations, law firms and regulators. David said that in the future they may consider expanding to sell information to the financial industry.

David said the key challenge hasn’t been procuring the data so much as “entity resolution,” which means accurately identifying which companies and people are cited in public filings and determining their connections.

I first met David in 2018. I was working as a product head at Bloomberg at the time. He visited the office to kick around an idea about providing news and information on China.

Six years later, here we are.

I congratulated him on how far he’s come.

He said there is still a long way to go.

David can be reached on LinkedIn or for a warm intro DM me. 

The View from the Office.

Met Katharine Wolf for lunch at Cafe Triskell in Queens. We both had scrambled eggs, toast and salad. We were taking a break from Andrew Yeung's OOO entrepreneur event.

Katharine is the founder and CEO of Odetta, Inc., a startup that helps clean up data sets and databases. It was founded six years ago.

Odetta began as a way to create jobs for women in developing countries after Katharine realized that in places like Pakistan 75% of college-educated women weren't working, often for cultural reasons.

Odetta leveraged that talent to solve data issues for tech companies. Odetta was hired by fintech firms to collect and clean up data for AI projects, among other things.

More recently, venture capital has become a big part of Odetta’s business, specifically updating and maintaining client databases (CRMs).

That makes sense to me because keeping track of sales leads is mission critical for most companies and particularly for VCs, which rely on human relationships.

Katharine said AI is transforming data collection, but humans are needed to provide accurate results.

AI often fails to capture the right information, misses data points or includes false records. Odetta relies on people to fill those gaps.

Katharine can be reached via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.

Trade Smarter with these Free, Daily Stock Alerts

It’s never too late to learn how to master the stock market.

You’ll receive daily trade alerts sent directly to your phone and email detailing the hottest stock picks.

The best part? There’s no cost to join!

Expert insights will be at your fingertips instantly.

Subscribe Now for Free

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

IRL: The loneliness epidemic is real.

WRITING: Perspective from Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel, on writing.

CONTEXT: Seen in Brooklyn it’s notable. At the shore, not so much.

NO WIFI: Fascinated by how cafes in NYC encourage people with laptops to camp out and work during the week but not on weekends.

MIKE & SONS: Mike & Sons is the best kind of throwback. He drives around Manhattan and rings a bell for people to bring out their knives to be sharpened. Its $5 a knife.