Dan Wagner is the Founder and CEO of Civis Analytics, a startup that helps companies, non-profits, and campaigns leverage their data to develop smarter strategy, make better decisions, and build stronger, data-driven organizations.
Before founding Civis Analytics, Dan Wagner was the Chief Analytics Officer on President Obama's 2012 campaign, overseeing a 54-person team of analysts, engineers and organizers that provided analytics and technologies for voter contact, digital, paid media, fundraising and communication. After a discussion with Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., on election night, Dan decided to keep his team together and start a company.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
- How Civis Analytics started with great people and no set idea
- How President Obama built an empowered meritocracy in his 2012 reelection campaign
- The differences between building a company and a campaign
- How Civis Analytics got their first customers
- What you need to do excellent data science
- Why the government is getting involved in fighting cancer
- The timeline for making progress on the cancer moonshot
- Why they decided to build an innovative data science company in Chicago
- Why Dan would like to see more risky financing in Chicago
- The three things you need to ask yourself before starting a company
Selected Links From The Episode:
- David Plouffe, 2008 Campaign Manager to President Obama
- David Axelrod, Senior Advisor to President Obama
- Civis Analytics's Cancer Moonshot Report
- NCI Genomic Data Commons
A Few of Dan's Favorite Books:
- The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddartha Mukheriee
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
- "The Future of Data Analysis" (1962) by John Tukey
Sponsored By:
- Bevy: a Chicago startup delivering everything you need, but don’t want to own, for amazing experiences. Own Less. Live More.