Framed Data: Turn Your Skills into a Startup

Interview with Thomson Nguyen, CEO and Co-Founder of Framed Data

By Poornima Vijayashanker

I sat down with Thomson Nguyen, CEO and Co-founder of Framed Data, to chat about how he based the company on his existing expertise from his previous job. We also talked about why it’s OK — and smart — to launch an early product even if breaks a little, in order to get validation that customers what it.

Framed Data takes data from businesses and turns it into actionable insights and decisions.

Poornima: “Let’s start with your background. What was your major in college?”

Thomson: “I come from a family of engineers, and I am the only non-engineer. I majored in mathematics and minored in English at Berkeley. So, pretty much the black sheep of the family. My parents thought I’d go on to teach.”

Poornima: “Haha, yeah, I can relate. I come from a family of engineers too, and wanted to be a lawyer for the longest time. But tech was just in my blood. So when did you learn to program?”

Thomson: “My senior year I joined a computer lab at Berkeley and had tasks similar to being a sysadmin. Then I went to grad school to study computational biology, and that’s when I was introduced to coding for a living. Then I spent a year at NYU working on machine learning with Bud Mishra — that’s when I was introduced to data science.”

Poornima: “What got you to move back to the West Coast?”

Thomson: “I was debating between pursuing a career in banking or consulting, but then decided to move back to California in 2011. I joined Lookout, which makes security products for mobile phones. I worked as a data scientist applying my machine learning background to detecting malicious software. After that I joined Causes, where I was reunited with my friend from college Elliott Block. We were working on data warehousing and data engineering, basically working on processing large amounts of data.”

Poornima: “So what inspired you to eventually start Framed Data?”

Thomson: “In July of 2013 I had an idea for a company. I realized that people don’t care about the methodology behind the data, they just want the output. And the output they really care about is retention and conversions [getting customers to go from free to paid].”

Poornima: “Who was your initial customer segment?”

Thomson: “We targeted product managers and marketers, and made it dead simple for them to track retention, which meant they didn’t need to write or cut and paste any code.”

Poornima: “What did you do after you nailed down the customer segment?”

Thomson: “We applied to Y Combinator and were in the November 2013 batch. We’ve just finished it and we’re serving about 600 customers.”

Poornima: “What is your growth strategy going forward?”

… continued in How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products

Get the full interview with Thomson to learn more about taking the leap from employee to startup founder in How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products, along with 6 other in-depth interviews with founders & early employees at startups like Pardot, Shopify, and MemCachier.