Making Data Analysis Usable: A Conversation with Guest Spencer Tate

Analyzing data can be a daunting task, but what if there was a more usable program to do so? In this episode of the Class E Podcast, we sat down with Spencer Tate ‘24 to discuss his and co-founder, Nemath Ahmed’s, data analytics platform, dotflo. Reminiscing on his win at the 2023 Paladin Pitch Competition, Tate shares what he’s learned on his entrepreneurial journey and the reality of having opportunity costs in life.

Guest: Spencer Tate '24

Host: Mary Sturgill

Producer: Isabella Martinez

 

Transcript: 

MARY: Hi there, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host, Mary Sturgill. This is the podcast that's brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. And we are right in the middle of our special series in which we talk to Furman students and recent alumni about their entrepreneurial endeavors. And so I have Spencer Tate with me here today. Spencer, welcome to the show.

SPENCER: Thank you. No, it's great to be on a podcast. This is the first time so…

MARY: Alright!

SPENCER: I'll try my best but I'm excited for the opportunity.

MARY: Cool. We're glad to have you. I know you at your young age are a serial entrepreneur right now. You just won the Paladin Pitch competition. Let's talk about your current company dotflo. Tell us about that.

SPENCER: Yeah, so right now we're…so Nemath and I…so Nemath Ahmed…he's my co-founder. He's actually in San Jose, California. That's why I have the festive San Francisco bridge behind me so he's out in San Jose right now working at Cisco. And I'm out actually in Chicago working at Ernst and Young. He's doing more AI machine learning and I'm more on the finance side. So yeah, over the past, since the Paladin Pitch… Well first I went out to San Jose for three weeks to work in person with Nemath. During that time, we were able to continue to develop the vision we were, we were able to continue to talk with initial beta users and start those initial relationships with people who are actually going to be able to use our product. And yeah, it's been an exciting time. We're actually about to launch our initial real MVP that is going to go into the hands of four universities who we're talking to right now who are using our product or will be using our product and we're going to go through kind of an iteration mode where we just work with those kind of initial first users and see how we can provide the most value. But going back to the dotflo and what it is and why we started it is so I'm a data analyst and Nemath’s a data scientist. And frankly, a lot of companies can't afford to hire a full-time data analyst or a full-time data science team within their organization. That's kind of where the ideas spurred of… kind of leveraging new technology and building out our own novel way to streamline that data science process and make it accessible for teams who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it. So that's really what we've been pushing on over the past few months. And we're getting it to a good stage where we can actually then put it into the hands of those initial universities and I think we're at an exciting time right now. 

MARY: Yeah, so I imagine your customer would be maybe universities, small or medium sized businesses. Am I correct in that thinking?

SPENCER: Yeah, so, so actually, when we first, when we did the Paladin Pitch we were pretty open to a lot of different verticals. So we were open to retail, manufacturing, food, universities, you name it, but what we found really quickly when we were developing, kind of the technology behind what drives that streamline process, is that it's better 1) to focus on an initial vertical and essentially train the brain within understanding data within that specific industry and even problem statement. So what we're focused on right now is helping advancement and development teams at universities help understand how they can use machine learning, which is basically statistical methods that help with understanding, how to assess the right, the right people who I should look, who I should reach out to, who who might potentially donate to my university. So a lot of… so Furman was the first people who approached us, and they essentially said, “hey, we have a data analyst on our team. However, we're lacking in the data science expertise. This is something that can be really beneficial for us because we're kind of, not that we're guessing but there's a lot of, there's a lot of guessing to be frank…That includes the process of “Who do I reach out to, do I reach out to all 1000 people on my list?” And when we bring in that flow, you can find out the 100, the top 100 people who are going to be most likely to donate or that have the characteristics that will donate a specific amount. So yeah, so we're actually just focused on fundraising teams right now. And building out that validation that we can streamline it within this just initial vertical. Work with different datasets from different universities. Basically train our, our AI essentially to learn the space of advancement, and provide that in house for teams.

 MARY: This is amazing, because I could see how you would save money, time and some of the effort that goes into development, right? And chasing leads that aren't necessarily going to be the best leads for a university to get funding. Right? And so I would think that what you guys are doing would help universities streamline that and just be… work more efficiently and that's the goal, I assume.

SPENCER: Yeah, definitely. And what we found is that universities will pay 20, 30, $40,000 to send their data out to companies who will then do the machine learning on their own end. And then they'll send the results back to those companies like Furman, for example, and then they'll have the list of the top 100 people to do it. So not only do we want to put this in the hands of a university, like Furman, but we also want this to be a tool where people who are, don't necessarily have those, that analytical background can grow within their role and can leverage this technology and feel empowered and feel like they can really make an impact and feel like they can collaborate with, with their teammates at a whole new level that they just, it was just too big of a barrier to get into before.

MARY: Right, right. That's amazing. How are you balancing all this? Because I know you're a full-time student as well. And you're at an internship this summer, which is why we're zooming and, and you know, getting this thing off the ground. That's a lot.

SPENCER: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing that comes to my mind is that I mean, Nemath and I love just innovating and thinking of ideas and it's really about the journey. It's not necessarily something that is easy. It's time consuming. There's sacrifices that I have to make. Am I going to go out and go to the bars on Friday, Saturday night, or am I going to work on my startup? I'm going to work on my startup, and it's just kind of the opportunity costs at a younger age that, that I have to weigh, but we love it and I think we have to take the small wins into consideration along the way that help continue to build the momentum. Because we're at such an early stage right now where we have great opportunities in front of us. He's at a great tech company. I'm at a great financial institution where we both can learn a lot. And what we're just trying to do right now is just take advantage of those opportunities to learn as much as we can. And if the opportunity comes where we really see a clear, foreseeable path to like let's say raise money to then go full time into dotflo, then, hey, that's gonna be an opportunity we're going to weigh. But at the point we're at right now is, we're just continuing to iterate and ideate on the idea, get that initial feedback, and I think at this time, we can balance both things and do a great job of doing both. Once school comes around, it'll kind of be like Ernst and Young will kind of be my new school because we'll go away for, for that for that year. But yeah, you know, one of the big things that I can think about a lot is opportunity costs, and there's a lot of opportunity costs, especially at a young age. When it comes to, you know, what am I going to focus on? So, to answer your question, we love it.

 MARY: Yeah. So this is not your first entrepreneurial adventure…you, gosh, were you a freshman when you did the first Paladin Pitch that you did?

SPENCER: Yes. Yeah.

MARY: So as a freshman, you created a company. Tell us about the Trash and Dash company.

SPENCER: Yeah, so it all started with… I was really bad at taking my trash out, out of my dorm room. So it was like a 5,10 minute walk just to take the trash out. And I thought you know this probably is a need. There's other people who probably are really busy like me who…trash is piling up in the room. And wouldn't it be nice if someone just came by their dorm room and came and picked it up on a scheduled basis? So that's kind of where the company University Trash and Dash came to light. I started that freshman year. Second semester I got two 64 gallon trash bins at a local Lowe's. And yeah, I started. I started growing that. 

MARY: So where does that entrepreneurial spirit and just the innovative thinking come from do you think?

SPENCER: Oh, man. Well, I think I have a lot to give credit to my parents. They're both really hard workers. So, my mom… she's bounced multiple jobs throughout her life. My dad works long hours. They're just both very driven people. I come from a modest background. So I've really seen them work hard for what we have. And I think that drives me a lot. And then also my grandparents. I would say that I have great grandparents that always told me to just follow my dreams and to never give up. So I think that… It sounds cheesy and cliche, but I mean, it's driven me a lot over the years. 

MARY: No, that's awesome because you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, especially young entrepreneurs come from an entrepreneurial family. And sometimes for those of us who don't, it might be a little bit harder to get into that mindset, right? And I think that mindset is so important. So it's such a great thing that you talk about your family giving you that mindset that they've created you to be, you know, an innovative thinker, obviously, since you're doing what you're doing and I mean, who would have thought of, you know, dotflo and helping universities really hone in on development, you know?

SPENCER: Sure. 

MARY: So when you think about this process that you've gone through with first Trash and Dash and now dotflo, what are some of the things that you've learned that… kind of along the way that might help other young entrepreneurs?

SPENCER: Yeah, well, it's actually funny because so yes, University Trash and Dash and dotflo, but there was a few things actually in between that. 

MARY: Yeah. 

SPENCER: We're not gonna go to the full extent of it, but to be short, there was… I'd tried to start a company that would connect collegiate athletes to mentor elementary and middle school and high schoolers.

 MARY: Oh, yeah. I remember you talking about that at one point. Yeah.

SPENCER: Yeah. So, so that essentially… I ended up not continuing that one because I was really having a hard time with the business model, but then too, if you're, if you're going to start a technical company, it's really hard to outsource the tech. You really need a co-founder who's, who's technical, who's going to be in it with you, and I didn't really have that. So… and then also, I was, I was younger, and I didn't have as much as experience. I still don't have a lot of experience right now. But yeah, so I ended up stopping that and then I started a group with my friend Tyler. And we basically brought together just driven people who wanted to ideate once a week. So we brought in people from all different universities…started doing that ultimately. We stopped it because it was really interesting what I've learned. You can bring a lot of really smart people together. However, if there's not like a really big meaning or connection with that group of people, it’s really hard to motivate them and it's really hard to get something going especially if they can't really see the finish line. I'm someone who like, I can have a more long term outlook on things. It’s a little bit easier for me not to see the finish line, but for a lot of people, they want to see the finish line, they want to see, you know, what's incentivizing them to carve out an hour and then to actually do more on their free time to like to dig into the group. So, yeah, to those points, just starting things, I think and I'm just curious. I think one of the biggest, the biggest blessings in my life was when I started that first company. I didn't know what was gonna happen. I literally went to the school library. I made a little flyer. I printed like 100 of them out and then I started talking to people and getting people to sign up. I think like when you're, at least for me, I would say trying to be an entrepreneur, especially if you don't like come from a super entrepreneurial background, you’re naive to a lot of things.

MARY: You're not alone though. A lot of entrepreneurs aren't business majors, right? They don't know necessarily how the business side of things work. So you're not alone in that.

SPENCER: Yeah, so you're naive to a lot of things. And you kind of, at least for me, it's kind of a trial and error. It's how am I going to step into this opportunity and how am I going to learn from it? How am I going to take that to then, to then be successful when I take that next step forward? So yeah, if I learned anything, it's just take that initial step forward and be willing to step into the unknown. And it's not an easy journey. I mean, there was a lot of times where I did feel kind of lonely like I kind of sacrificed, not spending as much time with my friends and then I didn't have as close relationships when I was a freshman and sophomore. Once I like stopped those businesses, I was able to dig into relationships more but I mean, there was an opportunity cost to that. But you know, if you really want something, you can go get it and I believe that with all my heart and that's kind of like why Nemath and I fully believe in the vision behind why we started dotflo and the purpose of it and everything like that. But yeah, I probably can say a lot more lessons, but I'll keep it at that.

MARY: Yeah, I think that's a great lesson and what, you know, there's no better time to take those chances, like you were talking about, then when you're young, right? And so that's why whenever I'm in class, and my student has an idea, I'm like, why aren't you doing that? You know?

SPENCER: Yeah. No, I think it's, I think it's important to just…to just take a step forward when it's, especially if you haven't started anything before. You have that creativity to have ideas. You're gonna probably fail. The first few ideas are probably not going to work out. And if they do, then that's awesome. 

MARY: Right. 

SPENCER: But out of all the successful entrepreneurs I've talked to, a lot of them failed first, and a lot of them had… it wasn't easy at all. So I think really quickly I found out that the glamor of, you know, maybe putting on my LinkedIn that I was CEO of Trash and Dash, it goes away really quick because at the end of the day, no one really cares. I'll be completely honest, no one cares. And you kind of find yourself in this place of like, oh, do I really want to do this? And I think that's how you find out whether or not, you know, this is something that you might want to continue to pursue as you continue to grow.

MARY: Right. So what's next for dotflo?

SPENCER: Yeah, so basically, right now, as I said, we're continuing to iterate on our initial product. It's really exciting because we, at the beginning of last month, we got together. We actually had a call with Furman and the call didn't go great. Our product was buggy. It was kind of rushed. Nemath…so he's more on the tech side. He was traveling to India, because that's where he's from. He is an international student. He's in his master's program. And I admire him a lot, honestly. I mean, he's, he's a very hard worker. And through meeting other, I'm kind of going on a tangent right now, but from meeting people from different cultures, I think it's super important to work with them. Because he brings a completely different perspective from what I bring to the table. But yeah, all that to say, where was I going with that?

MARY: I think you just hit on something super important. So when you're starting a company, you need to bring in people who have the talents that you don't have, who have different perspectives than you so that you can look at things in a more full way. Right? 

SPENCER: Yeah, yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. So with that, we…where I was going with that, is we kind of were rushed into that initial kind of meeting with Furman. It didn't go great. However, what we did learn is that we needed to focus more on that industry. And that's where we just said, hey, we're not going to be reaching out to 100 other people from retail, manufacturing, maybe food. We're just going to focus on college universities. So we have been talking to different universities. We have demos set up. We're getting data from these universities. And basically, over the next month and a half, we're just really going to work with these universities, continue to build out our product, make it functional for their needs, and by  mid September, you know, our goal is to have paying customers, paying enterprises on the platform as a software, as a service. So it's something where it's in the cloud, you log on to your browser, you don't have to download anything to your computer, and then they can get that seamless value of 1) really understanding their data, but being able to do so in a way where they can grow within their role and to collaborate with each other on the insights they're finding and really put this as a platform where, where they can go to the next level of how they can ultimately find people who are going to donate to the university and do it in a much more effective way than just kind of guessing and sending the 10,000 emails that are going to cost $10,000 compared to the 1000 emails that have much more higher probability that those people are going to respond. So really we're just trying to build that environment right now. It's a journey, like we kind of thought that we were gonna have things a little bit quicker than we did. But it's completely fine. And we're actually staying on track with what we wanted to accomplish over the summer. We wanted to get beta users on the platform. We want to iterate and by the time the semester comes around, we wanted to have paying customers and we're on track for that right now.

MARY: Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. So are you one of the entrepreneurs that, or serial entrepreneurs I should say, that keep a notebook?

SPENCER: Yeah, so I, I do. I actually do. I love journaling so I do this thing before I go to bed where I'll write the most important thing I did, the summary, how I can be excellent tomorrow, and then what I'm grateful for, and when I…

MARY: I love that. 

SPENCER: It helps me kind of, helps me reflect on the day, but I can spit out some ideas through there. But yeah, I have ideas all the time. And a lot of them are kind of crazy and something that I love about working with Nemath is that we can just… we feel open and we can shoot down ideas really easily if it's not a good idea. I think like, when you look for someone to work with…because I would say from experience if you're gonna start a company, do it with someone else, at least to start. I don't know. You can do it on your own, but it's better when you do it with someone. Just from experience doing it by myself to doing it with someone else. It's like a relationship and you're working within and you're growing with someone in a sense. But yeah, we've kind of built an environment, a culture where we’re both open to sharing ideas and to saying, hey, this is why we don't think this is going to work. And that helps us, it helps us get to the, it's going to help us get to the ultimate finish line. Like I said those little wins is literally like someone responding to an email at this point. There's so many people who don't respond to us, but we just have to keep going so…

MARY: Absolutely.

SPENCER: Because it's all about momentum. Going out to San Jose and me going out there, it was all part of the momentum. Yeah, it cost almost $3,000 for three weeks for me to be out there. However, it was worth the investment. Because I don't know if we'd be at this point right now if I didn't go out there and I didn't continue to grow the relationship with Nemath because we, we met back in February. So we hadn’t known each other that long. We met at a hackathon. It was so random how…

MARY: Yeah, I was gonna ask. Wow, yeah. 

SPENCER: Yeah, so literally, and this all starts with kind of the why behind just going and doing things. The whole story behind dotflo is actually we were working on a completely different idea for like a month. And then we had this pitch competition at Georgia Tech at the end of the month. Nemath and I met mid February, where we basically were on a hackathon team. And if you don't know what a hackathon is, it's where you have 36 hours to essentially build a product from scratch. And our product was… we built an AI trashcan. If you would put something in front of the bin, it would essentially say this is what bin you should throw it in. Because people…what I found doing Trash and Dash, people are terrible at recycling.

MARY: Yes, they are. 

SPENCER: But the thing was in Trash and Dash, we were able to reinforce the user's… writing on their can, what they were doing wrong when they put the recycling out and they actually got better over time. So it was that same concept. I won't talk anymore about that. But that then led Nemath and I to really building that relationship and I said, hey, I'm working on this one idea called Data Share. It was a data monetization idea. Blockchain involved it was, it was confusing. And essentially, we found out pretty quick that there were just some things within that, within that idea that were hard to get around. So then when I came home for spring break, I said, you know what? I'm going to go out and I'm going to talk to as many small and medium sized businesses as I can. I'm going to understand their problems. And that's what we did. And then we realized that a lot of these businesses can't afford data analysts, data scientists so we saw kind of a niche within that. 

MARY: Right. 

SPENCER: That's where this idea of all and so Nemath and I…just to share a little bit more about like the journey that we've gone through so far, we competed at a pitch competition at Georgia Tech. We were one place away from winning $500,000. 

MARY: Wow. 

SPENCER: Yeah, we were very close, one place away. And ultimately, after that pitch competition, and the guy who, who basically carries it out, he, he sold the company for a lot of money at Georgia Tech, and he basically helps student entrepreneurs and they do this petition once a year. And yeah, after that pitch competition, I think it shows a lot about the passion that Nemath and I have is that we had put our heads down, we got to the drawing board and we said what are we going to, what are we going to have to do to get paying customers on the product and validate this? We went to the library and continued to work. And that's and that's what we did. And then ultimately, that brought us to the Paladin Pitch where I was super grateful to have the opportunity to pitch there and the Hill Institute is a great organization that has provided me a lot of opportunities that I've been really grateful for. So I definitely want to say thank you to them if anyone's watching that's associated with the Hill Institute. Because ultimately, yeah, I don't think I'd be the same entrepreneur that I am right now without some of those opportunities. So, so yeah, and now we’re in the summer and continuing to build. 

MARY: Yeah, I love this story. This is going to be a great story for your website - how you, how you, and Nemath met, and for just the story of the company and how this was born. Spencer, I just have so much admiration for you and what you're doing and the fact that you're going after your dreams and you're not putting that off. And I hope our listeners… I know they get how intelligent you are and how compassionate and passionate that you are about being an entrepreneur and being innovative and making, making a space because you're doing everything right man. You are, you know, this is I don't even know what episode this is of this podcast, but I've been talking to so many entrepreneurs who are, you know, years ahead of you as far as age goes, but not as far as their entrepreneurial journey goes, right? And you are right on par if not in front of some of those guys in your thinking and I just, I just can't wait to see what you guys do in the future. 

SPENCER: Well, like parental advice like this is just one…this is just one perspective. You know, we don't even have any paying customers yet but you know, we're gonna, we're gonna do everything in our power to get paying customers on the platform and really change the way that data science is done. I mean, that's our ultimate vision is to create our own basically AI that can go within different platforms and be able to help 1) software engineers but people who aren't… the people who don't have the skills and data scientists to basically streamline that process and we think it can happen and we're gonna keep pushing forward to make it happen. So I really, really appreciate everything you said.

MARY: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think you know, you might not have any paying customers right now, but I think you're gonna be on target for September. And I just wholeheartedly believe in what you guys are doing and I'm, as a professor at Furman, I'm gonna say I'm so proud of you.

SPENCER: Well, and I just want to say Furman’s been…it's been, it's been a great experience. 1) like my coaches, on the Furman cross country team, I only ran for two years, but I mean, they instilled a lot of great things in me and then also the challenging professors that I’ve had. Thank you, because it’s been challenging.

MARY: Yeah, yeah. 

SPENCER: And I'm not the student who just has the 4.0 GPA. Who does everything like that, you know, during, yeah, there's opportunity costs for sure.

MARY: Exactly. And I love the fact that you talk about them in the way that you talk about them because a lot of times we… In these conversations that I have with people, we kind of omit the opportunity costs and there are choices that you have to make, but you have to kind of - and that's true with anything, not just entrepreneurism - but you just have to kind of weigh your, weigh your options and see what's going to be best for you in the long run. So, Spencer, it was such a pleasure to talk to you today.

SPENCER: Yeah, and thank you so much for having me on. It'll be… I don't know if I'm gonna listen to my voice. When I…

MARY: You'll listen, you're fine.

SPENCER: I’ll listen to it. But yeah, it's been, it’s been great. And usually I'm on the other side of the lens. Asking people questions. So it's, it's interesting then kind of I guess, share my, my take. So…

MARY: It really is and I so enjoyed this conversation and listening to your take, and I know our listeners will too. 

SPENCER: Yeah, well, thank you so much. 

MARY: Yeah, absolutely.

 MARY: That does it for this episode of the Class E Podcast. I am your host. Remember this podcast is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. And by the way, if you are a Furman student and you've listened to this conversation, then you might want to check into the Paladin Pitch competition that Spencer won last year and you could be in his shoes this time next year. Right? Exactly. That does it for us on this episode of the Class E Podcast. Until next time everybody, dream big.