Thanks to Jay's connections in the industry, the entire class was able to pitch their project proposals to a panel of Venture Capitalists: John Lilly of Greylock, David Hornik of August Capital, and George Zachary of Charles River Ventures. This was an amazing opportunity to get industry opinions about our proposed projects from individuals who know what works and what doesn't.
It was very entertaining to see our peers present their respective products, but eventually we had to face the music and present our product. Equipped with our slide deck we pitched our "Big Data to Small Data" product with the title "Explore Big Data." Our presentation went smoothly and it was time to hear the million dollar input from the VCs.
After joking about how we wanted to take on Splunk and Domo (as two of the VCs were affiliated with these companies) we learned two main things:
- A product like this is extremely valuable, predicated on the proper function of our models.
- Creating models that scale and continue to give insight is very hard.
We found this input to be very valuable and would like to thank these assumably very busy men for their time. Unfortunately we began sensing a theme: did we bite off more than we could chew with this ambitious product?