VoloMetrix, Interview with CEO Ryan Fuller

Ryan_Fuller-VoloMetrix-CEOSeattle, WA-based people analytics software startup VoloMetrix has just raised $12m in Series B funding (read here). CEO Ryan Fuller answered our questions about the company, the product, the funding and future plans.

FinSMEs: Hi Ryan. First, can you tell us a little bit more about you? What’s your background?
Ryan: I have been helping companies use data to make better decisions for more than 15 years and am the CEO and co-founder of VoloMetrix, the leading People Analytics solution for the enterprise. VoloMetrix was founded based on the idea that people are any company’s most valuable asset. In the typical 40 hours work week (give or take), each person makes decisions that collectively determine every outcome that a company has. Yet few companies have ever been able to explicitly measure and tie employee behaviors to business outcomes. VoloMetrix does that.
I have used analytics as a management consultant, as a software engineer and as a solutions architect. Most recently, I spent ~5 years at Bain & Company advising executives on some of their most challenging strategic and operational issues. Prior to Bain, I spent many years building and designing enterprise software products, running product teams, and selling business intelligence solutions. I was a Solutions Architect at Cognos and before that I led product teams in two early stage start-ups focused on business analytics.
In addition to leading VoloMetrix, I have been a speaker at several events on Big Data, SaaS, and Social analytics in the enterprise and have been quoted in a number of publications including Harvard Business Review, Fortune.com, BusinessWeek, Inc., CIO and others.
I have an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Boston University.

FinSMEs: Let’s speak about VoloMetrix. What’s the opportunity you found in the market? Is it big?
Ryan: The People Analytics market is part of the overall market for helping companies make decisions – including BI, analytics, process and strategy consulting. So the market is huge. We provide our customers with data on how people spend their time, who they spend it with and how this impacts business outcomes. There’s no limit to the uses for this data and it can be applied to pretty much every industry, every function and every company size.

FinSMEs: How does VoloMetrix work? Tell me something about the features of the service…
Ryan: VoloMetrix technology automatically extracts and analyzes anonymized data from corporate calendar, email and other systems to create a complete picture of time use and relationships inside and outside the company. This is presented in a web-based application for analysis and reporting and also available for extraction for use in predictive analytics studies. The insights you can get from the application range from knowing how much time your company spends with each customer (and to what extent that time investment drives revenue) to identifying inefficient business process or predicting employee attrition.

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FinSMEs: Where are you now in terms of growth? Some numbers?
Ryan: We’ve got about two dozen large enterprise customers for whom we’ve analyzed hundreds of thousands of employees’ data. We are currently ~20 people and expecting to triple over the next 12 months.

FinSMEs: You just raised a substantial funding? How are you using the funds?
Ryan: We’re continuing to build out innovative product capabilities while scaling our go-to-market organization to help meet the huge demand we’re seeing from Global 2000 companies.

FinSMEs:…future plans?
Ryan: Keep building and innovating in the field of people analytics.

FinSMEs

13/10/2014

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