It's been over six months since New Mexico Inno picked out 10 startups in the state that we thought were primed for big things in 2023. Since we're now over halfway through the year, New Mexico Inno wanted to follow up with those startups to see how things are going and if our January predictions were accurate.
Over the coming weeks, New Mexico Inno will roll out stories checking in with our 2023 Startups to Watch. Next up is the former data-driven startup Metrics Together, which closed at the end of June — but not for any adverse reason.
Click here to see the full list of New Mexico Inno's 2023 Startups to Watch.
Everything was going well for Metrics Together late last year. The Albuquerque-based startup was working on contracts with different agencies and organizations and starting to turn a profit when a representative from the U.S. Economic Development Administration approached Metrics Together's founder, Alison Turner, for what she thought would be more contractual work for the company.
That initial conversation spun into another, this time with the director of the National Economic Research and Resilience Center at Argonne National Laboratory. The recently formed Center is funded largely by the Economic Development Administration, alongside the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Turner told Albuquerque Business First, with the goal of accessing, researching and analyzing data to improve communities across the country.
"We [had] a conversation about what we were doing at Metrics Together, the push towards creating data tools and software that would enable individuals to use data more effectively," she said about her talk with the director.
That conversation took place in early 2023. A few months later, during a Metrics Together staff meeting, Turner received a call with an offer for a position in the Center, as senior economic development researcher.
"I immediately called my second-in-command and I was like, 'I just got a hell of an offer,'" she said.
Argonne hired Turner at the beginning of March. Three months later, on June 30, Metrics Together closed down.
During the four months between February, when Turner started contemplating the Argonne job, and June, when Metrics Together closed, Turner told Business First she considered a few different options concerning what to do with her startup. Those included selling Metrics Together for a price between $750,000 and $1 million, or transitioning the company to new leadership. She picked option No. 3 — closing the company.
Turner called those months Metrics Together's "sunset period" — ensuring its clients were prepared to move on, maintaining lines of communication and educating those clients on other resources they could turn to once their work with Metrics Together closed out. Those talks happened through various meetings with clients and staff between March and June, before the startup's five-person team came together for the final time.
"The last meeting was more of a party than anything else," Turner said. "We sat around and talked about what the experience was like for everybody.
"I almost want to call it like a test run," she continued. "At the beginning of Metrics Together I had no idea what I was doing, and I felt like I was almost playing business. So, it was really nice to take a step back and see that even in that environment where I was kind of scrambling things together and flying by the seat of my pants in a lot of ways, we still ended up really successful."
Over its one year and eight months of activity, Metrics Together made a profit, Turner said — something that's typically a challenge for early stage startups. And its full- and part-time employees transitioned smoothly into new positions after Metrics Together's closure, she added, with one beginning work as a Montessori school teacher and another landing a job with the New Mexico Bar Association, for example.
"I think the stars kind of aligned to take this opportunity now and then potentially use what I learn at Argonne, if this space still exists, to start something in the future," Turner said.
Much of her work at the National Economic Research and Resilience Center is similar to that of Metrics Together. Turner is the only staff person at the Center focused on economic development research. The Center is relatively new, too, meaning it's a bit like a "startup environment," she said.
"The reason that Metrics Together existed is because I'm good at one thing, and that thing is questioning the data that is telling stories that fund communities," Turner said. "So being able to take that same narrative — that kind of thread — with me into this new job has been really lovely."
But there is a tradeoff for Turner in her new role.
"The downside is I don't spend as much time talking to people in the community," she said. "Which was really one of the parts of the growth of Metrics Together that was so beautiful."
A return to entrepreneurship could come in the future, Turner told Business First. Could that look similar to Metrics Together by, as she said, "working closely with local governments to empower their own data?"
"I still think that will be a hole in the sector space 10 years down the line," Turner said. "Hopefully not. Hopefully somebody comes to the table and does it better than I could have.
"But if they don't, there's a lot underlying in the original business plan of Metrics Together that I think could really blossom in the future."
