Peter Fishman has worked in data and analytics for more than a decade, but he actually got his start in economics and statistics working for organizations like the Parthenon Group and Walt Disney.
And while working towards his PhD at UC Berkeley, where he studied economics, he looked at consumer behavior with video rental stores.
Netflix may have killed the video store (along with Blockbuster's own self-inflicted misfortunes), but Fishman, 41, has taken a keen eye for consumer behavior with him throughout his career.
"Basically it was the same concept. Taking a bunch of user data, user behavior that's in structured data and then turning that into something useful a business can use," Fishman said. "At the time, big companies were doing this," like Google, but it started becoming more important at smaller, earlier-stage companies, as well.
In 2020, Fishman, the CEO, co-founded Mozart Data with longtime friend and CTO Dan Silberman, who had more than a decade of software engineering and development experience.
The startup will participate in SXSW's annual pitch competition, now in its 14th year, along with 45 other startups from around the world including one other Bay Area startup, Action Face.
The San Francisco startup provides companies with a turn key modern data stack that's built on Snowflake's cloud data infrastructure and wants to differentiate itself by the way it helps customers without an engineering team transform their data.
"You can, in under an hour, connect a bunch of sources, connect a BI tool, and have a powerful data warehouse," Fishman said, and with the amount of data being used by companies increases, "the premium, I think, on the ability to make sense of it and filter out the noise and in the signal is really valuable, but basically, as your data sizes become larger and larger, yeah, it's taxing on the infrastructure but there's not that much more work."
Essentially, whether you're handling thousands or billions of lines of code, a business should be able to easily make sense of the data.
The San Francisco startup has raised $4 million in seed funding.
This year, the company is focused on building more solutions for citizen data scientists, direct to consumer startups and B2B companies. It's also looking to solve for more niche use cases.
Fishman told me he wants to double Mozart Data's team, with a particular focus on engineering, and triple revenue.
"We think we have a novel and new approach" to this market category, Fishman said, and while they compete with other all-in-one platforms, their biggest opportunity lies with people who aren't doing anything with their data.
"So, people punting on data infrastructure or doing point solutions where maybe they care about the data warehouse, so they make an investment in their data warehouse, but they don't necessarily think about their transform layers," Fishman said, and it's probably not managed in an organized way or they'll hire data engineers and consultants to do it for them.
Mozart Data wants to be their go-to solution.
They previously pitched at a Y Combinator demo day, and this will be their first time at SXSW.
"It's always nerve wracking and exciting to go pitch yourself, to put yourself out there," Fishman said, "especially for a technical founder" because we "live, eat, breathe, sleep" our product.
This will be an opportunity for them to explain what Mozart Data does and hopefully connect with the audience.
Last year two Bay Area startups won the SXSW pitch competition: Los Gatos-based MolyWorks and Cupertino-based Refiberd.
