Rene Reinsberg, CEO, Locu
Locu is a data-focused startup that spun out of Tim Berners-Lee’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In under six months after raising its first seed fund, the company nabbed $4 million in investment from General Catalyst. Locu aims to “provide structure to the world’s information,” meaning that in the real world, local merchants can better manage their online presence.
VentureBeat: What’s your advice to entrepreneurs starting enterprise companies?
Rene Reinsberg: Spend a lot of time with as many of your customers as possible to identify their needs and aim to build a product they’ll love.
VentureBeat: What was your greatest obstacle in your first six months?
Reinsberg: A lot of the data that we would like to tap into is available in an unstructured format today — we had to design and build a technology solution that is capable of generating structured data at scale, through a combination of document analysis, machine learning and human computation techniques — a big challenge!
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VentureBeat: What’s the most important trend in the enterprise we should keep tabs on?
Reinsberg: A lot has been written about the increasing role of data scientists; I think there’s definitely a trend in the enterprise space to use data to make better decisions. It’s great to see data-driven decision making in fields where you wouldn’t traditionally have expected it.
