Last week we turned the lakes of Berlin into the stage for our “Data Days 2018”. We welcomed 50+ data colleagues from 15 portfolio companies from all over Europe to our annual event and invited them to share their learnings from recent projects. We spent the first day networking during a cruise on Berlin’s lakes and the second day in the Project A office discussing data-related challenges — here’s what we learned:
With 15+ participating teams, the Data Days are a great networking opportunity for our portfolio companies.
Our partner Florian Heinemann kicked things off with a talk about the far-reaching impacts of the platform economy and how data teams can drive the necessary innovation in every part of the value chain. Aiming to learn from each other’s challenges and both, our operational experts from Project A as well as our ventures, we shared insights and opinions on topics including building Business Intelligence from scratch in a B2B environment (Spryker), ways to define a testing framework for ranking on-site search results (Project A) or how to use machine learning and NLP to distribute content (Opinary).
19 talks by top-notch speakers from all across the portfolio inspired us to take on a pioneering role in making our businesses more data-driven.
We were particularly happy to welcome two speakers from Amsterdam-based Catawiki, one of the fastest growing startups in Europe, as well as Johan Baltzar and his analytics team from KRY, probably the most promising European digital health company that recently managed to raise an impressive $66M funding round.
The two companies shared lessons learned on managing supply and demand, how to detect anomalies in data, how to run machine learning algorithms in the browser to help users create more compelling item descriptions and what challenges they face scaling data. Most importantly, they were able to raise awareness for topics that might not have been on everybody’s agenda just yet and shared learnings from their very own failures and successes.
Special thanks to Catawiki, KRY, CrossEngage, Horizn Studios, Comtravo, HelloPrint, kfzteile24, Lampenwelt, LIQID, nu3, Opinary, sennder, Spryker Systems, Wonderbly, our former portfolio company Contorion, and all other participants for sharing your learnings so openly and making the event a huge success — we are already excited about the “Data Days 2019”!
