#116 - Adam Carte, CEO of Luminoso - The art of uncovering Business-critical insights in data that’s all around us

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to unlock the hidden value inside unstructured data and, with that, grow the value we can deliver. My guest is Adam Carte, CEO of Luminoso

Adam previously served in a number of C-level positions: As the CEO of Cadre Proppants, a mining company, he doubled revenues. As the COO of Niotan, Inc., a chemical manufacturer. And as the CFO of The Trigen Companies, an energy company, where he led the turnaround and doubled profits, and doubled its equity value in less than three years.

He has also been an Operating Partner to Denham Capital Management, and a founding member and Partner of Fairlead Advisors. At Fairlead, Adam has led negotiations for acquisitions, divestitures, equity and debt financings, strategic partnerships, licensing agreements, and company restructurings for over 20 different companies across a broad range of industries.

Today, Adam is the CEO of Luminoso, where he leads the company’s efforts in building products that turn conversational text data into business-critical insights.

This triggered me and led me to invite Adam to be a guest on my podcast. We explore the opportunities that arise when you look at the abundance of unstructured data we have at our disposal, but hardly get value from. We dig into the inhibitors to unlock that value and how, by democratizing it, this allows companies of any size to explore value scenarios previously unattainable.

Here are some of his quotes:

The challenge that we faced early on was: Unstructured text is everywhere. Unstructured text is in everything that humans do.

Usually, it’s survey data or customer tickets, and they [businesses] need some way to analyze it, and they don't have it.

The traditional way to solve that problem would be to go find a sophisticated data science team, build a supervised model, which takes a number of months. And then you can start to get insights from that data. But most people don't have that sort of time.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. Why it’s key to start paying attention the fact the real gold in your business software solution is the data, not the process or the transactions you manage
2. That just because getting answers from data is complex doesn’t mean it needs to be the job of data scientists. What if you’d democratized that thought and start addressing a much larger audience?
3. How to stand out in a dense market which is loaded with hype – How do you cut through the noise and resonate?