INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
When T4 co-founder and CEO Maks Khurgin was working at Bain and Company, he ran into a common problem for analysts looking for market data
He spent way too much time searching for it and felt there had to be a better way
He decided to build a centralized market data platform himself, and T4 was born
This week the company competes in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield.
What he created with the help of his long-time friend and
CTO, Yev Spektor, was built on a couple of key components
The first is an industry classification system, a taxonomy, that organizes markets by industries and sub-industries
Using search and aggregation tools powered by artificial intelligence, it scours the web looking for information sources that match their
taxonomy labels.
As they researched the tool, the founders realized that the AI could only get them so far
There were always pieces that it missed
So they built a second part to provide a way for human indexers to fill in those missing parts to offer as comprehensive a list of sources
as possible.
AI alone cannot solve this problem
If we bring people into this and avoid the last mile delivery problem, then you can actually start organizing this information in a much
better way than anyone else had ever done,& Khurgin explained.
It seems simple enough, but it a problem that well-heeled companies like Bain
have been trying to solve for years, and there was a lot of skepticism when Khurgin told his superiors he was leaving to build a product to
&I had a partner at Bain and Company actually tell me, &You know, every consulting firm has tried to do something like this — and they
Why do you think you can do this?&
He knew that figuring out the nature of the problem and why the other attempts had failed was the key to
He decided to take the challenge, and on his 30th birthday, he quit his job at Bain and started T4 the next day — without a product yet,
mind you.
This was not the first time he had left a high-paying job to try something unconventional
&Last time I left a high paying job, actually after undergrad, I was a commodities derivatives trader for a financial [services company]
I left that to pursue a lifelong dream of being in the Marine Corps,& Khurgin said.
T4 was probably a less risky proposition, but it still
took a leap of faith that only a startup founder can understand, who believes in his idea
&I felt the problem first-hand, and the the big kind of realization that I had was that there is actually a finite amount of information out
Market research is created by humans, and you don''t necessarily have to take a pure AI approach,& he said.
The product searches for all of
the related information on a topic, finds all of the data related to a category and places it in an index
Users can search by topic and find all of the free and paid reports related to that search
The product shows which reports are free and which will cost you money, and like Google, you get a title and a brief summary.
The company is
just getting started with five main market categories so far, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, networking, data centers and eSports
The founders plan to add additional categories over time, and have a bold goal for the future.
Our long-term vision is that we become your
one-stop shop to find market research in the same way that if you need to buy something, you go to Amazon, or you need financial data, you
go on Bloomberg or Thomson
If you need market research, our vision is that T4 is the place that you go,& Khurgin said.
