Siccar sources: An open web data secret

My family took a long trip to the American West when I was about thirteen years old. My imagination ran wild as we visited sites with huge gashes cut into the earth exposing millions of years of geological history. One feature we saw was an angular unconformity, where dozens of layers rock are abruptly cut by angled or tilted layers of rock. The phenomenon is caused when older layers of rock are disrupted and become tilted, then new layers of rock are deposited on top. One of the most famous sites of angular unconformity is Siccar Point in eastern Scotland (pictured). The result is striking and unforgettable—one that came flooding back to my mind years later when I was thinking about what makes data valuable.

The teams I work with spend a lot of time thinking about, looking for, and cultivating information that helps us understand an industry and company’s growth patterns, relative strength, and value creation opportunities. When we have access to a company’s internal data, we have much stronger clarity and depth into the nuances of that one company. It’s rare to have a bottoms-up holistic view of an industry. In the past, the holes in information have been patched by making liberal assumptions, taking surveys, using benchmarks, and using other tools. These tools are valuable but tend to rely on top-down averages that may preclude the chance for surprises or slightly more complex discoveries.

Every so often, we’re clever enough to find and extract data from a Siccar data source, a source that cuts across an industry to give us a rare glimpse into its detailed flows and patterns. In the case of an outside-in due diligence, we learned of a widely used web forum where customers listed the specific software and hardware products they’d purchased across brands. We were able to make much better detailed estimates of market share, share of wallet, product category growth, and customer overlap. In another case, we supported a health analytics portfolio company that was itself a Siccar data company to gain the most of its unique position while maintaining data privacy and security. In many other cases, we find specialty retailers, customer review platforms, and other Siccar data sources to quantify and improve a company’s product portfolio, features, and pricing.

Siccar data can be powerful and it’s often hiding in plain sight. Where are your company, competitors, and customers leaving streams of information pooled into cross-cutting sources that you could use to see across your industry? Are any of your service providers Siccar companies that you could partner with to make better decisions? Are you a Siccar company—how are you using your position?