A Year to Remember

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

-Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities

Scribble Data is in the feature engineering space for machine learning. We are a young but ambitious, global, and clueful company. Like everybody else, we were impacted by the pandemic. 

We started the year with our growth plans in question. Our roadshows in the EU and US were put on hold. Our customers were in bad shape, and it looked like we would lose some of them. We were also on the cusp of raising a round, and some of our investors got cold feet. 

Cut to the year’s end, where we’ve managed to do rather well for ourselves. The market’s assessment of Scribble went from "Tell me again what Scribble does?" to "We need a feature store, tell me how Scribble is thinking about this". Our customers not only came back after a few months but doubled down on our product. We added new exciting customers. We received inbound inquiries from Fortune 500 companies, and pitched to clients across some 15 countries. The investors who joined us were committed to the organization, and very helpful during the year. We ended the year adding key staff, and doing revenue multiples of the previous year. We couldn't have asked for more. 

We are accelerating our growth plans and looking to transform into Scribble 2.0 during 2021. Here are some thoughts that came to my mind as we close the chapter on the remarkable year that 2020 has been.

People and Culture

Bad times are not all bad. Good times are not all good. Situations can be managed if you are with the right people. People make all the difference - the cushion and lift, and ideas and the criticisms, effort and the fun. Culture and commitment is central to survival, progress, and success. We saw organizations crumble around us under stress. It is not the situation but how you respond that makes all the difference. For that you need good people around you. I hadn't appreciated this enough in the past.

Resilience and Perseverance

For most of our existence, we were bootstrapped. There were few opportunities at the beginning, but that experience built in focus, resilience, efficiency, and confidence in ourselves. This helped us immensely as the uncertainty grew. The days seemed familiar. We also intuitively knew that bad days will pass like they did in the past. We hunkered down, stayed optimistic, kept working, and patiently waited. It worked.

Unpredictability and Nimbleness

This year taught us that our experience is not enough to judge the future. We were constantly surprised by what we saw playing out. But what this year did was to show dramatically how little we knew about the future, and in a way that we would remember. 

As the initial shock of the pandemic wore off, peoples minds opened up, and along with that our opportunities. On one day, we were talking to a food delivery startup based in a second tier Brazilian city. On another, we were interviewing candidates from Spain. And on a third, exchanging notes with an edtech startup in Berlin. We kept discovering new hubs of buzzing activity, and most importantly, a global pool of very talented collaborators. We always thought of ourselves as a global company but it was really internalized during the last several months. 

Change always throws up new opportunities. You have to be ready to seize them. What has helped us is the nimbleness of mind and of our product. 

Brighter Future and Renewal

At Scribble, customers have us accessing their business-critical data. Trust is central to our work. We noticed an interesting opening of minds in prospects and clients across geographies and domains, and surprisingly a willingness to trust. The conversations were flowing more smoothly than before. Every customer we interacted with would start with one pain point they needed solving, before quickly expanding the conversation to include a wide range of usecases. It wasn’t always like this. The pandemic has changed organizations' preferences and how they are viewing employees and partners. It will be a few years before we see the full impact, but we are seeing glimpses of a major shift. 

2021 and Beyond

We hired fantastic colleagues during the year, and are looking to expand more in 2021. We are looking to transform ourselves to operate at the next level of the ‘game’. 

Best wishes to you, your family, and every one around you from Scribble family.

About the Author

Venkata is Co-Founder and CEO at Scribble Data. When he is not thinking about data, you can find him studying geopolitics and economics.

Scribble Data is a Feature Store company out of Toronto and Bangalore, helping data science teams productionize their ML models by providing a trustable, accelerated mechanism for their feature engineering. Their Feature Store is called Enrich.