 Hi, I'm John Furrier, this is The Extraction Point, the new show that talks about extracting the data and turning it into action, finding the signal from the noise. For this extraction point, we want to talk with Marco Pacelli, CEO of ClickFox. I had a chance to speak with Marco recently to talk about entrepreneurship, big data, and how the web is changing computer science and entrepreneurship. Marco's been a successful entrepreneur multiple times, and their technology allows companies like Sprint, these big consumer companies, to provide value to their customers so that they can track the user experience. Marco's a great guy, extremely strong entrepreneur, and has one of the fastest growing companies today in the data space that's providing real value. In this interview, I wanted to chat with him about what he sees about entrepreneurship and what it takes to be successful in this new web. Prepare for the extraction point. We've been briefed on all the important stories and events in the world of emerging information. Now, it's time to extract the data and turn it into action. Live from the SiliconANGLE studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, this is Extraction Point with John Furrier. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com. We're here in London, England for, you know, just traveling the world, finding entrepreneurs and looking for innovation, and I'm here with Marco Pacelli who's the co-founder of ClickFox. Marco, welcome to the SiliconANGLE preview of entrepreneurs, and we want to talk to you about your company, you as an entrepreneur, and innovation, and you're involved in a lot of innovative areas like big data. We heard a lot from EMC, we hear a lot from IBM, the Hadoop community, which we have an office in Cloudera in Palo Alto. Big data is the biggest trend right now. That's everyone's talking about. And you're in that world. So we want to talk about you, we'll talk about big data. So first of all, tell us about, you know, what you do in your company. Well, thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure. So what do we do? We do analytics. We are the company, the startup that kind of makes the data valuable. Everyone's storing data, storing more data. Big data is a very common term lately, a lot of data going around. Unless you're able to tie it together and make value out of it, it's just storage element that stores more and more data. How long has ClikFox been around? ClikFox has actually been around since 2000. It started out at Georgia Tech. A couple of bright guys that had some really good concepts around mathematical algorithms that could model data and model patterns in data. And I came in and looked at that, and I found an opportunity to do something I've been trying to do for 20 years plus, which is bring data together to get a 360 degree view of consumer, customer, and product experiences across the data. And I saw an opportunity to deliver that. I saw the basis of technology that could be created out of the algorithms to actually deliver that to the marketplace. And I came in with that vision that I had been trying to do for many years. And we have succeeded. You know, I live in Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurship has always been great there. And now it's expanding around the world. But the technology business has changed. You mentioned Georgia Tech, which is well-known for their computer science program. What are you seeing for entrepreneurship out there? What are you seeing emerging in the computer science algorithm and the data area? What trends are you focused on? Or do you see people focused on? I see people focused on more and more consumer technologies than anything else. I believe that enterprise computing and enterprise control on technology has really has voyaged on to the consumers. You know, consumer computing is becoming more powerful. Consumers are able to do more on their own. Consumers are able to get answers on their own. If you look at social networks, you know, if I can find someone on a social network that has an answer to something I'm looking for, I'll go there before I go to an enterprise or a corporation to get my answer. So I believe that as we look at people getting smarter with computing, which is what we've seen in the past two generations, answers are out in the worldwide web. Why do I have to get an answer from any company I do business with or any company that services me for what I use or buy as a product? You probably have a better answer for me on how to set up my cable box. If you have the same cable box, then the cable company. So I believe that in the future, we will see more and more consumers taking ownership of their own experiences. Because at the end of the day, you and I both know and as well as everybody else in this place that we've had bad experiences. Every time we try to call our service company, our cable company, our phone company, our bank, we don't have good experiences. I mean, you know, we've been hearing from analyst Mary Meeker when she was at Morgan Stanley. Now she moved on to become a VC or an analyst at a VC firm. She put out a report last November talking about mobility and how the mobile web is going to just blow past the web web. Right. And the web has been great. People have enjoyed it. But mobility is becoming more central. And just recently in the news, a 16-year-old kid took over the number one spot on iTunes or in the App Store. So you get a 16-year-old kid beating the angry birds developed out of Finland. Why can't big companies get their act together with this social mobile web? Or are they? What's your angle on that? I believe big companies still want control. And I don't think they've been able to tap in the new generation. I have children in the age range of 20s to 10. And I'll tell you, these kids grew up with technology. They don't want to be controlled. They want the freedom. They want the entrepreneurship. They want the creativity. And they want not to be controlled. They don't want to be told what to do, when to do it, why to do it, and how to do it. And enterprises, corporations, need to start tapping into that concept. Otherwise, they're going to lose the game. And it's all about understanding your customer and their needs. And the customer has changed. It really has changed. It's not you and I anymore. It's these young kids. And their attention span is extremely short. So if you don't give them new things, quick things, new concepts, and you don't make their life easier and more interesting every day of the week, they're going to lose them. So about entrepreneurship, OK? You're a five-time entrepreneur, a repeat offender of success. Most entrepreneurs have failure, and learn from that. You've had a lot of successes since you were, how old? And talk about your background. When were you first an entrepreneur? I actually, I learned from the best, my dad. My dad has got several PhDs, several patents. He's actually one of the brainchilds of compilers. He wrote the first compilers in the industry working for only 18 in the old days. He taught me how to program at the age of 12. I learned how to program Pascal on a Sinclair computer, on a TV. And I thought it was the most amazing thing on earth. I actually started programming and started writing games. In those days, all there was was Pong. I don't know if you remember Pong, but I just aged myself. It was a ball going from one end of the screen to the other. Asteroid, space invaders, you know. Before all that, right? And I learned how to write Pascal on this Sinclair computer. And I started just getting hooked on the fact that I could make things happen by using a language. And at the age 16, I wrote this language, this program called Hypertext, which was, the actual program was called Menu Explosion. It was based on the Hypertext concept, which was being able to explode out menus and restaurants, to look at the cost of goods that comes in the back end of the restaurant, and what the margins are in the front end of the restaurants on the menu, and print new menus every day for the restaurant based on keeping the same margins. Very successful. So two million copies of it for a couple of dollars a copy out of my garage to all the restaurants, and they were able to always print new menus every day. And I hooked on to this, and I started writing more and more programs, building companies, creating innovation, learning new languages, and came to this world of technology of being able to create. You know, technology is like engineering. It's like when you have a vision to build a building, and you build this building, and you say, well, I created that. Well, software is the same concept. There's technology and software that's still running today that was created by innovative people that are driving some of the most amazing companies in the world. And I got into that game, and I got hooked on it. It was an addiction. So I built software after software after. I think they call that serial entrepreneur. Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. So how did you get on the big data bandwagon? Did you just wake up one morning and saying, damn, I gotta get on that? Or like, what happened? No, it's a long story. So one day, I built this product called 3270 or Quick Optimizer. In the days of the mainframes, there was a point in time where people, there was no call centers, there was no service centers, there was no help for consumers. You walked into a branch, you did your banking, you left. You walked into a retail store, you did your purchasing, you left. I had built this technology that optimized the data transmission between a mainframe computer and a 3270 dumb terminal. As part of that technology, I built a tracing utility that allowed me to see what an end user was doing. And help desks started using this technology to do debugging. That led to call centers using this technology to watch what agents were doing with customers. That led to call centers looking and recording what consumers were doing with customers. And during this whole process, as I built companies and sold them, I always heard clients say, give me the end to end consumer story. Tell me what are my customers are doing. Let me see the start to finish experiences customers are doing. And I always had this dream to one day be able to provide a 360 degree view of what we experience as consumers every time we walk into a store or deal with a wireless provider or deal with a bank or deal with a cable company. And I got to that point. And my goal over the past 15 years was to try to achieve that. And we finally achieved that in ClickFox. So but yeah, but the world's changed though. I mean like go back five years ago or you said, you know, 10 years ago, there wasn't this user data as most.