 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 has 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 is 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, just traveling the world, finding entrepreneurs and looking for innovation. I'm here with Marco Pacelli, who's the co-founder of ClickFox. Marco, welcome to the SiliconANGLE preview of entrepreneurs. We want to talk to you about your company, you, as an entrepreneur, and innovation. 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 at the Cloudera in Palo Alto. Big data is the biggest trend right now that everyone is talking about, and you're in that world. We want to talk about you, we want to talk about big data. First of all, tell us about what you do and your company. Well, thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure. What do we do? We do analytics. We are the company, the startup that 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. But 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 ClickFox been around? ClickFox has actually been around since 2000. I started out of Georgia Tech. A couple bright guys that had some really good concepts around mathematical algorithms that could model data and model patterns in data. 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. 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. I came in with that vision that I had been trying to do for many years and we have succeeded. I live in Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship has always been great there and now it's expanding around the world. 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 voyaged on to the consumers. 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, 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. 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 than 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. 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. 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. Let's talk about entrepreneurship. 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? 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 Oliva 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 to the screen to the other. Asteroid space invaders, you know. Absolutely, before all that, right? I learned how to write Pascal on a Sinclair computer. I started just getting hooked on the fact that I could make things happen by using a language. At the age of 16, I wrote this program called Hypertext. The actual program was called Menu Explosion. It was based on a Hypertext concept, which was being able to explode out menus in 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. Two million copies of it for a couple dollars a copy out of my garage to all the restaurants and they were able to always print new menus every day. 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. 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 and it was an addiction. So I built software after software after. I think they call that serial entrepreneur. Yeah, pretty much. So how did you get on the big data bandwagon? Did you just wake up one morning and say, damn, I got to get on that? Or 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, you know, give me the end-to-end consumer story. Tell me what 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. But the world's changed, though. Like, go back five years ago, or you said ten years ago, there wasn't this user data. It was mostly call center-driven, monolithic environments. And we're hearing from all the companies, EMC, we're here in London. The world's changing. And Michael Capellos, who worked at MCI, worked at Compact, these guys are passionate about this new change. And with mobility, everyone's connected. I mean, I was just checking in with Facebook Places, giving a little digital trail, digital footprint, so it's not to call centers anymore. So I mean, when did you realize that, hey, this new data sets are emerging that just change everything to your advantage? I mean, as an entrepreneur, you got to go, your eyes pop open. Did you have that moment? Yeah. I think that moment was watching my kids grow up and watching their behavior patterns and what they were doing and their utilization of SMS messages and text messages and gaming systems and the Facebooks and MySpaces and social networks of the world. I came to the conclusion that said, guess what? This generation is generating more data than ever before. And the tracking of that data has become more critical than ever. You walk in a store, they count how many people walk in, how many footsteps you do. So everybody wants to store every element of everything you do every day from the time you wake up, how many coffee cups you drink, going to Starbucks every day. And whether you get a grande or a tall, whether you get a americano or cappuccino, they're counting all that. The question is whether, what they do with it? Do they just count it to do statistical analytics around how much of something happens or do they really look at it to try to improve your life? Because at the end of the day, you have 24 hours in a day. You have to sleep sometime. We are addicted to the fact that we can get more done with less and we can communicate better with more, right? But at the end of the day, if we can get to a point where we don't have to do certain things that are repetitive because you know we're going to do them anyhow, then it makes our life even better. It gives us more hours in a day to do more freedom work and relax more. So as human beings, if you look at our just behavior patterns as humans, we are trying to buy more time in everything we do and our younger generation is doing it even more than us, right? Yeah, throwing off a ton of data. Yeah, tons of data, tons and tons of data. And it's new data. It's never been measured before. Never been measured, never been analyzed, never been connected and never been studied to understand what's the next generation going to do. Well, that's good. That's good. Make me bring up a question. So whenever there's a paradigm shift, whether it's the web, to now mobility, fully gestural data, connected data, it's an old way and a new way. And the old way ends up becoming either retired or kind of hanging around, but it usually goes away. The new way takes over. So what is that new way? What's the old way and what's the new way? So that's a good point. So we're the old way right now, right? Every generation, we have a behavior pattern that might be you wake up in the morning, you read a paper, you go down and get a coffee cup, you make a few phone calls, you go to the office, do your work, you grab lunch, you do more work, you have a few meetings, you go home, you have dinner. That's our way. Watch TV. Watch TV, watch a few games, check a few emails, read a book, right? Yeah. That's our behavior pattern. Every generation has their behavior patterns, right? You go study the ten years earlier before us or after us, it's different. You study the kids that are five years old growing up, it's going to be different. If we don't tie all these patterns together using the data, we will never understand how to benefit from consumers, from customers, or even make everybody's life better. We will never understand it. We'll have a lot of silos of behavior patterns based on generations of humans like we have in data. We have a lot of silos of data, a lot of data in a lot of silos not connected together. Behavior is the same way, no different. So as an entrepreneur, for other entrepreneurs out there who are going to watch this, what advice would you give them? Because, you know, entrepreneurs are always seizing on opportunities. You're on one now, it's big data, you're delivering a lot of value there. What do you give entrepreneurs, whether they're CS majors or, you know, 17-year-old kids? Think out of the box. There's no limits. Absolutely not a limit at all. As soon as you say I can't, then you're finished. You're really finished. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com with Mark Pacelli. We're in London, England on a global tour. He's a global entrepreneur living in New York in California. Milan, five-time entrepreneur. Congratulations. Looking forward to talking to you.