Data has been and still remains the power source of programmatic marketing.

Empowering knowledge, accelerating decision-making, and opening an abundance of information-packed corridors, data aids teams worldwide with prompter, cleaner and more sophisticated data use.

With a little help from a platform that accumulates all data in one place, companies can easily make sense of data purposed to enforce top programmatic exchanges.

Uncomplicated, undemanding, and facile, right?

Well, it hasn't been like this forever.

Not that long ago, standard reporting systems provided global businesses with static, dare I say, fruitless results.

Mending the old ways of data processing were Mike Driscoll and David Soloff, two academics whose extensive knowledge in the field would soon facilitate data management across the globe - all thanks to their remarkable, goal-oriented company Metamarkets!

Want to know how they revolutionized strategic data management by building their own designated company from scratch?

Read more about it below:

Separate Pathways, Common Goals

The story of Mike's ever-growing ambition roots within his early academic days. Enrolling at Harvard to pursue his bachelor's degree in government urged him into rigorous philosophical classes, whilst constantly delving into deep conversations concerning various political theories with top-notch professors.

Deeply immersed in national, local, and global political systems, slowly morphed the young American into an excelling Harvard graduate in 1998. From here, Mike earned his PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University, thus achieving yet another essential career milestone.

Meanwhile, on the West coast, David was plunged into his historical, linguistic and economics studies, graduating with honors from Berkeley, University of California.

Fresh out of college, David's artistic soul dragged him deep into the world of music.

Not the ideal way to lay the foundations of entrepreneurial success, right?

Well, David didn't seem to think so.

In fact, being a professional musician had taught him the cornerstones of building businesses, and helped him overcome the fear of embarrassment and uncertainty.

While marching to the beat of his own drum, the future entrepreneur was under the impression that linguistic and social interactive systems were due for a remont.

Far from his affinity for refined sounds, David saw a groundbreaking need in contributing to the greater good and providing communities with valuable information of all sorts.

But, long before his plan was put to practice, David had to go pour his blood, sweat and tears into a brand new project that would forever alternate the face of modern-day data handling.

Getting His Feet Wet

Mike began his career as a software developer working on the Human Genome Project. Together with a whole team of experts, the entrepreneur-to-be set his sights on producing high-quality sequencing technologies, thus helping renowned scientists study individuals suffering from specific diseases.

Together, the team achieved a groundbreaking success in 2003, when it developed the first human genome sequence, both with minimal costs and sooner than anticipated. Incredible as it sounds, by the end of the project, the sequence included all three billion human gene base pairs.

In this crucial role, Mike felt as he was spending his days crunching through large sets of unstructured data, struggling to come across an insight. Instead of constantly preparing data, he felt he wasted his precious time analyzing it only.

By 2008, Mike collaborated with a team of highly educated data scientists to come up with a solution to the ongoing data problem. As a result, he co-founded Dataspora, a company that used predictive analytic software as a global service.

Its clients? Gigantic digital media companies, international banks, prominent telcos, and up-and-coming businesses in need of proper data management, to name a few.

Way before crossing paths with Mike, David landed on the West Coast in search for a more promising job - as the director of information products for Rapt.

Working there, the young New Yorker aided the company in becoming a leading provider of advertising, through yielding management solutions for digital media publishers. Through synthesizing and observing the company's progress, David got a first taste for developing advanced business-friendly projects.

Eventually, Microsoft bought Rapt in 2008, which David saw as an opportunity to start fresh and contribute in a new line of business.

For the next three years, the young entrepreneur served on the advisory board of Columbia University's Institute for Data Sciences, still unaware of the fruits his position would let him harvest.

Fusion of Great Powers

During the era of internet portals like Yahoo, there was a growing consumption of content whilst centralized networks served advertising for the very first time.

Strange as it may sound, at that point in time, selling ads became the primary inventory for mogul internet companies. Even so, there was not a single platform that indicated the process of pricing inventory and predicting supply levels.

Seeing the need for it, David quickly grasped the opportunity to solve the existing demand for real-price discovery within the emerging digital media market.

Considering this, the dream of developing something on his own became even more vivid for David, so he reached out to someone with a similar background as his to help craft the genesis of what was going to become Metamarkets.

A phone call later, Mike became fascinated with the idea of working with a genius such as David, and soon, their first meeting was arranged.

The meeting turned out to be a very fulfilling experience for the two masterminds, who mainly brainstormed around the idea of aggregating all-around data in a single platform, thus providing robust benchmarking and price discovery for those with electronic media inventory to sell.

It was a powerful concept, having technology process all available data in an effortless manner.

With Metamarkets, the duo's goal was to build an indexing business that would enable price discovery and transparency on behalf of the changing digital media landscape.

Before you know it, in 2011, Metamarkets was officially launched!

Building The Company, Step by Step

As Mike and David continued to build their business, they realized there were two crucial focal points to consider- the product itself and engineering it.

However, finding the people that shared the same level of passion for the company as they did was not a breeze. To spark up the interest and enthusiasm, the duo put in hard work and tried to motivate their staffers with high wages. In the meantime, the two relied on acquiring their first private investors to aid them through their hardships.

Luckily, in its first year, Metamarkets raised a ravishing $2.5 million in seed funding, by IA Ventures. A few months later, the company's growth was further supported via an additional $6 million from IA Ventures, ultimately resulting in a fourteen-person engineering team to aid the company's further growth.

Incredibly, the powerful Metamarkets team managed to record over three billion events within a single year, mainly through buying and selling ad impressions.

In 2012, Metamarkets raised another dazzling $15 million round of funding led by Khosla Ventures. The funding additionally boosted the company's development and its leading edge analytics platform, which ultimately expanded the volume of their sales.

During the next two years, the Metamarkets team tripled, while its product grew more beneficial, especially in enabling easy data access. On top of that, the approach was transformed into a self-service that accelerated the decision-making processes while reducing the burden of reporting requests on analysts.

Last but not least, Wellington Financial, along with City National Bank provided a debt financing round for the company in 2016.

Throughout 2017, Metamarkets was acquired by Snap for over $100 million, leaving the two-co founders to pursue other fulfilling and in-demand ventures.

Metamarkets, in a Nutshell

In 2016, Metamarkets was declared the 281st fastest growing private company in the United States, providing end-to-end solutions to renowned leaders in programmatic marketing, such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

Nowadays, Metamarkets is easily the leading provider of interactive analytics for programmatic marketing, earning over $12.8M in annual revenue.

The company has its headquarters in Golden Gate City, holding over thirty employees.

While Mike and David's career paths took a whole new direction from Metamarkets, their intricate and interactive ways of data navigation still represent the company's basic principles, further contributing to the brand's global-scale success in putting visual data analysis and information handling - directly in the hands of marketers worldwide!