#128 - Michael Babineau and Kevin Hale

Y Combinator

Michael Babineau is cofounder and CEO of Second Measure. Second Measure analyzes billions of credit card transactions to answer real-time questions on consumer behavior. They were in the Summer 2015 batch of YC and you can check them out at SecondMeasure.com.
Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC. Before working at YC he cofounded Wufoo.
You can find Michael on Twitter @mikebabineau and Kevin is @ilikevests.
The YC Podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
***
Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:35 - What idea did Mike apply to YC with?
01:20 - Where did the idea come from?
4:35 - From project to company
10:20 - What info did investors want to know that Second Measure could provide?
12:05 - Their first customers
14:35 - The primary use case of Second Measure for VCs
15:20 - What questions are they trying to answer?
19:35 - Data examples from their blog
21:05 - Post: Fashion retailers have nothing to fear (yet) from the rise of Stitch Fix
23:35 - Post: Holiday sales rocket Peloton memberships ahead of SoulCycle active riders
25:05 - Post: Prime members deliver for Amazon every day
27:35 - Second Measure's product development process
29:35 - Finding good data scientists who work from first principles
37:05 - Why is credit card data so messy?
42:05 - Cleaning data
44:20 - Using their product for competitive analysis
47:35 - Their sales process
49:05 - Raising money from Goldman Sachs and Citi
52:05 - Focusing on a specific problem
54:05 - Keeping the product compelling when it's table stakes