#3 - Toby Dayton: Jobs Data, the US Economy, and Web Scraping

Toby Dayton is the President & CEO of LinkUp. inkUp is a leading job market data company empowering people with knowledge obtained from the largest, highest quality database of global job listings

In this episode, Toby and Drew dive deep into how LinkUp transitioned to become data company, what powers the US economy, and why indexing is superior to web scraping.

Toby's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tobydayton

Toby's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobydayton/

LinkUp: https://www.linkup.com/

PODCAST INFO

Podcast website: https://podcast.veridion.com/

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/data-on-the-rocks/id1641696416

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4QVTmqp1i6Hvn8VoPEHo2E

RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/7635cea8/podcast/rss

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8m4RLlG3s0D5miqf3GkEkw

SUPPORT & CONNECT

Drew Doherty is the VP of Partnerships at Veridion, the Co-host of Data on the Rocks Podcast, and an expert in the design of data solutions that support a range of business processes and decisions across the entire customer lifecycle.   

Drew's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewdoherty/

Veridion is a big data startup that leverages advanced scraping and ML technologies to ingest hundreds of billions of webpages every week and perform at scale human-like ML based research to create and maintain a database of 50+ data points on 70M+ companies. Clients vary greatly in terms of domain (from insurance and banking to procurement and private equity) but share a core common trait: the need to perform business decisions at scale. About Veridion: https://veridion.com/about-us/ Veridion's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/veridiondata Veridion's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/veridiondata/ Veridion's Twitter: https://twitter.com/veridiondata

OUTLINE

(00:00) - Introduction

(03:51) - Toby's background in English Literature

(05:46) - Toby's Metalsmithing hobby

(08:00) - Toby's interest in History

(13:11) - The connection between History and Data

(17:25) - Toby's career path toward Data

(22:50) - Early days of LinkUp

(27:20) - LinkUp becoming a Data Company

(33:16) - Web Scraping vs. Indexing

(42:43) - Power of Scaling & Coverage

(48:53) - LinkUp use cases transformation 

(51:41) - Doubling the database & Job distribution

(57:14) - What powers the US economy

(01:02:03) - The evolution of Alternative Data

(01:06:21) - LinkUp's future