Solving Big Problems With Big Data - Dan Wagner / Founder of Civis Analytics

Dan Wagner is the Founder and CEO of Civis Analytics, a startup that helps companies, non-profits, and campaigns leverage their data to develop smarter strategy, make better decisions, and build stronger, data-driven organizations. 

Before founding Civis Analytics, Dan Wagner was the Chief Analytics Officer on President Obama's 2012 campaign, overseeing a 54-person team of analysts, engineers and organizers that provided analytics and technologies for voter contact, digital, paid media, fundraising and communication. After a discussion with Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., on election night, Dan decided to keep his team together and start a company. 

In This Episode You Will Learn:

• How Civis Analytics started with great people and no set idea
• How President Obama built an empowered meritocracy in his 2012 reelection campaign
• The differences between building a company and a campaign
• How Civis Analytics got their first customers
• What you need to do excellent data science
• Why the government is getting involved in fighting cancer 
• The timeline for making progress on the cancer moonshot
• Why they decided to build an innovative data science company in Chicago
• Why Dan would like to see more risky financing in Chicago
• The three things you need to ask yourself before starting a company

Selected Links From The Episode:

• David Plouffe, 2008 Campaign Manager to President Obama
• David Axelrod, Senior Advisor to President Obama
• Civis Analytics's Cancer Moonshot Report 
• NCI Genomic Data Commons

A Few of Dan's Favorite Books:

• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddartha Mukheriee 
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
• "The Future of Data Analysis" (1962) by John Tukey