Live Data keeps real-time information on employment status
With more information at our fingertips now than ever before, it can actually be much more overwhelming to find the necessary data despite it being readily available.
J. Scott Hamilton, founder, president and CEO of Live Data Technologies, noticed this problem when he was leading sales, business and operations teams.
“He would walk around the bullpen and realize that half of his team or a quarter of his team on any given day was wasting massive amounts of time reaching out to people who weren’t at the company that the database said they were at anymore and it’s really hard to sell something to someone who isn’t there anymore,” Jason Saltzman, Director of Growth at Live Data Technologies, told the Business Times.
So, in 2019, Hamilton founded Live Data Technologies in Santa Barbara where the company still resides.
Saltzman joined the company in 2022, noting that the company’s mission of continually verifying and correcting business-to-business contact data for whoever needs it is an exciting reason for him to join.
“I recognize the world of possibilities for this data,” Saltzman said.
“We tend to joke that any given job change matters to someone for some reason, and thinking about it now the sorts of questions that you can ask and answer when you have access to this data set is really what gets me excited.”
According to Live Data Technologies, the company’s database and data sets cover over 70 million people at over 2 million companies, updated in near real-time — including over 30,000 daily job changes.
Saltzman said that, on average, 25% to 30% of people tend to change jobs every year.
“If you have to go through and update hundreds, thousands, millions of people who might be changing jobs manually, well that becomes a very costly task,” he said.
“And that means companies could be missing a lot of great revenue opportunities.”
Live Data was at the beginning of the prompt engineering movement, which is the process of structuring an instruction that can be understood by generative AI models.
In Live Data’s case, it’s leveraging AI to gain unique insights into employment.
“What the company has gotten uniquely good at, is prompt engineering the search engines to make sure we return the right person and the relevant information about their employment status,” Saltzman said.
“We’ve realized that sort of the technology that enabled us to do this was the ability to go out to the open web and verify the employment status for anyone using publicly available information, and in doing this for what is about 80 million plus people here, we have a really good picture of the white collar workforce, employment changes.”
This information is important to a lot of different industries — VC firms who want to understand movement in early-stage companies; investors in public companies who want to see where funds are being spent or even divested; software-as-a-service companies needing to know who to contact at a moment’s notice.
“We have a lot of excitement around our ability to look at any company and understand their intelligence based on their hiring patterns,” Saltzman said.
“If Google wanted to understand how Amazon is hiring, Google may have really good data on their employees, but they won’t have really good data on Amazon’s employees, and so the ability to help people understand any given company down to the person level is really what we’re working on.”
Live Data also leverages publicly available information, so nothing that they are releasing is nothing that can’t be found on the internet, they just do it and have all that information in one place.
These resources are also helpful for traditional news and media outlets as Live Data’s stats have been used in stories by the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and more.
“We are really positioning ourselves as we have the data to answer any and all workforce-related questions,” Saltzman said.
“And answering these questions is great for recognition for the company, but it’s also really indicative of the types of things that you can know when you have access to new and novel data sources.”
Live Data Technologies currently has upwards of 20 employees, with one-third working in the Santa Barbara headquarters, including Saltzman and Hamilton.
Live Data does not disclose revenue, but Saltzman said they have done work with local companies, however, its greatest local tie is to investors.
In January 2023, Live Data announced it raised $5 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Santa Barbara-based Entrada Ventures and further participation from firms and individuals with deep backgrounds in data tech.
“We have been behind Live Data Technologies since the company’s inception. The core technology has multiple compelling applications across industries and verticals. The accuracy and quality of job change event detection are mission critical to anyone making informed decisions,” Jason Spievak, Entrada Ventures Managing Partner & Live Data Technologies Board Member, said in a press release.
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