Furze Product Update: July 26
Happy summertime to the Northern Hemisphere. Perhaps you’re picking this up on a sunbed whilst watching your kids in the swimming pool, hiking up a mountain or like us you’re still waiting for your time to come. But this is a packed product update and much has been happening at Firehills to celebrate and share.
What we will cover in this update:
The challenges of managing the worlds messy data with AI
Building market datasets and insights
Pathway to the Furze growth assessment (where the value comes together)
The worlds data is a mess
The promise of Furze to make complexity manageable and to be able to find clarity in messy markets and their relationships. In the pursuit of growth and impact.
This is big promise and with that a complex engineering challenge. Which is how do you find organisations and put them in market boundaries? How do you know those organisations actually exist? How do you not get confused between what an organisation is and what a legal entity is? How do you handle AI which can happily and confidently make up answers?
I could go on with all of the questions which relate to what we focused on which is how to resolve an entity and place it in a market. It’s where we have spent a significant proportion of our engineering capability.
This is what our first pipeline of data is all about. To define a new set of strategic options you need to know who you is around, what are they doing and how well connected are they to the market.
We do this in a number of ways.
You have to ask the question multiple times and converge the answers. AI can find more and more, if it keeps on going and there is value in the long tail.
Humans in the loop is essential to qualifying the quality and confirming what passes and doesn’t.
Grading what you get back across sources of truth provides that additional layer for confirming identity
Furze facilitates all of this, at scale and we’ve learnt (sometimes the hard way) how to do this to a high standard to deliver on our client promise.
Furze Market Intelligence
Back in May when our MVP went live, we promised to keep sharing what we have released. Last month we covered the Firehills version of business model canvas. You can read about this here: June Product Update
Our next big share is how do our data pipelines on both discovering organisation and their relationships convert into real insights.
The key questions these answers:
What is the make up of my market? (Named companies and entities, what do they do in the market?)
What are the relationships which form the market? (regulators, owners, investors, supply chain partners etc.)
Holding both views, you can then think differently with another set of perspectives…..
How influential am I?, How connected am I?, Who else is holding the market together? Who is on the edges of the market but with unique capability?
From this you can build a new set of novel and strategic options, such as what can I do differently in my current market. And can i take my capability to where it is needed in another market….
We do this via two primary lenses:
Macro Data: Market centred view
First, we bring to life all of the insights about an entire market, its shape and who is leading the relationship model. Macro data is the view that most executives and investors will have the narrowest view of. Which is why this is where we start the insight journey.
FurzeMacro Insight Page: FTSE-100 May26 example
We cover here the headlines on who dominates the market, who enables the market and who has the biggest cross market reach. Ranking all of the organisations discovered.
All with a tidy narrative summary to bring the market data to life in layman’s terms.
We also have recently added several visuals to showcase the different relationships, so you can follow the supply chains across the market, or look at the competitive network:
Micro Data: Org centred view
Barclays bank example from our FTSE-100 dataset (May26)
Second is the micro view. This enables a user to stand in the shoes of an organisation and tell their story through the data. We see this as likely playing back what an organisation may already know. But for others looking the other way there is value in inspecting competitors or for investor decision making.
This answers questions like,
How do I rank in the market? (against who?)
How well connected an I?
What relationships do I have?
What does this mean for my market opportunities?
Growth Assessment
Something very exciting for Firehills is a new milestone in our roadmap has been added which is that we are going to build a new product.
Based on all of the three core pieces of functionality of Furze (BMC, 2 x data pipelines) is the ability to create a growth assessment.
Namely testing the claims of an investment thesis, often contained in a pitch deck (org looking to secure funding) or an investment memorandum.
Using our data we will interrogate the claims made by those seeking investments. We see this as the fast and economical due diligence which investors have to repeat time and time again, at high labour costs. Potentially leaving valuable deals on the table, in favour of better understood investments following a portfolio model.
We’re actively testing this out with clients today, if you have an investment opportunity on your desk and you want to get some quick and high-quality data on your desk we would love to hear from you.
If you’d like to talk more about Furze and its promise, then feel free to get in touch rob@firehills.io
Till next month.
Rob
