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.

https://twitter.com/mikebabineau
https://secondmeasure.com/

Kevin Hale is a Partner at YC. Before working at YC he cofounded Wufoo.

https://twitter.com/ilikevests

The YC Podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

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/

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Topics

00:00 - What idea did Mike apply to YC with?

00:45 - Where did the idea come from?

4:00 - From project to company

9:45 - What info did investors want to know that Second Measure could provide?

11:30 - Their first customers

14:00 - The primary use case of Second Measure for VCs

16:45 - What questions are they trying to answer?

19:00 - Data examples from their blog

20:30 - Post: Fashion retailers have nothing to fear (yet) from the rise of Stitch Fix [https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/fashion-retailers-have-nothing-to-fear-yet-from-the-rise-of-stitch-fix/]

23:00 - Post: Holiday sales rocket Peloton memberships ahead of SoulCycle active riders [https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/peloton-subscriptions-doubled-over-past-year/]

24:30 - Post: Prime members deliver for Amazon every day [https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/prime-members-deliver-for-amazon-every-day/]

27:00 - Second Measure's product development process

29:00 - Finding good data scientists who work from first principles

36:30 - Why is credit card data so messy?

41:30 - Cleaning data

43:45 - Using their product for competitive analysis

47:00 - Their sales process

48:30 - Raising money from Goldman Sachs and Citi

51:30 - Focusing on a specific problem

53:30 - Keeping the product compelling when it's table stakes