Why Predict42? Our Founder Story.

Why 42?

Our company name started as a “nerdy” joke. For those who are not familiar with the book/serie “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, the number 42 was given as the answer by a supercomputer “Deep Thought” after calculating for 7,5 Mio. Years. Take a quick look at below sequence, when “Deep Thought” gives the answer. Does this remind you of some of the challenges you face in your company?

At the end of the day, the answer 42 is meaningless (despite all the efforts) as the question was badly posed.

We believe the same is true in today’s business world, as most of the effort is place on finding satisfying answers, rather than finding & iterating towards the right questions.

Above statement is even more true in today’s digital and data-driven world, as everybody suggests and expects great tech and analytics to solve all kinds of problems.

Problem to solve

You might disagree, arguing that you understand your buiness and customers really well. But imagine you would combine the following pools of know-how to discuss you business challenges.

1. Business Know-How, meaning customer and business understanding
2. Analytics Know-how, meaning understanding of statistics and math
3. IT/Technology Know, meaning how to develop and run applications

We argue, that looking at your challenge from a single of these three perspectives, will result in potentially ill-formulated questions. Bringing all perspectives together and creating a space where Business, Analytics, IT can discuss and find the rights questions is key to success. If all these disciplines can agree on the key question and then subsequently on questions resulting from this key question, good things will happen.

Our Solution

While this seems easy, it is extremely difficult to manage. We know this from years of past experience as line managers and as founders of Predict42, that many companies fail at this specific point (discussing what the key questions are among these three disciplines). Our purpose is to help you to ask the right questions by enabling you to:

1. Prototype with quantified business impact: Based on your initial key questions, we will build analytical prototypes. These visual and interactive prototypes help you understand business value and implications.
2. Learn by challenging the prototype results: Using our interactive prototypes, we go back and forth to identify and answer the key business questions. This iterative learning-based approach creates understanding and acceptance among all stakeholders
3. Automate the process and implement the solution: We help you implement the solution by either providing scripting logic or a full application.

Founder Story Thomas