Australian startup snapshot: The Search Party

'Data is our game,' says CEO Jamie Carlisle

The Search Party CEO Jamie Carlisle was part of the management team at Spreets when it sold for $40 million to Yahoo!7. Credit: N2N Communications

The Search Party CEO Jamie Carlisle was part of the management team at Spreets when it sold for $40 million to Yahoo!7. Credit: N2N Communications

Sharpening data analysis

Carlisle sees data crunching as The Search Party’s greatest asset and the company continues to invest in data science, he said. The company soon plans to expand its data team, and will likely employ six to eight data scientists by year end, he said.

“Data is our game,” he said. “It’s super important that we have people who understand how to use data so we make better product decisions and make better a product experience for our users.”

The Search Party’s data scientists have studied “hundreds of thousands” of previous job vacancies, looking at what kind of candidate has applied and who has been most successful in getting placement, he said. “Where appropriate we can actually see how long they’ve stayed and where they’ve moved on from there.”

Several hundred data points can be taken from a single CV, he estimated. “For every two million CVs, we create roughly two trillion data relationships. So it’s really, really big data.”

“From that you can start to build pretty sophisticated recommendation algorithms.”

In the next 18 months, Carlisle said he hopes to at least match LinkedIn in terms of quantity of local data. “I think ours will be much deeper and much higher quality.”

The Search Party also wants to expand abroad. The company plans to go to the UK first and later the US, Carlisle said.

Startup scene

Carlisle said it’s still very early days for the Australian startup environment.

“Like any new startup scene, you get a lot of incredible ideas, energy and effort,” he said. “You also get a lot of people spinning each other’s wheels [and] lots of networking events that really lead to very little other than high fives and bum slaps.”

Also read: How tech startups rate Australia

The scene is also “guilty of being a China,” with many startups copying ideas from larger markets and adapting them to Australia, he said. “In order to be a genuine hub of technology, you need to innovate.”

Something that greatly concerns Carlisle is seeing “Australian darlings of technology” moving to London, he said. For example, Atlassian recently announced it would register as a UK business to better set itself up for international growth.

“It’s a bloody disgrace that a company the size of Atlassian would need to go offshore to get the money and the types of valuation and exposure it needs,” Carlisle said. “It shows absolute abject failure by the Australian investment community to allow that to happen.

“The government needs to sit up and pay attention. I think investors need to sit up and pay attention. And I think entrepreneurs need to make that choice early whether they think under the current Australian conditions and climate they can flourish here.”

Despite coming from the UK himself, Carlisle would like to keep The Search Party in Australia, he said.

“We feel we can for the time being, but that’s something we will continue to evaluate depending on the support of government and local investors.”

Previous startup snapshots:

Bluethumb
CoinJar
Kicktone
Bluedot
WeTeachMe
Drivelist
Showgizmo

If you’ve got a startup or know about a cool new Australian business, please email Adam Bender at adam_bender@idg.com.au or on Twitter (@WatchAdam).

Adam Bender covers startup and business tech issues for Techworld and is the author of a dystopian novel about surveillance. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam

Follow Techworld Australia on Twitter: @Techworld_AU

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