i’m proud to announce kp’s investment in an exciting young company, clearstory data. you may have read about it last week, clearstory is an innovative company with seasoned people at the intersection of some pretty massive trends, so we are thrilled to be involved. i am leading this series A investment for kp and will join the clearstory board — and am also excited to work with investing partners andreessen horowitz and google ventures.

it’s no secret data is becoming more important. it’s past cliche, right? data impacts the large social networks. it impacts ad networks on the web and mobile. and, it even impacts governments and political power. we all know this. but if we focus on the realm of software for a minute (and there are many great data startups also working on hardware, servers, storage, etc.), the software opportunities in big data, especially at the infrastructure and application layers, are massive. with clearstory, the focus is on business analytics — itself a big category within data software applications — and fits alongside other great startups in this space, such as domo, platfora, and kaggle, among others.

the great coverage of clearstory data’s launch and announcement go into the product details quite well. on top of this, i’d like to personally highlight one dimension that excited me as an investor in the space. in addition to backing a great, small, lean, seasoned team with lots of experience in data, i’ve seen over the years, from my time at composite software to palm to twitter, and even at kp, that companies desperately want to leverage their data yesterday, but there aren’t many people with the requisite data science and computer science skills to help them. as a result, data functions and the data itself becomes put in a silo, accessible only to a few people. and, the most sophisticated tools in the space come at a cost, a cost that some larger companies aren’t as willing to incur. add to this security issues of larger companies, and most platforms run the risk of being stuck.

the reason i’m interested in a company like clearstory is because they’ve built out a product and modeled it to allow companies to simultaneously secure their data while allowing their people to leverage it with dead-simple interfaces. think of all the inefficiencies in modern work. the constant reporting, or seeing troubling trends too late. the data doesn’t lie, and a company like clearstory is on a mission to make data transparent, accessible, and actionable in today’s work environment. and, for me, that’s something i want to be involved with.

as you may have caught last week, kleiner announced a new program around supporting design as a craft. we all worked really hard to put this together and are grateful for the support from our founders and former colleagues to make this happen. and, we were lucky to get some great coverage for it too. in a nutshell, as we learned from our engineering fellows program, we wanted to devise an infrastructure where we could help emerging designers get great, hands-on experience and match them with designers who are already practicing in their field. the result is the creation of a design fellows program, which designers can apply to, and a design council, which will help mentor the next generation of great interface creators.

i also wanted to share, from an engineer’s perspective, just how critical design is which I fully appreciated during our development of webOS. everyone knows it takes great engineers and designers to create great products. twenty years ago, engineers had to create all UI, as not many others knew how to build in MFC. ten years ago, designers were doing production work, but interaction design was really nonexistent. fast-forward to today, and a design team is focused on human interaction, including user research, visual design, and interaction design. a few years ago when i was at palm, the webOS design team worked with the development team through a process to ship v1.0 and 11 post-releases (shout out to matias duarte). as we were leading these discussions, we fielded ideas from both designers and engineers, but at the end of the day, designers won the vote (pending the ability for engineering to execute, of course).

but as products get more complicated and have more usage, product managers emerge to handle product management, communication, and advocate for the customer. the problem here is that having too many PMs in the kitchen fighting over turf, credit, and features, the engineering team can get thrown in all sorts of directions. it’s not that different from politics, in some cases! and in the case of engineers, they oftentimes are called on to build *and* maintain, the latter which is often greatly underestimated and can be a thankless job in and of itself. more on this topic in a later post.

i’m not an expert in organizational structures, so i’m only speaking here from first-hand experience from company building, intuition, and gut. for each product or company, there’s an optimal number/ratio of engineers, designers, and PMs…all play a crucial role. at kleiner, and looking ahead to how these structures evolve, especially as phones and tablets become customers’ primary computing devices, the importance of design will — we believe — only grow. this is not to say that engineering or product management will recede, but rather to acknowledge that building strong, deep capabilities and networks in this artful skill will be a great benefit to everyone in the kleiner family.

the next evolution of the designer/engineer founding team may be the addition of a domain expert which would culminate in cross-disciplinary innovation –  but lets discuss that in a future post.