Meet the team: Timothy Ong

One of the larger projects I’m working on is a portfolio dashboard that will enable us to track the activity and performance of our portfolio companies. It’s valuable to figure out what types of initiatives have the most impact on portfolio company metrics, so we prioritize and use a data-driven approach to build a model of engagement for each company that comes into our portfolio, identifying key factors that correlate with higher fund ROI.

 2. What attracted you to working at B Capital?

The team’s focus and acumen attracted me to the firm. Everyone is committed to the vision and  building out business intelligence capabilities while balancing that with realistic expectations, challenges, and opportunities. The ethos of being bold and willing to do things differently (while acknowledging the risks involved) also attracted me to the firm. It’s exciting to be a part of this exceptional team.

 3. If you weren’t in this career, what would you be doing?

I would probably be involved with museums or the art world.  Since I was young, I enjoyed going to museums to look at paintings, sculptures, and photography. Sometimes words (or data) aren’t the best medium to convey an idea or point of view. Art, in all its depth and creative forms, can be a great way to communicate. More broadly, it’s about ways of seeing the world – creatively, politically, culturally. It’s a good balance to all the data work that I do!

 4. How have you seen technology innovation impact your function or field?

 I’ll highlight two areas.

First, data and analytics is becoming a core business function. The accelerated development of data preparation/transformation tools, distributed cloud database querying, and dashboarding tools have changed where data and analytics roles reside. Technological innovation is not just in technology but also in thinking. Data and analytics teams have moved to a more active stance of being involved in strategy planning and driving decision-making for companies.

Second, the shift to graph technology as the future. Connected data (relationships) is at the heart of this. Graph technology (databases) aims to mimic the real-world interconnectedness of relationships to enable us to discover connections in combinations of diverse data, at scale and at speed. It’s the most efficient means of processing data. Facebook uses it to find “friends of friends”, credit card companies use it in machine learning models to detect fraud. It’s an interesting space that is fast becoming dominant.

5. What’s something people may not know about you?

I learned how to dive when I was 12 and eventually became a certified scuba diving instructor. I’ve logged dives in beautiful places like Bali, Manado, Phuket, and Australia. I’ve also had my fair share of encounters with marine animals along the way.  I hope to make a trip to the Galapagos islands and dive with hammerhead sharks soon.

Connect with Tim on LinkedIn!