This is my first blog entry since the acquisition of Dorado, the company I founded with Rob Carpenter, by CoreLogic and yes, it seems like a lifetime ago. Back in March, the combination just made sense. And I’ve been proven right now, 6 months later.
When I look at the market over the next three years I believe there is growth on the horizon. The right partnership would help us realize that growth potential while at the same time continue to provide a team of entrepreneurial computer engineers with opportunity to do something really interesting. I like to tell prospective team members during a job interview, “what is going to have the biggest impact on your kids’ lives? Building yet another site so they can find their old high school flame or laying the network cloud down that puts them into a home to raise their kids without bringing down the world’s economy?”
To me, to be successful, the market will move quickly from data processing to information processing. What is the difference? I’ll give you a simple example when I check the weather app on my iPhone. Data is barometric pressure, satellite imagery, radiosondes that measure temperature, humidity, wind speed, and cosmic ray intensity, etc. My little display on my iPhone shows me a little sun, or little sun with clouds, over the next five days. Those little drawings of a sunny day are information – easily digestible information – that allows me to quickly make decisions about what to wear on a particular day anywhere in the world.
Information processing is a combination of data – reams of it, the network to provide ubiquitous and predictable access to it, and technology to make it consumable and digestible.
CoreLogic is all about data. They are the largest provider of data in this industry and others. The have the largest Oracle database on the planet right next to the largest Sybase database on the same planet. Its almost impossible to close a residential loan without some data housed in CoreLogic’s data centers. [what are some examples of CLGX data that would be interesting?]
Dorado is pure technology. Empowered by CoreLogic’s data, we’ve become part of a larger overall strategy to provide technology to the market that transforms data into actionable information. That technology represents an intelligent and robust grid that provides ubiquitous access to data, an open platform to lay composite applications that digest and disseminate that data as usable information – for example loan processing. And services on top of those applications – to add even more value such as outsource services or business consulting.
The empowerment of Dorado by CoreLogic excited me last spring, and now that our combination has proved successful – more than we anticipated – I’m looking forward to the next few years to come. We are on track to make every loan on the planet, better and safer.
