Emma Thibaudeau is the Data Operations Manager at PitchBook. Over the past three years, she has been instrumental in bringing together our news, web crawler and machine learning groups under a single, 46-person Sourcing Operations Team, which she now manages. In the Q&A below, Emma shares what she’s learned at PitchBook so far, as well as the initiatives she’s most excited about working on next.

How has your role at PitchBook evolved?

I started in April 2016 as a Data Operations Associate on the News Team. From there, I shifted to work more on requests from clients and our sales team. Eventually, I moved on to work on our Machine Learning Team, which aims to expand our news coverage by creating a series of algorithms that can help us precisely locate data on the markets we cover.

After leading that team for about a year, I had the opportunity to bring together our news, web crawler, and machine learning groups under a single team called Sourcing Operations. Our group now focuses on identifying and analyzing potential sources of new data for use on the PitchBook Platform, including news articles, press releases, websites and regulatory filings.

More recently, I’ve started to work with our team that focuses on industry classification, taxonomy and verticals. Search is extremely important to our users, and that interaction often starts with a search by industry group or a set of keywords. However, our users often think of the same company in different ways. It’s more of a challenge than people realize to serve up accurate, relevant search results given the number of variables involved, and we want to deliver a system that’s extremely accurate and easy to use.

What does your team work on day-to-day?

Our team supports PitchBook’s news-as-a-service (NaaS) tool, demo and industry group processes. To do this, we work closely with our counterparts in Mumbai, India, as well as our partners on the PitchBook Product Team here in Seattle. We also often team up with PitchBook Labs, our in-house research and development group, which is doing amazing work to help push our technology to the next level.

Each day, we examine the efficiency of our data collection processes, evaluate new data sources and work on building and deploying training modules for our global teams, among many other things. That’s what I love most about our team. The enormous diversity of the work we do means I’m never bored!

What’s something you think most people may not understand about PitchBook’s data operations?

The availability of timely, accurate and complete data is what fuels our platform, but it’s something that can be taken for granted.

I don’t think most people realize how many different tools and processes we’ve created to uncover previously hard-to-find data points, even though that’s what allows us to provide the depth and breadth of coverage we do.

Our process goes far beyond scouring news stories. Over the years, we’ve put significant investment into developing systems and processes that allow us to acquire niche data sets in the most efficient ways possible.

What’s the most impactful project you’ve led at PitchBook?

This one is hard to answer. I’ve gotten to work on a lot of projects that I feel passionate about, but my favorite so far has been NaaS, our machine learning project. I think this system sets our news team up to scale in a way we haven’t been able to before.

I’m also proud of the steps our team took to revamp our workflows and clean up our legacy processes. We spent a lot of time examining sources, tightening up our staffing, performing analysis on software functionality and removing low-yield processes. We nicknamed the initiative “Project BBQ”, and we systematically moved through each of the components of the pipeline to ensure we understood how everything was functioning. At the end of the process, our team had a much deeper understanding of the whole ecosystem and could demonstrate with data the importance of every component.

What strategic, longer-term initiatives are you currently focused on?

Right now, our team is focused on building a robust news pipeline to track venture capital in China. Historically, it’s a market we haven’t focused on as much, but our customers have continued to articulate an interest in it, so we are responding by building out the dataset. We’re also working to expand our coverage in Europe.

Both initiatives require us to invest in our translation technology and learn more about new markets, and I’m hopeful that it will allow us to paint a more global picture of the private markets within the PitchBook Platform.

What do you do in your spare time?

I’m studying for my MBA at the University of Washington, so I head to campus on Monday and Wednesday nights for classes. The only reason I’m able to pursue this opportunity is because of the PitchBook Scholars Program, which is helping me fund my education. I’m very grateful for the chance!

When I’m not on campus or doing homework, I’m likely hanging out on the ski slopes. My fiancé and I built out a camping van in true Seattle fashion, so our routine is to pack up the van and head to the mountains every weekend. The drive is a great time to knock out work for school while taking in some amazing Northwest scenery.

Watch a short video to learn more about our Data Operations team and processes.