Czech Startups: Stories

( This interview with Vojta Roček, the co-founder of Czech start-up Stories, which comes with a new analysis of corporate data, was published at CzechStartups.org ) Stories is a unique start-up which through its approach to Big Data can change how big corporations work with information. One of its co-founders, Vojta Roček revealed for you the plans of this promising company. Read more in our interview! We have heard a lot about Stories in the last few weeks. Almost all tech internet media talked about the next level of business intelligence tools which Stories are working on. The reason for it was that this promising Czech start-up has received an investment of 15 mil. CZK from the Czech company Logio, which deals with the problems of managing supply chains. For Czech standards, it’s not a small amount and it corresponds with the experience of the trio Filip Doušek, Peter Fedoročko and Vojta Roček, the three founders of the company. What plans do they have with the investment? What is their daily work? How hard were their beginnings? You can find answers for not only these questions in our interview with one of the co-founder of Stories, Vojta Roček. Q 1: Thank you very much for your time Vojta. Please, tell us for starters, what is your start-up Stories about and what is its main idea? Decision-making process in large enterprises is currently under pressure. It is happening without enough precise information and often very late. We are trying to change this process and allow management not only to focus on operations, but also include the overall strategy. Our tool is trying to give the management only the information with business value, therefore it is including primarily the most important and current trends, which have the greatest financial impact and leaves out the less important factors. Q 2: The basis of your work is the analysis and daily work with a huge amount of data. In your opinion, the most significant date, are those with the biggest financial impact. That is actually understandable since today´s world is focused mainly on finances. But what about other data, those without significant financial impact, are they important for you as well, or not? At this moment we judge data purely based on finance aspects. With our tools we are able to transfer any trend to money. That is the unique thing Stories poses and thanks to this our tool can pay for itself very quickly. But this aim is also connected to the group of our primary clients which usually comes from FMCG retail and banking sector. Q 3: How far in advance can you predict these trends? We are asking because you collaborate with large corporations, which probably need to know trends as soon as possible, are we right? It cannot be generalized. Every day we make around 10 mil. specific views for each of our clients; it is a combination of various data. We will look at all trends and find the most important ones. Sometimes, it will show that there is a fast growing problem in a in the matter of weeks, sometimes strategically more significant thing which will become a problem in the matter of years. We cannot know that up front, we have no chance to see it, but that is the beauty and benefit of our tool – that we eventually identify it. As the world around us is spinning faster every day and becoming more complex, our experience has taught us that the most important thing is the short response time of the key people. Those are the very people we help to find the new trends. We explain them and allow them to react to these trends. Q 4: A short time ago, we have informed our readers about the investment you have received from the Czech company Logio. It is very clear for us that you are fully occupied by it now, but would you share with us what are your short-time plans for the future and how significant is the amount that you have received, 15 mil. CZK? We are developing not just technologically, but also humanly very demanding start-up. After two years of R&D and testing hypotheses on the data of real clients, this amount of 15 mil. CZK will allow us to build fully scalable architecture, which will not have performance limits and it will also allow us to expand capabilities of our tool towards machine learning and predictions. Logio is a unique Czech company – the values they stand for and the approach to business they believe in is something we like very much and we, as Stories, truly appreciate, that we have agreed on the seed investment with them and no-one else. Once again we would like to thank you for taking the time to share a few thought with our readers. We will keep our fingers crossed for you and we also wish your many satisfied customers. If you want to know more about Stories, take a look at their official website, you will find it at http://www.stories.bi