Podcast: Auren Hoffman Tells The Truth

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SafeGraph launched this year with $16 million in funding from more than 100 investors, and a very driven founder in former LiveRamp CEO Auren Hoffman.

On the podcast this week, Hoffman talks about his trajectory and his new company’s pure focus on providing accurate location data.

“Our goal is to focus on truth: what happened, where it happened and when it happened – and that’s it,” he says. “Our clients then figure out why something happened or how it happened or what will happen in the future.”

And who are those clients? Marketing is a very important use case, according to Hoffman, but not the dominant one. The company will also sell to customers in verticals such as insurance, academia, automotive, retail and real estate, to name a few.

Although it’s easiest to sell in the marketing vertical because it’s one that Hoffman and his team know quite well, “we have to become like mini-experts in each vertical,” he says.

Not coincidentally, SafeGraph is aided in that challenge by the sheer number of investors in the company, plugged-in people it can call on for advice and introductions.

The company also has a traditional VC investor in IDG Ventures, which previously put money into Krux and whose managing director, Alex Rosen, sits on the SafeGraph board.

“We went with them because they have a lot of experience in the data world,” Hoffman says.

Also in this episode: Hoffman’s angel investing philosophy, the untold story of how RapLeaf became LiveRamp and did LiveRamp sell to Axciom too soon? (Spoiler alert: yes.)