Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with David Myers Column Editor: Darrell W. Gunter (President & CEO, Gunter Media Group) <d.gunter@guntermediagroup.com> DARRELL GUNTER: I’m pleased to interview a very longtime, industry friend and colleague, Mr. David Myers. He’s the CEO of the Data Licensing Alliance and the CEO of DMedia. David, welcome to the Innovators Saga. I appreciate you coming on to talk about the Data Licensing Alliance. DAVID MYERS: I appreciate it, Darrell. It’s always great to see you and have conversations. We’ve known each other for a long time, so happy to be on the show. DG: Yeah, we didn’t have gray hair back then. DM: Yes. Trials and tribulations of the industry, you know what I’m saying! DG: There you go, there you go. So, if you could, for our audience, could you share a little bit about your education background so our audience can get to know you a little bit? DM: Absolutely. I’ve had a really varied background and I think that, interestingly enough, I didn’t have a vision of how all the pieces would fit together, but it interestingly works for what I do. Education-wise, I have an undergraduate degree in genetics and business. I received my MBA from Pepperdine University and went to work for Texaco, a Fortune 10 company, doing strategic planning and then was a commodity trader for them. At the same time, because of the timing of that, I was on the West Coast, I worked for them in the morning, and then I did investment banking at night and then went full-time investment banking for a number of years, came back to the East Coast and went to law school at night and started my first company. I was part of a great little venture in the dotcom era that we ended up selling to a New York company. Then I got recruited into the publishing industry where you and I got to know each other. That was in early 2000. I went to work for Wolters Kluwer. At the time it was Ovid, but I was one of their first hires when Ovid was acquired by Wolters Kluwer. I worked for them for seven years and then left and started my own consultancy, DMedia Associates, and still have that company to this day. We’re a bespoke consultancy helping very large, or really companies of all sizes, but very large organizations with their data licensing needs as a service business. Well, let me take a step back. I know firsthand how complicated and inefficient the licensing of data is from my consultancy. And, so, during COVID, I came up with an idea — I’d been struggling with this idea actually for a long time — of how to make licensing more efficient. I came up with Data Licensing Alliance. It’s like the product side of my service business. It’s the yin to the yang, and it is a marketplace for licensing data specifically for AI. We’re focusing on AI. We have since the beginning, way before ChatGPT and all this generative AI noise that has come into the marketplace, but we’ve been doing it for a better part of three years. And that’s me in a nutshell. DG: This is very interesting. You said that the Data Licensing Alliance is to make the process more, is it more transparent, would you say? DM: That’s a great question. It’s certainly more transparent. Our tagline is we make AI smarter, but really what it is, is, it’s the
Against the Grain / December 2023 - January 2024
marketplace that makes it easier for data science to license data for their efforts. And it’s applicable to any type of data. We happen to be focusing on the sciences and drug discovery as a first niche, but we have other niches as well. If you think about it, just like Amazon matches somebody selling T-shirts to somebody wanting to buy T-shirts, DLA will match buyers and sellers of data. So, just like you go on Amazon and you find different products that you want to add to your cart, and then you check out. It’s essentially the same thing on the DLA marketplace. DG: Wow, that’s awesome. So, who sets the price? Does the publisher set their own price or is there a negotiation on the platform between the buyer and the seller? DM: We put the power with a licensor, or seller in more layman’s terms. Absolutely. We make it more turnkey. There is no real negotiation. When you’re on Amazon and you see again a T-shirt for $12.95, you’re not negotiating with the seller. You either like that price or you don’t like that price. The licensor has the ability to price their products in multiple different ways on our platform, and they’re the one that sets the price. We really see ourselves as a channel to democratize data. DG: I guess in one sense you’re also an aggregator of data that people can then search, find and decide they want a license. DM: Absolutely, yes. An aggregator in that sense, just like Amazon is an aggregator of, again, I use that analogy of T-shirts and everything else. We are, too. DG: Wow. And how long has the platform been in service? DM: We started about three years ago, actually about three and a half years now. And great timing with COVID, of course, but it didn’t really affect us by and large because the whole industry is moving towards digital, it’s moving towards virtual. And so our problem doesn’t go away. My DMedia business, the DLA business, it’s all been pretty steady since then. DG: Absolutely, absolutely. And if you can publicly disclose this, if you can’t, I understand, but how many customers do you have on the platform currently? DM: I don’t want to get too far into that. We have a number of very prominent sellers like John Wiley and Sons, and American Medical Association and a bunch of others. We’ve been focusing really on the supply side and we’re onboarding a number of others before we really roll out too hard to the buy side. DG: Okay. Wow. And so what do you see as your main selling point to the licensor? DM: So, on the supply side, right? You’re asking why would they want to do that? Great question. There’s a number of issues that data owners have, and it’s because, number one, data licensing is very complicated. And I would say the majority do not have any experience or comfort level in licensing data. They understand how to sell subscriptions. People have been doing it for a long time, but licensing data, especially for AI, it’s a different animal. We offer expertise. We offer simplicity. We offer a channel to be able to target different layers of the ecosystem.
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