David Soloff went shopping. The numbers didn’t add up.

David Soloff went looking for groceries and found a problem with the economy’s paperwork. In 2009, while headlines described falling prices, the staples in his own shopping basket seemed to be getting dearer. The discrepancy sent him back to a deceptively plain question: how did anyone know what things actually cost?

For most shoppers, that inquiry ends at the checkout. Soloff had spent time in quantitative finance and software. He could imagine a business in the distance between an event and its appearance in a respectable-looking number. By 2012, he and Joe Reisinger had co-founded Premise to collect economic observations closer to where life was happening.

A market stall makes an unlikely rival to a statistical office. It does, however, enjoy the considerable advantage of being open when the customer arrives.

First, let the eggs go cold

Another meal provides an earlier glimpse of Soloff at work. In a 2011 essay, he described a New York breakfast with a former hedge-fund trader in the summer of 2008. Soloff wanted to gather advertising transaction data and make it useful across a market. His companion thought the infrastructure would cost too much.

The pleasure of the account lies in Soloff’s willingness to make himself ridiculous. He remembered talking while his eggs cooled, and repeatedly inflated the price of breakfast as the story progressed. The escalating bill was the joke; the objection about computing costs was serious. An elegant theory would still need somewhere affordable to keep its data.

“At this point I should say that I talk a lot,” he wrote. His friend’s verdict was shorter: “It’ll never work.”

It is a useful founder portrait: appetite for an idea, an impatient audience, and the nuisance of making the arithmetic behave. Soloff’s eventual answer rested partly on falling storage and processing costs. Technology was changing the price of asking questions at scale.

“I don’t apologize for the business we’re building, not to anyone.”

David Soloff, discussing Metamarkets in 2010

Ancient worlds, modern prices

His education offers a less predictable opening chapter than a childhood spent dismantling computers. At Columbia, Soloff studied Near Eastern languages and cultures. At Berkeley, he pursued the social, economic and linguistic history of the Greek and Roman world, supported by Javits and Pritchett fellowships.

The subjects belong to a life concerned with interpretation: what people leave behind, what records disclose, what a fragment can reasonably tell you about a larger system. It would be too neat to claim that antiquity caused Premise. The interesting fact is that these studies and those businesses coexist in the same biography.

Finance supplied another education. Soloff worked as a quantitative analyst, then in advertising technology at Rapt. With Michael Driscoll, he developed Metamarkets, whose early proposition was to help media companies understand the transactions passing through their own businesses.

In 2010, he explained the imbalance that interested him. Financial markets offered participants abundant information; publishers possessed transaction data without necessarily having the means to use it. A company could sell the ability to understand what was already flowing through the customer’s hands.

That is a fairly exact description of a recurring Soloff concern: economic activity generates evidence, yet the person who needs that evidence may be poorly equipped to read it.

The economy takes a walk

At Premise, the evidence included things that could be bought from an actual shelf. A contributor could receive an assignment on an Android phone, photograph a product and its price, and submit an observation for payment. Online price collection supplied another stream of information.

The physical world was essential. An internet search cannot stand in every market, inspect every display or discover everything a local resident already knows. Premise organized people and software around that gap. Reisinger brought machine-learning experience; Soloff brought a founder’s insistence that the gap was worth paying attention to.

By its October 2013 unveiling, Premise had a network of roughly 700 contractors in 25 cities. The operation had to make observations comparable and useful, rather than merely plentiful. Contributors were trained and their work checked before acceptance. Location information helped place each observation in context.

A photograph was the beginning of an assignment’s value. The business depended on what could happen after it arrived: analysis, aggregation, an index, a decision. Customers could also receive raw data to examine using their own processes.

Soloff’s complaint about slow information had a practical edge. Decisions about money and inventories were being made while the underlying picture was still travelling through a lengthy collection process. A faster pipeline could give a customer time to respond while a change was still unfolding.

India’s onion prices became an early example. In 2014, Soloff described Premise detecting increases months before the policy response he cited. The claim expressed the product’s purpose: seeing a change earlier might matter more than describing it elegantly afterward.

A price tag acquires a passport

The people carrying the phones were part of the proposition, too. Premise paid for accepted contributions, with compensation varying by task and location. By September 2015, the company said it had distributed nearly $3 million in fees. Observation had become a small paid job fitted around ordinary movement through a city.

Its questions were expanding beyond the price of food. In Brazil, contributors recorded bottled-water prices and whether public taps worked. Elsewhere, photographs helped examine electrical connections or whether promised roads existed. A company born around economic indicators was learning to ask about the physical conditions behind them.

There was a commercial argument and a public-purpose argument. Banks and other businesses wanted useful information. Governments and development organizations wanted a clearer view of conditions in places where collecting it could be difficult. Soloff argued that serving both aims could belong inside one company.

Bowery Capital’s account of its investment emphasized the founders’ wish to improve economic transparency, but also their methodical attention to early customers and revenue. The combination matters. A vision can be global while its next useful step is getting a particular customer to pay for a particular answer.

Premise’s expansion also required changes in leadership. In February 2018, Maury Blackman, previously CEO of Accela, succeeded Soloff as chief executive. Soloff stayed on as chairman at that transition. The company continued; the founding CEO’s daily job changed.

That moment deserves its own punctuation. Founding a business gives someone a permanent place in its history. The executive seat belongs to a particular period.

When a measurement becomes a promise

Soloff’s later venture asked what economic information might do inside an insurance contract. Founded in 2020, OTT Risk brought him together with Chamath Palihapitiya around business interruption: losses that could occur even when a building remained physically intact.

In a 2021 public discussion, they described an effort to connect that risk with insurance capacity and capital markets. It was another application for the idea that a better view of economic activity could support a useful product.

The mechanism was parametric insurance. Payments could be linked to agreed economic indices or industry measures associated with business losses. This places considerable weight on the choice of indicator. A measurement must be convincing enough to become part of a promise about money.

OTT Risk entered the ninth cohort of Lloyd’s Lab in 2022. During the accelerator, it developed revenue protection for the digital economy and agreed a capacity partnership with Apollo’s ibott Syndicate 1971. The work moved the question from an abstract model toward insurance distribution and underwriting.

The venture did not endure. Its cessation of operations was reported in September 2024. OTT Risk UK Limited was dissolved on 13 January 2026. Those are part of the record alongside the accelerator place and the partnership. An interesting problem, even one backed by substantial experience, does not guarantee a lasting company.

Three books, one recurring question

For a 2020 conversation about building data businesses, Soloff offered a reading list that makes a pleasingly unruly bookcase: Robert Shiller’s Narrative Economics, Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson’s The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

Stories, risk and an unfamiliar world. A reader need not turn the list into a personality test to see why it belongs near this career. Soloff has moved between disciplines that require someone to make sense of incomplete evidence, then decide what can responsibly be built from it.

His businesses have addressed advertising transactions, observations from markets and revenue protection. Each puts a practical question to information: who needs it, what can it reveal, and who will pay to have it?

The grocery trip remains the most human entrance to that work. A shopper looks at a price, looks at an account of the world, and notices the two do not seem to agree. Soloff kept asking questions after he got home. The milk, at least, had done its part.