Jim Fowler keeps putting his faith in other people

Jim Fowler has given himself a rather small identification number. At RealHumans, the nonprofit he now leads, he is RealHuman #1. After years of building databases about people and companies, he has returned with a question that sounds almost impolite to ask across the internet: are you actually a person? His proposed answer involves other people. Someone who knows you can vouch for you; otherwise, a short call with a verifier starts the process. The old business of introductions has acquired a new assignment.

There is a recognizable Fowler pattern here. Jigsaw asked businesspeople to help maintain contact information. Owler asked them to contribute knowledge about companies. RealHumans asks them to help establish human identity. Each project puts a useful piece of the work into the hands of a community. The object has changed, from a business card to a company profile to a person at the other end of a screen. Fowler keeps coming back to the people doing the checking.

That continuity makes his career more interesting than a list of acquisitions. He has spent years testing what strangers will contribute, how information can stay useful, and why anyone would bother helping. His current project gives those questions a different setting. A sales database helps someone make a call. A verification community hopes to help someone decide whether to trust the caller.

01 /A ski farmer joins the tech circus

Fowler grew up in Santa Barbara, with the ocean and scuba diving close at hand. He graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder and became a U.S. Navy diving and salvage officer. Later he owned and operated Lookout Pass, a ski area in northern Idaho. The route into software passed through water, snow and the practical business of keeping an operation running. It was an unusual preparation for a life spent persuading people to share information.

He has called his ski-area occupation “ski farmer.” It is a tidy description of a business whose essential raw material falls from the sky on its own schedule. In the early 1990s he moved into Silicon Valley and went into sales, eventually holding vice president of sales jobs at three companies. That gave him a particular view of technology: the view from the person who has to find a prospective customer and persuade that customer to talk.

There is little distance between that problem and the idea behind Jigsaw. Before a pitch, before a demonstration, before the carefully rehearsed explanation of a product, someone needs a reliable name and a way to reach it. An incorrect record can defeat an excellent sales presentation without ever hearing a word of it. Fowler’s first software business would put that mundane obstacle near the center of its design.

02 /A business card earns its keep

Fowler co-founded Jigsaw in 2003. Its exchange was straightforward: contribute information, help maintain its quality, and earn points that could be redeemed for access to more records. People could also pay for data. The people who needed contact information became part of the machinery for keeping it useful. A business card, usually destined for a drawer, could earn another turn at work.

By April 2010, Jigsaw’s community had more than 1.2 million members. They had built and maintained records covering more than 21 million professionals at nearly four million companies. Salesforce announced an agreement to buy the company that month and announced completion in May. The purchase brought the shared database into the orbit of software already used to manage customer relationships.

The scale is worth pausing over. A contact database promises names and details, but time quietly works against it. People change jobs. Titles change. Companies move. Jigsaw’s points system gave members a reason to help with maintenance as well as collection. The useful insight was that access and upkeep could support each other. Every new record created something to use; every correction helped preserve the value of what was already there.

03 /Fowler, minus the F

The next venture began in 2011 as InfoArmy. It would become Owler, but the change involved more than finding a friendlier name. The early service sold researched company reports. Fowler later described a price around $199, with the researcher and the company splitting the proceeds. Customers’ unwillingness to buy again exposed a problem with the product. Selling another report would not, by itself, repair the reason the first report disappointed.

The team moved toward free access and a different way of gathering and distributing company information. Owler launched in 2014. The question expanded from who works at a business to what is happening around that business: its competitors, acquisitions, funding, headcount and news. A salesperson could follow a customer; an executive could watch a rival. Company information became something to keep up with, rather than a report to finish reading.

The name arrived through marketer Janet Lavine. She proposed taking the first letter off Fowler’s surname. He initially treated it as a joke. The wise-owl association helped it stick. A founder’s name had been hiding inside the brand all along, with one letter politely excused. It supplied an easy introduction, too: Fowler from Owler. Marketing occasionally earns its lunch by noticing what is already on the door.

“Hi, I’m Fowler from Owler.”

JIM FOWLER, ON THE NAME THAT STUCK

04 /The people who fix the numbers

Owler’s premise depended on something more complicated than collecting a heap of answers. Private-company revenue and employee counts are difficult to establish. Contributors have different knowledge, and some answers will be wrong. Fowler explained that Owler weighted contributions differently through its algorithms. The crowd supplied information; the system still had to decide how much confidence to place in it.

He also described a less cynical experience of contributors than one might expect. People sometimes supplied misleading information about competitors, but he said that was not the norm. Investors, salespeople and product people could all take an interest in putting a record right. There is a familiar pleasure in correcting a number that is wrong on the internet. Fowler had found a business use for it.

That distinction matters when looking at Owler today. Revenue estimates are estimates. They can help someone build a list or decide what to investigate, while still inviting further checking. The appeal of the community was its access to scattered knowledge. The challenge was turning that knowledge into something a working person could use without treating every contribution as an audited fact.

05 /A departure written into the plan

In August 2018, Fowler announced that co-founder Tim Harsch had become Owler’s CEO and that he was moving to executive chairman. He explained that this had been his intention from the start: he would hand over the CEO role when his son finished high school. The succession plan had a family calendar attached to it. A milestone outside the company set the timing of a change inside it.

Harsch had already been serving as chief operating officer and, Fowler said, effectively running the business. The announcement followed the closing of a funding round. Fowler described their shared ambition to build company intelligence through millions of business professionals. The handoff put someone who knew the operation in charge of its next stage. It also made a promise about stepping aside visible, rather than leaving it in the category of things founders say they will get around to.

Three years later, Meltwater announced its agreement to acquire Owler for $24.5 million in cash and equity. At that point, Owler’s community counted five million active business professionals contributing to 14 million company profiles. The figures belong to that 2021 announcement; they mark how far the venture had traveled by the time of the deal. Fowler’s second experiment in shared business information had found another owner.

06 /The next record is a human being

Away from those databases, Fowler has pursued journeys that resist being reduced to a quick commute. He has cycled from Cairo to Cape Town and from Cartagena to Ushuaia. These are separate routes across Africa and South America, connected in his biography by a taste for long-distance bicycle touring. The former ski-area operator has kept finding reasons to spend time outside an office.

RealHumans, founded in 2025, brings him back to organizing a community. Its stated mission is to build a network of verified people through human interaction. The foundation says it does not sell members’ data, store biometrics or keep copies of identity documents. Verification is free. Those commitments put boundaries around what this particular database is supposed to become.

The process offers two routes. An existing member who knows someone can provide a one-time code. A newcomer without that connection can arrange a short video call with a Guardian, a trusted verifier. On that route, identification is briefly shown; the organization says the call is not recorded and the document is not retained. Once verified, a member can create proof-of-personhood links to share elsewhere.

The ambition is easy to understand, even if building such a community requires much more than explaining it. A useful contact record helped establish where to direct a message. A useful company profile helped establish what to say. Now Fowler is working on the question that comes before both: who is really there? RealHuman #1 has given the crowd another piece of work. He has also put his own name at the beginning of the queue.