Nick Jordan and the trouble with having all the data

Nick Jordan was surrounded by data. At Tapad, where he led product and strategy, the business depended on understanding how consumers moved between digital devices. Yet a data scientist could still propose a promising experiment and bring the machinery to a halt. The information needed to test it belonged somewhere else.

Getting it meant finding a supplier, helping that supplier figure out what to sell, negotiating a price, working through permissions, and building an integration. After all that, the data might duplicate what the team already had. Or the hypothesis might simply fail. A perfectly reasonable question had acquired the administrative life of a minor construction project.

Jordan's irritation was specific. His team wanted detailed information whose origins they could inspect. The available offerings too often simplified it into something less useful. He looked for software he could buy. When the search disappointed him, he founded Narrative in 2016. His starting point was the experience of being a frustrated customer.

That gives the business a rather human origin. Before there was a platform, there was someone trying to get on with his job. The question behind it remains easy to understand: why should the preparation for an experiment be more elaborate than the experiment itself?

A career spent between the machines and the money

Jordan's working life crossed several versions of the advertising technology business. At Yahoo, he was a senior director responsible for pricing and yield management around acquired assets including Right Media. These were questions about what a system could do and what its output was worth. The technical and commercial arguments occupied the same room.

He went on to run product management at Demdex, which Adobe acquired in 2011. The product became Adobe Audience Manager. At Tapad, he served as senior vice president of product and strategy, helping the company move from a media business toward licensing data and technology. Telenor acquired Tapad for $360 million in 2016.

Those are company outcomes, not a tally of Jordan's personal proceeds. Their relevance to his story is the sequence of problems he encountered: managing advertising markets, organizing audience information, and making data useful across devices. Narrative grew from a career spent close to the joins between systems.

A join is an unglamorous place to build a company. It is also where one team's finished work can become another team's impossible assignment. Jordan had seen enough of those handoffs to recognize a business hiding in the inconvenience.

Selling the same barrel twice

In his 2019 manifesto, Jordan took apart the familiar comparison between data and oil. Information has an awkward property for anyone relying too heavily on the metaphor: you can sell it repeatedly without using it up. Its value also changes with the buyer's problem. A dataset that is irrelevant to one business can matter greatly to another.

The implication is that usefulness requires specificity. More information alone does not tell a buyer what to do with it. A supplier needs to describe what is being offered; a customer needs enough control to decide whether it fits. The oil slogan supplies an attractive poster. It leaves quite a lot of the actual work unassigned.

Jordan also resisted an easy marketplace story. In a 2019 video conversation, he explained that data could be sold through many outlets, making exclusivity difficult. He saw the surrounding software as central to Narrative's position: buyers and sellers would return because managing the transaction there made their work easier.

That is a quieter ambition than simply owning the place where everybody shops. It puts the daily experience of using the software at the center of the business. The destination matters, but so does how many forms you must complete when you arrive.

“They didn’t want someone else’s idea of what might be valuable.”

Nick Jordan, on his Tapad data team

From a grievance to something people could buy

By August 2020, Narrative had announced an $8.5 million Series A led by G20 Ventures. It also introduced its Data Streams Marketplace, giving the founding complaint a more concrete commercial form. The funding announcement tied the marketplace to tools for discovery, onboarding, enrichment, and identity resolution.

When Jordan explained the business in early 2022, he described two sides. Enterprise buyers could discover data, assemble what they needed, transact, and receive it. Sellers could use Data Shops to put their own information on the market. He compared the latter to Shopify for data: software for establishing a sales operation rather than doing every task by hand.

In that account, a seller could get started in days. The point of the comparison was familiar commerce. A business ought to spend more time deciding what it has to offer and less time constructing the mechanism through which another business can buy it.

There is a discipline in explaining an unfamiliar product through familiar work. Jordan's vocabulary often returns to customers, transactions, and the effort between them. For a company operating amid databases and algorithms, the recurring question is pleasantly ordinary: can somebody actually use this?

The founder who wanted a smaller job

Jordan's view of leadership has a useful sting. “My goal is to be the least effective person on my team,” he said in 2021. He wanted colleagues who could do their jobs better than he could, leaving him to concentrate on responsibilities such as fundraising, investor relationships, and the company's direction.

The same conversation placed Narrative's product decisions in the customer's hands. Jordan described thinking of himself as a user of the platform. He also argued that marketing technology had become needlessly complicated, with businesses forced to string together tools while large integrated platforms offered a simpler experience.

Both ideas involve a willingness to stop being the center of everything. Hire people who do not need you hovering over their work. Build software that does not demand a seminar before someone can accomplish a task. Complexity may impress the seller; it still sends an invoice to the buyer.

In May 2023, Tim Mahlman became Narrative's CEO. Jordan moved into a strategic role focused on initiatives and growth opportunities. He remains listed as founder. The change separated founding the company from occupying its top operating position, while keeping him involved in its direction.

Four versions of the same customer

Jordan's later writing moves from buying data to understanding it. In April 2025, he used an imagined customer named Sarah to show what fragmented identity can do to analytics. She browses on one device, responds on another, joins a loyalty program elsewhere, and buys in a store. Separate records can make one person look like several.

The example explains why he advocates composable identity: choosing the information and connections that fit a particular business rather than accepting an opaque packaged graph. The danger in his illustration is a confident report built from the wrong picture. The charts can look orderly while the customer underneath them has been multiplied.

In July 2025, he applied a similar practical test to retail media networks. A retailer selling advertising needs more than connected databases. It needs products advertisers want, sales capabilities, billing, onboarding, and agreement between departments. Jordan explicitly placed commercial strategy and staffing outside what Narrative's software could supply.

That boundary gives his argument some bite. Software can remove technical obstacles. The business still has to decide what it is selling and who will do the work. A working pipe is an achievement. It does not, by itself, constitute a shop.

The quiet button and the loud AI argument

Jordan began 2026 with an unusually blunt title: “New Year, Same Ol' Bullshit.” His target was the assumption that useful AI must arrive as a conspicuous chatbot. He favored smaller capabilities that could disappear into the work.

His example was a dataset description. Users often left the field empty, depriving colleagues and AI agents of context. Narrative added a Rosetta button that examined the schema, name, and a sample of the data, then drafted the missing description. The user could accept, edit, or discard it. Jordan said it took about four seconds.

The example is modest enough to be revealing. Nobody has to pretend that writing a description is the grand purpose of intelligence. It is a task that people neglect and other people need done. Taking away that small obstruction is a product decision worth explaining.

His May 2026 writing about clean rooms returns to the next obstruction. Secure access makes collaboration possible, he argues; consistent interpretation makes it work. Two organizations can exchange information safely and still disagree about what their fields mean. For Jordan, the shared language matters as much as the permission to talk.

He extends that argument in his discussion of the “SaaSpocalypse,” the prospect that foundation models will absorb software tasks. His case for Narrative rests on governed, repeatable work across organizational boundaries. A useful answer must be reproducible, traceable, and permitted. Better models do not automatically settle who may see which data.

In “Anatomy of a Skill,” he opens up an AI workflow for checking identity data before a graph is built. The example looks for suspicious connections that could merge unrelated people. Its design emphasizes knowing when to act, establishing evidence, and handing work to other skills. The attention is on dependable behavior, including the places where an assistant should stop.

An appetite for the next question

Jordan's personal account contains a few departures from the usual founder script. He trained in software engineering, then moved into product management after discovering that writing code did not suit him. His father ran a manufacturing business. Asked about a dream dinner, he chose the Beastie Boys and the chance to hear their stories.

He describes himself as drawn to the next challenge, sometimes too quickly to celebrate a completed one. His warning about entrepreneurial advice is that another person's experience arrives with its own circumstances. He distrusts the promise of a transferable recipe.

That skepticism fits the product argument running through his career. A business needs information for its particular question. A team needs tools suited to its particular work. A founder needs judgment about the situation actually in front of him. Convenient generalizations can be expensive when someone tries to operate them.

The thread from Tapad to his current writing is therefore unusually consistent. Jordan keeps returning to the distance between possessing something and being able to use it. Data may sit in a warehouse. AI may produce an answer. A company may buy another piece of software. Someone still has to make those things work together.

Narrative began with a customer who could not find what he wanted to buy. Its founder is still asking the customer's question, now in a world with more capable machines and more promises attached to them: how much work remains before this becomes useful?