The View from the Office.

I met up with Dan Entrup, the co-founder of AggKnowledge, at the Classic Car Club, where he is a member. The club, located on the West Side Highway in Manhattan, offers members a lively happy hour, screenings of F1 races and the opportunity to take hot cars out for a spin.

Dan gave me a tour of the club. We took the opportunity to sit in a 1969 Camaro before grabbing a table out back on the terrace beside the Hudson River to talk about AggKnowledge, a startup that helps expert networks, survey panels, and other organizations improve their biographical databases.

He started the company at the beginning of the year with Bill Ronkoski, a former GLG colleague, and Jon Zajac, a former engineering leader at Teamshares and HubSpot.

The problem AggKnowledge is trying to solve will be familiar to any professional who gets random calls and emails to verify employment, title, role, and subject expertise. Most of that info is either available online, has already been answered, or could be inferred with a high degree of confidence.

The issue is that most of these databases are both hopelessly out of date and not precise enough. This is a particularly big problem for expert networks which are trying to match clients with individuals with specialized knowledge.

AggKnowledge combines data feeds about people, companies, and expertise, with sophisticated entity matching powered by AI to enrich biographical information and filter out the noise.

Let’s say you are looking for a doctor who performs robotic shoulder arthroscopy using da Vinci surgical systems, and another who switched from prescribing primarily Ozempic to Wegovy. That isn’t likely to be on their CV, LinkedIn, or web profile, but AggKnowledge can pull this from data sources.

By including additional details, such as what a company does, its competitors, its size, revenue estimates, ownership information, and subsidiary structure it helps ensure the people you are reaching out to are appropriate matches.

Detailed biographical information would be helpful not just for expert networks and survey panels, but also companies hiring talent and organizations that are managing a community, such as universities reaching out to alumni.

Dan is a data geek. He was previously executive director of data strategy at Henry Schein and SVP of partnerships at FactSet. He also publishes a newsletter with 2,500 subscribers called It’s Pronounced Data that focuses on data, analytics, and information services.

Dan can be reached via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.