The View from the Office.

I caught up with Eric Pachman, founder of Data 4 the People, via Zoom. He was at home in Dayton, Ohio, where he moved in 2016.

Eric is building an AI-assisted platform designed to lower the barriers to data journalism. His initial focus is local journalists, and he is running a proof of concept with news outfits in Dayton.

We were connected by Matt Zeigler, a financial advisor at Sunpointe Investments, podcaster and uber connector, who recommended Eric’s rich data visualizations. 

Eric’s current project got a boost when he won a fellowship from O’Shaughnessy Ventures, the firm led by Jim O’Shaughnessy. About 11,000 people applied and roughly 20 were selected. The fellowship provided money to help build the platform.

Eric came to this work through an unusual path. He was managing a chain of about 22 pharmacies in Ohio when he noticed reimbursements on generic drugs being slashed 40 to 60 percent overnight by pharmacy benefit managers, even as actual drug costs were unchanged. He built charts showing the gap between what the state of Ohio paid for drugs and what they cost, and spent a year showing them to legislators in Columbus.

That work became 46brooklyn, a research outfit he co-founded whose analysis of drug pricing contributed to policy changes in almost 20 states and helped the Ohio auditor identify $225 million in missing money. Mark Cuban was among the people who followed the research.

Eric eventually handed over the operations at 46 Brooklyn to two employees and shifted his focus to broader questions of inequality. Recently, he co-published a piece with Barron’s showing how concentrated state job markets have become in what he calls the Medicaid care economy, including home health aides and nursing homes.

He uses AI, mostly Claude, to build interactive data visualizations that once took weeks in Tableau. He describes AI as the greatest entry-level data analyst you could hope for, but one that needs a human editor.

Eric is converting Data 4 the People into a 501(c)(3) and plans to meet with foundations. He says $500,000 would fund more than a year of operations.

You can connect with Eric via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.