Qloo is the ultimate AI-driven cultural recommendation engine, revolutionizing how businesses and creators connect with their audiences. Powered by cutting-edge machine learning and enriched with insights spanning movies, music, fashion, dining, travel, and beyond, Qloo transforms raw data into cultural gold.
In this episode, we interview Jim Jansen, Chief Revenue Officer at Qloo, a cultural AI company focused on decoding and predicting consumer tastes. Jim discusses Qloo’s innovative Taste AI engine, his extensive background in the tech industry, and the challenges of profitability in AI. He introduces Qloo’s new self-service analytics tool, Insights by Qloo, emphasizing the importance of data privacy and the company’s mission to help consumers make better choices. Jim shares his excitement about the product’s potential and outlines future innovations for Qloo.
Qloo is the “Cultural AI”, decoding and predicting consumer taste across the globe.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Qloo’s mission is to organize and reveal people’s preferences globally.
- The Taste AI engine combines a vast entity catalog with consumer signals.
- Jim Jansen emphasizes the importance of people in business success.
- Qloo’s Insights tool democratizes access to consumer intelligence.
- Data privacy is a core principle in Qloo’s operations.
- The company has achieved zero churn, indicating strong customer retention.
- AI profitability remains a challenge for many tech companies.
- Qloo aims to help brands anticipate consumer needs effectively.
- Future innovations will focus on enhancing user experience with AI.
- Jim’s diverse background contributes to Qloo’s growth strategy.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Qloo and Jim Jansen
05:55 – Jim Jansen’s Background and Motivation for Joining Qloo
12:07 – Introducing Insights by Qloo: Self-Service Analytics
18:04 – Excitement Around Launching Insights by Qloo
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:05)
Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions. Today we’re talking with Jim Jansen, Chief Revenue Officer at Qloo, the really fascinating cultural AI company that is decoding and predicting consumer taste across the globe.
Jim has built quite the name for himself in the tech industry with over two decades of sales strategy and operations leadership in a variety of different sectors. He might be best known for his tenure at Google, helping to grow revenue from 20 million to 500 million. And now he’s taken that experience and bringing it over to Qloo. So without further ado, Jim Jansen, welcome to the podcast. Glad you can join us.
Jim Jansen (00:52)
Thank you for having me, Beau.
Beau Hamilton (00:54)
Yeah. So it’s great to have you here. I spoke with Alex Elias. That’s Qloo’s CEO earlier this year for the inaugural SourceForge Podcast episode, the very first one. So it’s really neat to have you here and kind of follow up on some of the things Alex and I talked about roughly eight months ago, and I would say almost 30 podcast episodes later. So for those unfamiliar with Qloo, could you kind of just give an overview of the company and talk about how Qloo’s taste AI engine works to decode consumer preferences?
Jim Jansen (01:24)
Of course, sure. So I think first and foremost, our mission is to organize and reveal people’s preferences and tastes globally. This really enables brands to build more personalized products and campaigns. And we’re super proud to be working with leaders such as PepsiCo, Netflix, Hershey’s, Campbell’s, and WPP, for instance. In the past 12 years, we’ve built the largest and most accessible consumer intelligence engine globally. And the engine actually consists of two things.
So first there is the entity catalog, which consists of over 3.7 billion entities, such as brands, restaurants, movies, artists, influencers, books, celebrities, much, much, much more. And actually this is larger than the combined catalogs of Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and Wikipedia.
And then secondly, we have a consumer signal database and that consists of over 10 trillion anonymized signals that tell us basically how humans interact with the things in our entity catalog. And these signals come from different data sources. So there’s first party data. We, for instance, acquired Taste Dive, which is a consumer recommendation engine with over 12 million profiles. But we also have proprietary learning rights, which we negotiated with our clients. And as an example, one of our largest client actually is one of the largest credit card companies and we’ve obtained learning rights of all their anonymized transaction data.
Now putting these two things together, so the entity catalog on one hand and the consumer signal database on the other hand, we layer on top our proprietary AI and ML. And we’ve done that since inception, so 12 years ago. We’ve really been, always have been an AI first company, which is in our DNA.
Now putting these three things together, what you get is basically a full spectrum of people’s preferences and tastes globally while respecting their privacy. Let me give you a couple of examples. So Netflix is a client and for their series, Stranger Things, Netflix asked us to kind of select an activation partner based upon taste and preferences of consumers. We came up with Vans, the sneaker brand, and basically the Vans shoes were sold out in days.
Second one is Michelin, so the guide. We implemented a taste-based travel recommendations for them, which increased their online bookings by 273%. And the last one at least, JC Decaux. So our engine informs basically which brands best to advertise on which billboards in which city block basically. That’s delivering over a 10X improvement in their ROI.
Beau Hamilton (04:12)
Interesting. Okay. So there’s lots of, lots of stuff you’re working on. and I definitely want to unpack a lot of that before we kind of dive deeper into the Qloo kind of side of things. I want to touch a little bit more on your background. because I know you joined the Qloo team in September pretty recently. It was just, you know, yesterday in the grand scheme of things, and you joined with a pretty impressive resume. I mentioned your tenure at Google, which cannot be overstated. You helped unlock tens of millions in revenue during your, your five year stint at Unilever.
You’re also a venture partner at Antler, a global venture capital fund, and I saw that you’re a guest lecturer at a university in the Netherlands. Amsterdam’s one of my favorite places. I will say I visited a couple years ago. I loved it. But can you walk us through your background in more detail and just share with us some of reasons why you decided to join Qloo?
Jim Jansen (05:03)
Sure, happy to. So let me start by saying that my passion really is to build things, whether it’s teams, businesses, organizations. And I’ve been lucky to be able to have done that for several actually leading companies worldwide. Indeed, most notable my 13 years at Google, both in Europe and in the US, I’ve worked in different commercial roles, driving top line growth for specific verticals such as CPG and travel, but also on agency relationships like WPP, for instance. In 2010, I was asked to come to New York, moving from Amsterdam to become chief of staff of the US sales team, basically. Now Google taught me mainly two things. So first, I’d say the power of data for marketers and agencies. And second, that it’s all about people and good leadership.
Now I started my career at Unilever, working my way through the ranks there, in marketing and sales. And Unilever actually told me kind of the importance of, you know, consumer insights for brands to innovate and basically to lead. Now, prior to Google, I was founder and CEO of a private equity boutique. So there’s definitely an entrepreneur in me. And in 2021, after 11 years in New York, we basically moved back to the Netherlands where I work for Just Eat Takeaway, which grew up here in the US. Led all their global new business development teams, which was a super exciting role.
So indeed, currently, as you said, I do two things next to my role as chief revenue officer for Qloo. I teach part-time at RSM, which is Rotterdam School of Management topic, strategic entrepreneurship. It’s basically top 10 MBA program. And indeed, I’m a venture partner for Antler, which is a global VC fund with over 1,300 portfolio companies globally.
Now your second question, you know, basically what encouraged me to join Qloo. It’s a combination of things. First and foremost, really it is the people. So Alex, our CEO, his vision to become the global standard for taste really inspired me. Think, you know, taste and preferences are in everything. And there’s so much choice that it’s sometimes hard to make the right choices for consumers, but also for brands.
So we really, you know, are here to help people make better choices, to stay true to themselves, if you will, and to live more fulfilled lives. Now, secondly is the uniqueness, I would say, and the strength of our product. I can share one astonishing fact with you. In the 12 years of our existence, we’ve had zero children. So we really add value to the businesses of our clients.
And then thirdly is the opportunity itself. This is an opportunity to build and to scale, which is really in my wheelhouse. And I would say last but not least, the opportunity to work with a phenomenal team here and to build and grow this global business is the third reason why I’m super happy to be joining Qloo.
Beau Hamilton (08:11)
Hmm. Well, those are all great reasons. Yeah. I imagine just also talking with Alex was a major selling point because he’s such a just a personable guy, so nice and friendly and he’s really passionate about it. So I imagine, you know, he did his share in trying to convince you to come on board.
But I also know that just, you know, speaking with some of the members of Over at Qloo, they’re really excited to have you on board. And I think those of us watching from the outside are really excited to see what you can bring to the table. And they’re just excited to have you there.
So yeah, and also, you know, I cover a lot of AI news over on Slashdot and you know, it’s amazing to see how much money is being invested in this area of artificial intelligence. You know, every tech companies, it feels like they have to invest in this, in this area, even if they don’t necessarily know how they’re going to make money from it.
I know OpenAI isn’t really expected to be profitable until at least 2028, 2029. Meta has indicated that their AI initiatives haven’t really become major revenue drivers despite pivoting to AI from their augmented reality ambitions. You have Elon’s X’s AI that has yet to generate any major significant revenue.
These are just a few examples, but the general consensus seems to be that the jury is still out as far as AI’s profitability is concerned in the near term. Qloo being an AI company, how do you plan to help Qloo meet its financial goals?
Jim Jansen (09:49)
Well, I think it’s making first and foremost making the right choices and that basically means from a commercial perspective, what clients what client composition do we want to kind of focus on and can we best serve with the solutions we have. I think focus drives results and in the past we’ve been, you know, trying to meet all our clients needs but I think more focus there will really help. That’s one.
I think secondly, we need to grow and expand. So making the right choices in terms of our go-to-market strategy, in terms of our positioning, you know, the specific use cases we’re trying to solve for, showing the value we’re adding to customers in such a way that we can win over and grow the market as fast as we can, basically.
And then thirdly, I would say, first and foremost is making sure, you know, in the end of the day, it’s all about people, that we hire the right people. So we’re in growth mode, we’re a lot of people, but hiring the right people, putting the right people in the right seats, making sure we structure and organize everything in the best way possible, that we have the right incentives in place, etcetera, will help us, I think, tremendously to grow as fast as we can.
Then lastly, would add to that basically is to make sure that the level of investment we’re planning to make in terms of both resources and for instance, a marketing budget needs to be balanced well with kind of when the revenue is coming in. So balancing those two as well plus the other factors I mentioned is my way of contributing to let’s say the profitability of the company.
Beau Hamilton (11:44)
Hmm. Well, yeah, I like the, people first, kind of attitude you have. ‘Cause I think that’s super important and you know, it’s, it’s just kind of, it goes to show like companies are so, so looking so, keen, they’re so keen on like automating things and adopting different software and AI tools. and they don’t talk about as much as the importance of, of people and humans at the end of the day, it’s, you know, these are, they’re AI companies but they’re still run and managed by some brilliant people. And that’s really what separates the winners from the losers, I guess.
I wanna pivot a little bit to talk about Qloo’s new self-service analytics dashboard called Insights by Qloo. Can you explain the motivation behind creating this tool and just how it builds upon the taste AI engine?
Jim Jansen (12:34)
Sure, and let me take a step back. Every company of course must stay on top of consumer trends and needs, right? And companies will thrive not only by reacting to consumer preferences and need, but actually by anticipating that. And this actually becomes harder and harder due to a few things. One is the fast pace of change. Think of social media for instance, but also due to signal loss. Think of the deprecation of the third party cookie and privacy regulation.
Most companies actually use a combination of first party data, market research, surveys and or social listening to it. Well, and what each of these have, you know, advantages. They all have clear kind of shortcomings too. And let me explain a little bit more there. So first, you know, we know that a lot of businesses are investing heavily in their kind of in-house data assets, first party data, and it’s really good for, you know, to create a good understanding of current consumer purchase behavior. But the shortcoming actually is that it’s quite limited in scope and quite expensive to maintain.
Secondly, there’s qualitative research, which is really good to get a general understanding of mindsets of cohorts, if you will. But they’re relatively slow and expensive and only represent, I would say, small sample of your audience.
And then lastly, social listening tools, they are popular and they make it easy to analyze a lot of, let’s say, consumer sentiment, but they only capture the opinions of a vocal minority, basically.
This is really where Qloo comes in. Insights by Qloo, as you mentioned, really is an easy to use self-service analytics platform. Now moving beyond the API to democratize the access to our taste intelligence engine. Now, first it starts, basically with a very simple but powerful query and goes from anyone from anywhere who likes anything based. Let me explain it a little bit.
Because this actually is our this reflects our product vision as well. It’s the ability to make any taste correlation for anyone from anywhere. So what does it mean? Anyone is really determined to set your target audience, right? So you can differentiate in different age groups if you will everyone wants to know a lot about Gen Z for instance, right? Naturally, there’s gender selection all kinds of different interests as well you can select so that’s anyone.
The second bucket is from anywhere. We can target the whole world. We can target country. We can target a state. We can even target a borough or a block. We apply level 7 accuracy, yeah, in cities. That’s about 150 meters. So super, super accurate in cities, of course, as well.
And then last is that’s like, you know, who likes anything basically, right? And the anything ties back to what I said earlier, our 3.7 billion entities we have. So think of brands, movies, restaurants, etcetera, etcetera. And once you’ve created your target audience, you can now start to map and analyze the correlations between that target audience and their taste and preferences between any of the entities globally I just described. So that’s Insights by Qloo.
Beau Hamilton (16:07)
Hmm. Okay. Yeah, that’s, that’s exciting. I want to, one of these days I want to try and play around with the API and, and, and get a, get a sense of kind of exactly how it works and how it looks.
Jim Jansen (16:17)
You’re most welcome to, I’m happy to schedule actually a demo for you.
Beau Hamilton (16:20)
Yeah, that’d be fun. Yeah, we should try and do that. I think naturally this makes me just think of maybe some of the data security, you know, issues maybe surrounding this particular technology. Talking with Alex earlier this year, he stressed about how Qloo was always maintaining a privacy first approach. How would you address that? How are you ensuring that customer data remains secure while still providing valuable insights?
Jim Jansen (16:49)
Yeah, and as you know, Alex’s background, basically, he’s a lawyer as well, right? So he really started building out the company vision with a privacy first approach, if you will. So Insights by Qloo basically sits on top of our Taste AI, so our consumer intelligence engine. Taste AI has zero PII in it. So it’s fully trained on anonymized behavioral signals. And then second, basically, our clients, you know, and have full confidence that Qloo will be approved by their legal and their security teams. We are trusted by leaders in many different verticals and some of the largest brands globally, including, you know, some of them from the financial sector where they have very strict privacy regulations, for instance.
Beau Hamilton (17:38)
Hmm. Okay. That’s yeah, that’s reassuring. And, you know, it’s always good to hear your thoughts on that because I think for a lot of companies in this space, it’s often an afterthought. So, you know, it’s, it’s always good to hear that you’re at the forefront of, know, of the data security policies at Qloo. So, yeah, thanks for sharing.
And, you know, speaking of that topic, you know, you’ve been, you’ve been part of, launching products at some of the largest global tech companies out there, what excites you most about launching Insights by Qloo?
Jim Jansen (18:10)
Yeah, thank you for the question, you know? I really believe in our mission to help consumers make better decisions and to stay true to themselves and to live more fulfilled lives. And I believe in the product and the value it can offer marketers and inside us basically. So it’s, I’m really stunned by the fact that we are able to add so much value to their business objectives. Again, zero churn is something I’ve never seen before.
Second, I’m confident that we will have a massive global impact on consumer choice and consumer behavior. We’re really at the beginning of this journey. I’m super thankful to be able to be part of this journey and also so relatively early on and what actually really excites me as well is to be working with a phenomenal team who’s made this product possible and is now ready to kind of scale it as well.
Beau Hamilton (19:13)
Hmm. Now as chief revenue officer, what are some of the ways you’re seeing this product generate revenue for the company? Is it mostly through maybe a competitive advantage? Does it help strengthen the brand or maybe retain customers and kind of build revenue that way? Maybe it’s all the above. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the revenue generation aspect.
Jim Jansen (19:37)
Yeah, so I think Qloo is really able to provide unique insights. So it’s not only the largest and most accessible consumer intelligence engine, but we’re able to create insights which add a lot of value in many different, let’s say, verticals and different use cases.
So focusing on that added value and proving the, proving the sale you’re quantifying the failure and showcasing that value to to other companies will drive our top line goal.
Beau Hamilton (20:14)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, like looking ahead, how do you envision Qloo continuing to innovate in this space? You know, it’s growing so fast. There’s, there’s, you know, there’s talk of AI agents in the future. It’s kind of the next big wave of the AI space. But how do you, how do you like envision Qloo just, yeah, continue to innovate in specifically the AI and consumer insights space just over the next, let’s say, year or so?
Jim Jansen (20:41)
Yeah. So specifically for insights products or self-service tool, it will be by adding more and more data because that’s actually key to modeling and training our algorithms and our model. And we will continue to invest in that. Generative AI is basically redefining actually the user experience as well. So building more AI into our platform to make it even more easier to get insights and actionable recommendations, I think will be a key for us, right?
So we’re already really good at creating these insights. I’d love us to get even better at kind of, know, in an automated fashion show in very different use cases, the clear recommendations we would propose and the value it adds to customers. So that’s what I see happening for the insights tool. And on the API front, the integration actually with LLMs to ground chatbot experiences in user preferences basically to create a more personalized output.
Beau Hamilton (21:52)
Okay. Yeah. That’s interesting about the data comment because, you know, so, so often it seems like businesses are sort of drowning in data. It’s just a matter of extrapolating meaning from it. but for you guys, it’s like, you know, it’s your, your training, your algorithms and API on, on data, on your data sets. So it’s a matter of getting the source data to begin with, getting more of that to work with, right?
Now for the last question, I want to do something a little bit fun that might be great to share in a short clip on social media. And I think it’ll be perfect, you you don’t have to necessarily have all the context of this larger interview to get some kind of insights out of it, so. Well, if you were to give a short audio snippet of Qloo Solutions right now, what might you say?
Jim Jansen (22:35)
Qloo power, CPG brands to thrive by enabling them to uncover and anticipate local consumer preferences and taste at a global scale.
Beau Hamilton (22:45)
Beautiful, well, that short and sweet to the point. Awesome, well, you heard it here first, folks. On that note, where can people find out more about you and Qloo and just get in touch with the team?
Jim Jansen (22:57)
Sure, so basically three things. One is the website qloo.com spelled basically Q-L-O-O.com. There are lot of very interesting use cases and white papers there. You can also request a demo. Secondly, of course, you can follow us on LinkedIn. And last but not least, you can email me, jim@qloo.com.
Beau Hamilton (23:17)
Perfect. jim@qloo.com and that’s Q-L-O-O.com. Awesome. Well, thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to sit down and talk with us about Qloo and predicting the future of consumer taste. Appreciate it.
Jim Jansen (23:28)
You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me.
Beau Hamilton (23:30)
All right, thanks Jim. Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software-related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.