The Refinery Arrives

On a new corp dev function, and what it means for stalled founders and the VCs who backed them

For two decades, we’ve heard that data is the new oil. It was a clean line, the kind that makes its way into every keynote, every board deck, and every LP deck, and like most punchy lines, it skipped a step. Oil is not valuable because it exists. Oil is valuable because somebody built refineries, pipelines, and tankers, and established a global price for the barrel. Until that infrastructure showed up, oil was a thick, corrosive sludge that ruined boots and poisoned the wells around it.

Data, for most of the last two decades, has been unrefined crude oil. Companies sat on enormous reserves of it and treated it like exhaust from the real business. Logs, tickets, transcripts, internal Slack threads, edit histories, the back-and-forth between a customer success rep and the engineer she escalated to at 11pm. Nobody was buying those interactions. These activities and data points were just the price of doing business. The refinery did not exist.