DataBlend Spotlight: Have you met David Furth yet? He's helping automate the way finance does business.

Have you met David Furth yet? He's DataBlend's President & CEO and just celebrated two years with DataBlend! To celebrate this milestone with David, I interviewed him to learn why he originally joined DataBlend and why he's even more excited today about the future of automation and where DataBlend is headed! 

What is your background:

I am originally from White Plains, New York. I have a degree in civil engineering, with a strong interest back in college of designing and building buildings. So, when I first graduated from college, I worked for a company called Turner Construction, the world's largest general builder. The first project that I was on was building a Hyatt Regency Hotel in Connecticut, which was cool. After that, I had a variety of positions at Turner but ended up being asked to run IT. So, that's where I first got a taste of how business and technology came together. After Turner, I went to work for Deloitte where I started a practice to help companies select a new category of software back then called e-procurement.  Companies like Ariba, Commerce One and RightWorks. After Deloitte, I joined my first software company in Silicon Valley. Before joining DataBlend, I started Leap the Pond, a top Sage Intacct VAR, and SIAP, which AcctTwo later acquired. 

Why did you join DataBlend?

I've known the founder of DataBlend, Ethan Carlson, for a while. We collaborated on several projects while I was running Leap the Pond. We had a really good connection and stayed in touch through the years. After I sold Leap the Pond and left AcctTwo, Ethan and I reconnected, and he asked me to look at DataBlend. He was curious about what I thought about it and the market opportunity. I realized quickly that what Ethan and the team at DataBlend had developed was a solution that was desperately needed by finance and accounting professionals. It intrigued me because I was always asked about integration when I sold Sage Intacct. Sage Intacct has an open API and a thriving marketplace with many applications that can integrate with it. But many providers kick the integration can down the road. When I started looking at DataBlend, I realized there was an opportunity to push integration to the forefront and bring it into the mix early on in a project to ensure that the value of best-in-class was realized earlier than later on. The rest is history. 

Watch David's video to learn more!

It's been two years. Are you still excited about DataBlend? 

So, it's been two years since I joined. And I am more excited every day for several reasons. 

1. The product has evolved to handle more connections and to make it even easier to perform integrations.
2. The roadmap and the vision for where we want to take the product have evolved. We want to make it even more, what we'd like to refer to as self-service.
3. I'm more excited because I've watched the team grow from five people when I joined two years ago to a team of over twenty people that is driven to bring a solution, integration platform as a service, iPaaS, within reach for small- to medium-sized organizations and help these organizations deliver on the promise of best-in-class by allowing information to flow seamlessly across their tech stack.
4. But most importantly, I'm excited because we have customers that are using DataBlend and sharing the impact that it's having on their business and them personally. DataBlend eliminates a lot of the stress associated with meeting deadlines when you're doing things manually or not as efficiently as you could be doing. So, that part is exciting.

Watch David's video to learn more!

How has automation changed since you joined DataBlend?

When I first joined DataBlend, I thought of integration as more of a tool that allowed users to map data from one application to another. But there is so much more to integration. First, of course, mapping is essential, and being able to do that in a repeatable way is certainly a layer of integration that leads to automation. But you can extend that to collecting information from multiple systems, applying logic to that data and performing calculations using that data to for example, create a journal entry, a sales invoice, or an allocation. There are so many ways that a solution like DataBlend can do more than simple integrations. And that's been a lot of fun to see and be a part of, and, frankly, watch our implementation in our services team, apply the capabilities, and leverage the functionality to do more. Automation is part of the digital transformation, and it is a part of what we're doing.  

Watch David's video to learn more!

What are three fun facts about you?

1. I married my high school sweetheart.
2. I love my Peloton bike and try to do it at least three times a week.
3. I'm a long-suffering New York Mets and New York Jets fan.

Connect with David

If you want to say hello or book an appointment, here are a few ways to chat:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/furthdavids/

Email: dfurth@datablend.com