Page 63 - Forbes - Asia (April 2019)

In order to do so, Enigma searched the Office of Man-
ow much did the federal government shutdown
cost? After 35 days of deadlock, $6,354,845,148 in
wages had gone unpaid to 747,573 federal employ-
Hees. Every second that ticked by added $2,118 to
the figure. Some staffers were furloughed; many more worked
without pay. At the Department of Homeland Security, for ex-
ample, some 245,405 employees were unpaid and 32,706 fur-
loughed. At the U.S. Treasury, 36,309 workers were furloughed
and 82,336 worked unpaid. At the Environmental Protection
Agency, 52% of its staffers worked without compensation.
Getting a handle on the magnitude of this disruption—as
well as its granular details—was no small feat. A little-known
New York City fintech company named Enigma tabulated the
rising costs in real time on a website it threw up called Gov-
ernment Shutdown 2018–2019.
agement & Budget’s contingency plans for 109 federal de-
partments. It also tapped FederalPay.org for average salaries
and worker counts for 46 agencies. In all, it combed through
2,000 pages and 2 million spreadsheet rows of federal data to
create the tracker. From idea to launch, the effort took three
Enigma number crunchers a total of 36 hours.
The shutdown data is available free, but Enigma’s ability
to rapidly make sense of multiple disconnected data sources,
public and private, and create a customizable view of the glob-
al economy has attracted some of the world’s leading com-
panies, from BlackRock to PayPal, with many clients paying
more than $1 million a year for fingertip access to its insights.
Enigma is the brainchild of Hicham Oudghiri and Marc
DaCosta, best friends since they met 16 years ago as under-
graduates at Columbia University, where they studied philos-
ophy. Their startup organizes information from thousands of
sources around the world into a single, fully linked interface.
“People know how the internet works and how to log users
and serve them cookies to suggest products on Amazon. That
problem is solved. What we’re doing is building a model of
the real world,” says Oudghiri, 34. His cofounder, DaCosta,
34, adds, “This isn’t just about a faster microprocessor or bet-
ter statistics. Enigma is a knowledge graph of what’s going on
in the economy.”
Oudghiri and DaCosta’s journey into data mining began
after the financial crisis of 2008. DaCosta was doing graduate
work in the cultural anthropology of data at the University of
California, Irvine, while Oudghiri was managing renewable-
energy projects for BCME Bank in Morocco. Both were curi-
ous about explaining the world in light of the global disrup-
tions going on. So they reunited and began to organize sets of
publicly available data, starting with Federal Aviation Admin-
istration flight logs. They soon discovered a trove of valuable
information hiding in plain sight—buried in government
logs, university research publications and arcane business fil-
ings. If they could collect, scrub, organize and analyze it, they
thought, it might produce a near real-time rendering of the
macroeconomy.
In 2011, Oudghiri and DaCosta formed Enigma and
went to work amalgamating public data, mostly from gov-
ernment sources such as the Census Bureau, the Feder-
al Communications Commission, and the Internal Revenue
Service, as well as records from the Customs & Border Pro-
tection agency (CBP) and building permits, and putting it
together as a single source. They also became experts in un-
covering complex, hard-to-find information. For instance,
using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Enigma
taps the CBP’s Automated Manifest System to track every
container ship that arrives in the U.S., including the im-
porter and port of call. From the National Fire Incident Re-
porting System, Enigma retrieves the cause and location of
every fire in the U.S. To cover energy, Enigma leans on oil-
well data from the Railroad Commission of Texas, founded
in 1891 to establish tariffs.
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