Meet Nate Watson, CEO @ Contemporary Analysis (CAN) / Executive Chairman @ Omaha Data Science Academy (ODSA)  

What inspired you to become an entrepreneur or support other entrepreneurs?

My case is fairly unique. I didn’t start Contemporary Analysis. I’m actually the second CEO. I worked for the founder and first CEO Grant Stanley, and he inspired me. He constantly told me that I was the next CEO. He really encouraged me to step out to do these things, and I have enjoyed it. I’ve gotten to become an entrepreneur.

As we’ve built the Omaha Data Science Academy (ODSA), we also built the Tech Access and Inclusion Fund (formerly the ODSA Scholarship Fund). Those two things I did invent, and I enjoyed being an entrepreneur — being “that person” for the first time. I was a cabinet manufacturer in college. It was my side job. That’s what motivates me as an entrepreneur or as a founder: I just really enjoy the building of things. And I support everybody else who does that.

It’s so risky and so exciting to step into the nothing. You have to clap for your fellow entrepreneurs who do the same — who risk it all, who step out into the unknown, who take that risk and that challenge. It’s such a cool place to be. And so anytime I get to talk with a founder, the first thing I tell them is this is hard and you can do it. 

What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to when you were just starting out?

If I made any other decision than the ones I made when the going got tough, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have CAN, I wouldn’t have the academy and I wouldn’t have the scholarship fund. So part of me wants to say the answer is nothing — absolutely nothing. Because every decision I’ve made led me here, and I freaking love what I do. 

But if I went to the future and I came back, well I hope that someone would say it’s going to work out okay. It’s going to work out in a lot of ways — not the way you think, but it’s always going to work out better than you think, beyond what you thought was possible. That’s what I hope the future Nate comes back and tells me. That all of these crazy ideas you have about what you’re going to do for the future and how you’re going to build CAN into an empire and where you’re going to go with it — it’s all going to work out.

I definitely wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise of any of this to my former self. I never would have dreamt that I’d be standing here doing this. I didn’t have that much imagination. 

How do you stay motivated when things feel overwhelming — or stagnant?

I have a group of people that I talk to on a regular basis. I have my wife, she’s the first one. Then I have two super close friends, and they both revolve around food. We’re all three foodies, so we go to different places and travel together. Adventure is part of how I stay sane. If you don’t want to feel stagnant, go on an adventure. Food adventures are one of my favorites. 

But when feeling overwhelmed, I have a couple of hobbies: I paint or do art in general, go on walks and on drives — I love windshield time. 

One of my side gigs forever has been jewels. I have a geology degree, and I love gemstones and diamonds and silver and gold. I love all that stuff. My buddy owns a gem boutique, and we talk. I go in and I look at things in the safe and look at the diamonds and the giant sapphires. And man, when you get overwhelmed, geology is one of those interesting things — this overarching ideology that it took millions of years to make these rocks. 

If you can’t get to whatever it is you’re doing today, those rocks that took a million years, they’ll still be there tomorrow. So you don’t need to stress about this. This problem didn’t start today, and you weren’t going to fix it today either. So, it’s okay if the problem takes a couple days to be fixed. You can just go paint. You can go do the things that will bring you back to being centered. 

It’s important to have a hobby that has nothing to do with whatever it is you do for a living.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve overcome and how did you overcome it?

There are a lot of big challenges I could put here. COVID was awful. How did we overcome it? We just survived. We lost our senior data scientist two Decembers ago. How did we overcome it? We survived.

We went back and set the bar at “survival,” which gave us the ability to do anything and everything possible. There were no rules. And I think sometimes we forget that we’ve set bars, and they’re all artificial. They were set by us in a different world.

You can reset the bar at any time. When you reset the bar at zero, it frees you to do anything and everything to stay alive, and sometimes that’s what you need. Sometimes being alive at the end of COVID is the success. Not making money? Just be here in a year when it all settles.

That’s the key takeaway — and we did. And we celebrated that when we finally started again in 2021 and started making money. That was the bar and then we reset the bar to metrics that we still kind of have today.

How can the Nebraska community support you?

Be bold. We’re at a point in Omaha’s history where every company has to start adopting artificial intelligence (AI). More than just adopting AI, they have to adopt the data-driven mindset. Your company produces data, and it actually is valuable property. You have to think about it as valuable property, and you need to consult it. You need to think about it, you need to talk to it, you need to use it. It will help you make decisions faster and with less failure.

If you have two companies — one that enacts data-driven decision making and one that doesn’t — the one that does will eat the one that doesn’t. What I fear is that Omaha is very frightened to try new things. And if it doesn’t do that, then every company in Omaha will just get eaten by an East or West Coast company. We’ll become this Midwestern hub for all the things that are great on the East and West Coast, and there will be zero reason to stay here — zero reason to live here. Our best and brightest will get identified in this Midwestern hub and then they’ll get recruited to places like Boston. There is only one wrong answer here, and that is to do nothing.

Be bold, take a step, do anything, for two reasons: One, I need the community to be successful. I have an 11-year-old daughter, and I need her to have a very thriving city so that she can stay here. And two, I run a consulting company. The ultimate sales pitch is request AI so that you can request it from me.