About Us

In 2016, I was winding down what was basically the 12th technology startup I had been involved with over the past decade. In that startup I was serving as head of data science and analytics.

The team was great, and I loved the work, but it came in fits and spurts. In most cases, I felt like it didn't make sense for the business to have me on staff full time working on a very narrow problem where there was a lot of downtime between setting things up as we waited for data to accumulate. I felt like I could do the same work for less money for that company, plus take on a lot of additional work from other companies, and they would all benefit from the shared knowledge gained. I was hungry to learn more, and grow in this particular area.

Another important point to mention is that I had made a habit of doing what many in the SF Bay Area and Silicon Valley tech scene did: you worked as a “consultant” for multiple seed stage startups until one of them raised enough money to afford to bring you on full time, so you were really auditioning into full time roles. Given my new ambition, I didn't want to do that anymore, to consult myself into a job. I wanted to explore being a freelancer and consultant, intentionally.

That summer of 2016 after I left my last full time W-2 job, I called what felt like hundreds of people to a) ask questions about how to set up a business and b) ask who they knew that I should also know as I networked my way to more clients. That summer was very slow, business wise. It made my wife anxious. We created an agreement that if I didn't manage to replace my income with new clients by the end of the summer I would spend the last 30 days of my savings to hustle and get myself a full time job, any job, and give up on this entrepreneurial dream.

It turns out that all of those phone calls I was doing was priming the pump and creating momentum that paid off in a big way by the time the summer ended. I found myself with a lot more work than I could handle on my own, so in September I filed incorporation papers to create Acorn Analytics Inc, and it became official in October 2016.

There's another pivotal moment in the history of Acorn that happened in early 2019 if not before. I read books written by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham that left an impression on me. That impression was that if I had it in me to build a business that provided safe and satisfying employment, that it was my obligation as an entrepreneur to do that. So, I've been working ever since then to make that a reality, to make a business that struck an appropriate balance between taking care of its financial viability and also taking care of its people. My definition of success is to create a business that is organized enough that it could be sold tomorrow, but is also built in a robust enough manner to last forever. To do this, I'm working to build a business that is not overly reliant on any one person, organization, customer, or vendor, employee, or supplier. We still have work to do to make this vision a reality, but it's a labor of love. As a former professional musician, there were days when trying to come up with something new to say about love in a song was a struggle, but I find no shortage of ways to express creativity in this organization, and I couldn't ask for better "band mates" than those who are along with me for the ride here at Acorn Analytics.

July 2025 UPDATE: A big moment happened for us in the spring of 2025. We took a hard look at our revenue both recently and since we launched in 2016. We were surprised to discover that very little of our revenue could be attributed purely to data science and analytics work. In fact, most of our revenue could be comfortably labeled as custom software development where we were delivering code and working software. To test this, we put together an offer to give away to a few lucky companies what we had previously been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to deliver to big companies. The level of trust and fun and value that we were able to create with this program has sent Acorn in a whole new trajectory, where we are focusing on providing great software to services companies so that they can grow and thrive.

– Mike Zawitkowski, founder (written December 2023, updated July 2025)