Web Startup Scores $28 Million to Simplify A/B Testing Optimizely found a way to make website optimization easier and everyone from Obama to venture captalists took notice.

Analyze this: Dan Siroker of Optimizely.

Photo© Terri Leowenthal

Big data has opened up giant opportunities for Dan Siroker. In 2008, as director of analytics for Obama's first presidential run, the former Google Chrome and Google AdWords product manager was tasked with figuring out which data and calls to action on the campaign's website would drive people to contribute.

Deciding what to try wasn't the hard part; Siroker could easily identify two elements for a head-to-head performance test. The bottleneck came in the logistics--every trial required an engineer or a developer to tweak some code. "Frustration set in pretty quickly," Siroker says. "We knew there had to be a better way."