Thomas MacMillan
A dozen years ago, Leon Rozenblit was the nerdy cognitive psychology guy other Yale grad students turned to when they needed help sorting their research findings. He’s still organizing data, but now with a staff of nearly 40, the entire seventh floor of a downtown New Haven office building — and a company that pulled in $3.6 million in revenues last year.
From his grad school days, Rozenblit (pictured) has built his company, Prometheus Research, into a nationally recognized data management company. Last month, the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City and Fortune Magazine ranked Prometheus third among the country’s top 100 fastest-growing “inner city companies.”
That recognition goes to booming businesses in, according to the organizers, “economically distressed urban areas.”
“Which apparently we’re in,” Rozenblit said.
That was news to him. He said he doesn’t see the distress during his daily 22-minute walking commute from his home in East Rock, where he lives with his wife and two kids. And he doesn’t see it when he looks at the other tech companies that are taking root in New Haven. And not just poster-child financial aid company HigherOne, or the ever-expanding citizen-empowering SeeClickFix, he said.
“There are dozens of really small companies doing really interesting stuff,” said Rozenblit, a self-described New Haven booster.
Just a few years ago, Rozenblit’s Prometheus was one of those small companies. In 2004, he had three employees and his yearly profits were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now he has nearly 40 workers and over $3 million in annual revenue. It’s the low-profile multimillion dollar company you might walk by everyday, without realizing it’s there.
On Thursday afternoon, Rozenblit, who’s 42, sat down in his office on the seventh story of 55 Church St. to talk about the company’s trajectory. Prometheus’ hushed offices occupy the entire floor. Behind a locked, ring-to-enter door lie corridors of sparsely furnished carpeted offices, with esoteric acronym-rich diagrams scrawled in dry-erase marker on glass walls.
Rozenblit’s office, in the back corner, offers a panoramic view of the city, and more dry-erase evidence of high-level meetings.
Rozenblit formally created Prometheus in 1999, after getting his start helping out his classmates as a grad student at Yale, where he earned a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. Other students regularly sought his help in figuring out how to organize and make sense of the data they had collected in their research.
“I have a passion for organizing things,” Rozenblit said, a passion for organizing files and information.
Which doesn’t extend to physical objects, necessarily.
“My socks are not alphabetized,” he said.
At first Rozenblit found he could help his classmates using available software: FileMaker, Access, even Excel. Eventually he began to wonder if maybe he could help write software of his own.
He eventually teamed up with Clark C. Evans, a big name in open source software development. “He’s the guy behind YAML.” Shortly after that, he joined with David Voccola, the company’s other working partner.
Evans’ most recent development — “an enormous breakthrough,” Rozenblit said — is called HTSQL.
“It’s a web-native query language that allows users to interact with a relational databases much more efficiently,” Rozenblit said. Then he demonstrated what that means.
He pulled up a chair to a widescreen monitor, navigated to www.HTSQL.org and pulled up a sample database of fictional university courses, organized by department. With a few clicks, the data can be rearranged as needed, or accessed through simple inputs in the web browser’s address bar.
Part of the power of HTSQL is that all you need is a web browser. Huge databases can be accessed without any other program, from anywhere with Internet access.
HTSQL acts as a powerful middleman between the browser and a database, making it easy and efficient for a research analyst to find the data he needs. Prometheus uses HTSQL to create web applications for research centers to access heaps of data, usually from medical or psychological studies. The company has done most of its work with researchers working on autism.
Rozenblit opened a new window with a web application Prometheus created for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI). In a few seconds, with the ease of creating a new email account, Rozenblit ticked through a couple of webpages and culled data on a select group of research subjects to create a “cohort” of anonymous autistic subjects who match a few select parameters: having a certain IQ level, having an unaffected sibling, having completed a certain DNA study. As he clicked, a graph of his results changed with each new entry, until he was down to a group of 250 subjects.
Were he an autism researcher, he would have just efficiently honed in on a very precise set of data that he could now use for further study. For example, maybe the kids in the cohort have some heretofore unknown characteristic in common, one that could be the key to unlocking the disorder.
Prometheus’ services come down to giving researchers the flexibility, access and power to zero in on such data without enlisting a fleet of programmers to help them wrangle a database, Rozenblit said.
The company has developed several tools to further that goal. HTSQL is the main ingredient in the “secret sauce” that makes it happen, Rozenblit said. But other 5‑letter acronyms are close behind, like DBGUI (dee-bee-gooey) and RDOMA (are-dome-ah), tools that allows users to access RDBMS like MYSQL with ease.
HTSQL is an open-source tool that can be downloaded for free, and used freely with open source databases, Rozenblit said. He predicted that it will be come “incredibly popular in the next two to five years.”
Rozenblit is also poised to grow the company in the years to come. Until now, Prometheus has expanded mainly by word of mouth, without “systematic business development.” Prometheus is thus well known in the world of autism research but not elsewhere. Rozenblit’s next goal is to change that.