Hello, World.

The earth on a black background with a light coming from behind it

Hola, 🌎. Let me introduce myself…

My name is Ryan Melehan. I’m the Co-Founder & CEO of Coco Alemana.

~ $ whoami

I’ve been a programmer since middle school, a fanatic builder and creator, with a passion for great design. I have a facination with technology and the impact it can bring to the world if implemented properly.

I started building before I was old enough to realize it. I started with toddler building blocks, then LEGOs, Minecraft and finally programming. My first ever job was as a software engineer when I was 15 years old, working with web technologies like jQuery, JS, PHP, plus a dinosaur technology called “Adobe ColdFusion” - and a whole lot of Microsoft Windows.

During high school, I built Apps for iOS, Web and macOS. In 11th grade, I started my jouney into machine learning and data science (before the word “AI” was synonomous with ChatGPT). I built image classifiers, generative adversarial networks (GANs) for image generation, as well as classical statistical modeling. This was my first taste of data.

After I graduated high school, I found myself with the opportunity to work on a research project at the MIT Sloan School of Management. During that summer intership, I built a textual classification model to classify free text into around 20 distinct topics. I was launched into the world of high performance computing as I tried to optimize and run my software on the MIT Engaging super-computer.

I briefly attended college for a 3 month period in up state New York, before un-enrolling. Several months later, the research project turned into a full-time job opportunity. I joined the company that formed out of the research, called CultureX. For the next 5 years I led the technology development for that company, serving several Fortune 500 companies.

After 6 years of working on the project that was CultureX, I decided to start my own company, Coco Alemana.

~ $ traceroute Coco Alemana

I started working with Pandas in 2016. It felt foreign, and strange. Especially considering Excel seemed like the most intuitive way to do things. I thought I was naive and figured that it was built this way because the “experts” know better. End of story.

I quickly started to realize the immense mess that was data work. I would spend hours, or days refining scripts, fixing bugs, and re-doing work that I had messed up in an earlier stage. I loved programming, but this felt wrong, but I couldn’t figure out why.

As I went on, this manual data manipulation and investigatory process became a serious liability to my productivity. It felt as though I was spending 90% of my time to get the data into a state where I could analyze it. I built my own data pipeline systems to automate a lot of this work, but there was still a massive amount which was not able to be automated - The ad-hoc.

Throughout the years I spoke to dozens of others in the space, who all had the same frustration. The tools were just bad. I spoke to PhDs which had to learn a whole new dicipline, software engineering, just to perform their research or analysis.

This always felt strange to me because other complicated domain-specific problems were already solved with great software. Video editing, as an example, has multiple fantastic software suites. They allow hobbiests to create home movies, or Hollywood to create feature films, all without code. This is how it should be.

Powerful, flexible software that works for you. That was my guiding principal when dreaming up Coco Alemana.

The Future

Note the intentional removal of the ~ $ in the title. This is what we want to do. We want to remove the requirement for programming as a skill for scientific disiplines.

Our long term vision is to provide the highest quality, fastest, and most intuitive business software for the data economy. Whether you’re a data analyst, data scientist, business analyst or data engineer, we want Coco Alemana to be part of your core workflow.

We want our starting place to always be with the end user’s experience. You. The Human. Most data software offerings focus too much on the engineering, technical usecase, and tack on a UI as an afterthought. That is fundamentally wrong. The internal technology doesn’t matter, it’s your experience with it that does. The experience is everything. The experience is the only thing.

Where We’re At

So far, we’ve built high performance software for the data manipulation and EDA use case. You’re able to explore your data wherever it lives, extremely quickly. The best users are analytics folks and data engineers. One customer we have is working with 90 million rows, on his laptop.