Horizon Data Partners
Data strategy and applied economics for PE-backed companies, from an economist who works as your embedded head of analytics.
Your analytics team can tell you what happened last quarter. Your BI tools can show you a trend line. What they can't do is tell you why it's happening, whether it will continue, and what it will cost you if you don't act now. That's the job of an economist.
Advisory Rooted in Economics
Horizon Data Partners provides advisory services and custom modeling, analytics, and data deployments that help companies grow faster. We work most often with private equity funds and their portfolio companies, but our approach applies anywhere leadership needs analytical rigor behind a growth plan or strategic decision.
Core Capabilities
Data strategy, economics, econometrics and statistical modeling, deep quantitative analysis, and data communications that translate findings into boardroom-ready insight.
Our Approach
Every engagement starts with a conversation. We help leadership teams shape business objectives into clear, testable hypotheses, then design and execute the analytical work to answer them. The result is a defensible, evidence-based understanding of what is actually driving outcomes — not just correlations, but causes — and what to do about it.
What Changes
Decisions your team couldn't make before
A biotech CEO discovers that the $12M they're spending on patient acquisition is concentrated in the wrong geographies — and redeploys it before the next board meeting.
Patients in northern states are more likely to miss final on-trial visits than southern ones.
Patients from northern states have a 2.4x higher attrition risk than from southern ones. Patients who enroll in northern states often winter in southern ones, causing them to miss final on-trial visits. Spend on patient acquisition should be focused where there is a high likelihood of final on-trial visits.
Knowing where to focus is half the battle.
Nobody asked us to find this. It surfaced because an economist was inside the data looking for causal structure and correlation.
A dashboard would have shown total patient attrition at 17%. It took an economist to see that the real number was 27.4%, masked by patients who enroll in northern states but winter in southern ones — and that the patients leaving were the ones worth the most.
That's the difference between a reporting tool and a thinking partner. You get both.
How It Works
What it's like to have an economist on your team
Your leadership team gets sharper questions
Within the first two weeks, your executive team will be asking different questions. Horizon Data Partners helps to frame questions from an economics perspective, then looks inside the data to answer them. The business questions that actually drive decisions replace the ones that normally fill dashboards.
Most clients tell us the discovery phase alone changes how their leadership team talks about the business.
You stop flying blind on the decisions that matter
Horizon Data Partners builds the infrastructure needed to answer causal questions, and you get to keep it. Your team can finally answer the questions that used to end with “we don't have the data for that.” Pricing decisions, retention strategy, portfolio allocation — all backed by evidence, not intuition.
Everything is built in your environment. You own it. It keeps running whether we're there or not.
The insights keep coming after the project ends
Some of the most valuable findings surface after a few months. Once the data has been flowing long enough to reveal patterns nobody was looking for, Horizon Data Partners is there to help you understand them.
One client's first post-engagement insight identified $5M in annual revenue at risk that wasn't visible in any existing report.
What We Build
Every engagement starts with your business question
The capabilities we deploy depend on what's needed to answer it.
Discovery & Economic Framing
We start inside your business — understanding your economics, your data landscape, and the questions your team can’t yet answer. This phase alone often reshapes how leadership talks about performance.
Data Foundation
When the plumbing needs work first, we build it: ETL pipelines, relational databases, system integrations. Always designed for the analytical layer that follows — not as a standalone project.
Analytics Design & Build
Custom dashboards, segmentation models, predictive analytics, Power BI environments — built in your infrastructure, designed around the decisions your team actually makes.
Ongoing Advisory
Most clients stay. As new questions emerge, we serve as your embedded head of analytics: an economist watching your data, surfacing what matters, month after month.
If data engineering is the first thing that needs to happen, great — we do that. But every engagement leads somewhere: to the economic analysis that changes how you compete.
Perspectives
What the headline doesn't tell you
When the Fed moves, a market shifts or a regulation changes, Paul writes about what it means for the industries our clients work in. Some of it is public; clients get more.
Public perspectives
Published on Substack, free to read.
For clients
In the Horizon Data Partners client portal.
Perspectives tailored to each client's business and data, and early copies of the public perspectives before they appear on Substack.
Client portal →The Podcast
Engineering Alpha in Private Equity
Exploring where data science and engineering meet to create operational alpha.
Listen NowApple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Client Portal
Your private workspace
Insights, dashboards, and analysis from your engagement — organized, shareable, and always current. The place your leadership team goes when someone asks “what did we learn?”
What is your data not telling you?
The most expensive insights are the ones you don't have yet.
Paul Karner
CEO & Founder · Ph.D. Economics
No pitch deck, games, or strings attached. We care and want to hear about the challenges you're facing. Let's spend a few minutes thinking together.