William MacDonald

Head of Data Solutions

Makes

Clean data structures that actually change how people work; nailing a race start; a beautiful raw block of black soapstone

Breaks

NULL values where there shouldn’t be any; oysters that refuse to shuck; quartz veins hiding in that block of soapstone

What do you do when you're not working?

I sail, competitively and obsessively. Whether it’s a club series or offshore, I’m always chasing performance, obsessing over the numbers, the conditions, the margins. When I’m not on the water, I enjoy stone carving. There’s something about working a piece slowly by hand, the satisfaction of watching it come to life, and the incredible softness of the stone as you sand it down, that I find therapeutic. It’s about as far from a screen as you can get, which is probably the point.

William MacDonald

A bit about me

I started my career as a geotechnical engineer, working on some fairly large infrastructure projects across the city, foundations under Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Battersea Power Station, that sort of thing. But what I was always most drawn to was the client side: understanding the problem behind the problem, working with them to find a solution. That pull eventually led me through business development into data science, and now into the work I do at 4OC.

As Head of Data Solutions, I lead the development of 4OC’s data and business intelligence capability, connecting the organisation’s departments to enable genuinely data-driven decision making. What I care about most isn’t the technology itself, it’s that intersection where a clean data structure starts to drive the right behaviours, and you can measure the difference it’s making. Getting there is the part I find endlessly interesting.

Outside of 4OC, I co-founded DOCKSIDE, a sailing operations platform built to bring performance analytics and race management to clubs and sailors. It’s the project I’m most proud of, partly because it combines two things I love, and partly because watching 500 sailors use something you built from scratch is a pretty good feeling.