Barry McCardel

Barry McCardel is co-founder and CEO of Hex, a collaborative analytics and data-science workspace he started in late 2019 with former Palantir colleagues Caitlin Colgrove and Glen Takahashi.

Consulting, Palantir, and the same broken workflow

McCardel studied at Northwestern, worked as a consultant doing heavy Excel analysis, spent about five years at Palantir at the intersection of product and customer impact, then worked closely with data teams at TrialSpark (later Formation Bio). In a Data Driven NYC conversation with Matt Turck, he said he had "been working in data effectively my whole career" and kept observing the same problems: notebooks that do not share cleanly, brittle handoffs into slides, and tools that fight collaboration. Hex is his answer to that pattern.

Building Hex with Palantir teammates

He has described starting Hex with Colgrove and Takahashi as a stroke of luck rooted in prior trust. Amplify Partners and later investors backed the trio as they pushed a notebook-plus-app model aimed at analysts and data scientists who need publishable, shared work. The company has since added AI-assisted analysis features while keeping the collaborative workspace as the core product story.

On design as a data-tool requirement

In founder interviews McCardel treats design and clarity as part of the product, not decoration. He argues data tools fail when they ignore how teams share context. That is why Hex markets itself as a workspace rather than another isolated notebook.