data-science
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Avital Pardo and the long road to a second look
Before AI became a boardroom obsession, Avital Pardo was building algorithms to reconsider credit. His Pagaya story turns on a stubborn problem: persuading institutions to see what their existing systems miss.
Jessica Steier and the odds of being understood
A data scientist raised around racetracks built Unbiased Science by taking other people’s questions seriously. Her next dream collaborator is Amy Poehler.
Prashant Warier and the art of the useful detour
A steel-town childhood, a trucking thesis, a stolen passport and an advertising startup. The Qure.ai co-founder’s career makes a case for taking the long way to a problem worth solving.
Dori Wilson and the trouble with a beautiful chart
She co-founded Thorntale to help people tell stories with data. Her work since then keeps returning to a harder question: what makes a number worth trusting?
Katrina Lake and the trouble with a thousand pairs of jeans
Katrina Lake started Stitch Fix with a questionnaire and clothes bought at retail. Her wager was that knowing a customer could be worth more than showing her everything.
Chris Paquette and the art of becoming less necessary
He started DeepIntent by building things himself. Keeping it growing meant learning when to hand the work to someone else.
Ajay Bidyarthy’s Case for Starting Small
Before founding Blackcoffer, Ajay Bidyarthy worked on network security and mathematical optimization. His route from research to consulting and hyperlocal networking reveals a recurring concern: making complicated information useful.
Florian Douetteau and the trouble with brilliant machines
Before co-founding Dataiku, Florian Douetteau spent years making sense of search engines, software and the people who use them. His enduring interest is what happens when artificial intelligence leaves the experts’ desks and joins the rest of the company.
Jeremy Achin wanted to automate his own job. Then the job got bigger.
A Kaggle scoreboard helped inspire DataRobot. For co-founder Jeremy Achin, the same practical question now runs through new AI ventures and the companies he backs: how do you turn specialist knowledge into something people can use?
Jérôme Wojcik and the work that survived the office
When Merck Serono closed its Geneva headquarters, Jérôme Wojcik took a specialist skill into a company of his own. The founder of Quartz Bio has kept returning to a practical question: how do you make data worth the time it takes?
Gourab Mukherjee and the work between the slides
An inexpensive Singapore office. A patient colleague revising the pitch. An expanding list of markets. Gourab Mukherjee’s story at Aktivo Labs is about making technical work travel.
Ali Alorainy and the work behind easy money
Before Malaa could simplify a customer’s finances, Ali Alorainy had to deal with the complicated parts: bank connections, regulation, and trust. His route from data science to wealth management runs through all three.
Jim Rebesco and the problem with tomorrow
He learned to keep algorithms working on Wall Street. At Striveworks, Jim Rebesco is applying that lesson to a world where the weather, the data, and the adversary refuse to stand still.
Benjamin Harvey and the trouble with the last mile
Benjamin Harvey learned to repair computers before he learned to build companies. After a decade at the NSA, he founded AI Squared to solve a stubborn problem: getting useful intelligence into the hands of people who need it.
Roddy Lindsay and the art of getting an answer
A Facebook data scientist tried texting people who ignored their email. Hustle followed, then listening rooms, a disco documentary and a new question: who is really on the other end?
Alex Svanevik and the value of a well-placed comma
A Norwegian data scientist turned a question about anonymous wallets into Nansen. His next wager is that the machines reading the market will also make the trades.
Avi Patchava and the art of making better bets
From philosophy and poker to algorithms and American credit card bills, Bright Money’s co-founder has kept returning to one question: how do you make a sound decision before you know everything?
Aneesh Sathe and the usefulness of getting lost
The Qritive co-founder learned to make slow work faster. His games, essays, and experiments ask a different question: what happens when you leave room to wander?
Matt Hollingsworth and the trouble with a clever idea
From CERN to dressage scores to the company he co-founded, Matt Hollingsworth has kept returning to a practical question: what will people actually use? His career offers an unusually varied education in the distance between a working model and a working business.
Jim Tananbaum and the art of assembling people
Before he built Foresite Capital, Jim Tananbaum built companies, collected disciplines, and learned how much a partnership can matter. His career is a study in putting the right people around a difficult idea.
Ian Picache and the trouble with a convincing story
From a bootstrapped shopping business to private equity analytics, Ian Picache has kept returning to the gap between a plausible explanation and what customers actually do. At AtomicPE, that question now extends to how a business works.
Hao Zhou Learned to Read Starlight. Then He Put the World in a Spreadsheet.
The QuantGroup founder has spent a career translating uncertainty into variables - from distant stars to credit risk to consumer markets. The constant is less a faith in numbers than a restless suspicion of wasted motion.
The Engineer Who Keeps AI on a Short Leash
Anton Bubna-Litic spent years turning mathematical models into working systems. At NetBox Labs, he is applying the same practical instinct to AI agents - testing the fashionable future until it becomes useful infrastructure.
Jenn Gamble and the Long Mile After the AI Demo
The impressive prototype is the easy part. Distyl's founding Head of Data Science has built a career around the harder question: how does a clever model become dependable work?
Bruno Trimouille Wants Marketing to Work More Like Good Code
The Posit CMO began as a software engineer. Three decades later, he is still arguing for work that can be inspected, questioned, and trusted - whether it is code, a campaign, or an AI-generated idea.
Pek Lum Keeps Asking Biology Better Questions
Before AI became biotech's favorite phrase, Pek Lum was teaching computers to notice what biology hides in plain sight. At Auransa, that long apprenticeship has become a patient-first method for finding the signal inside human complexity.
Mike Huang Built His Career Where Data Meets the Messy Real World
Before Glow became a suite of consumer apps, Mike Huang spent fifteen years learning how people behave around software. His path from enterprise products to social experiments to a data-driven startup offers a quiet lesson in building for lives that refuse to fit a spreadsheet.
Bryce Judy Found a Startup Hiding in the Tariff Schedule
He did not set out to work in customs. Then a job at KPMG showed him a world of codes, rulings and expensive repetition - and a company worth building inside it.
Chaz Flexman Is Teaching the Grocery Aisle to Show Its Work
After years moving between venture capital, connected hardware and consumer brands, Chaz Flexman found his most useful dataset in the supermarket. At Starday Foods, every snack is also a test of whether software can make product development less dependent on guesswork.
John Hoctor Keeps Asking What Happens After the Dashboard
Three companies, two acquisitions, and one stubborn idea: the useful part of analytics begins when a neat chart fails to answer the next question.