Here’s the second part of my interview with the founders of Kaggle, a recently-launched start-up with $11 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, as well as Stanford University’s endownment, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian and now Google Adsense co-founder Gil Elbaz. Kaggle is solving real-world problems through competitions among the world’s biggest brains.
Kaggle brings together super smart data scientists, or just plain hyper-intelligent folks who love data and number crunching, with data sets and prizes to figure out complex problems.
In this interview, Anthony Goldbloom, founder and CEO, and Jeremy Howard, the first hire, chief scientist and president, talk about how Kaggle plans on making money and how it managed to attract some very smart people vying for tens of thousands and sometimes millions in prize money. Apparently, it’s easy to attract brain power, said Goldbloom. The hardest part was getting data sets.
