Kaggle's lessons in building a crowd-sourcing platform

Bambi Francisco Roizen · February 13, 2012 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/2204

Anthony Goldbloom and Jeremy Howard on engagement and funding lessons

The No. 1 and 2 questions I typically ask start-ups when they're getting started is: How do you plan to market your service and how do you plan on keep customers/users engaged? Kaggle has done an incredible job engaging its users to compete for prizes to solve complex problems. In this interview, I spoke with the founders Anthony Goldbloom, CEO, and Jeremy Howard, Chief Scientist, about how they do that.  

Kaggle  is a recently-launched start-up with $11 million in Series A funding from Index VenturesKhosla 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.  

(Editor's note: Vator will be tackling this challenge of engagement and how companies are using game mechanics to keep their users actively interacting with their service/product. See agenda and register here.)

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Bambi Francisco Roizen

Founder and CEO of Vator, a media and research firm for entrepreneurs and investors; Managing Director of Vator Health Fund; Co-Founder of Invent Health; Author and award-winning journalist.

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Kaggle

Startup/Business

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Kaggle is a platform for data prediction competitions that allows organizations to post their data and have it scrutinized by the world's best data scientists. In exchange for a prize, winning competitors provide the algorithms that beat all other methods of solving a data crunching problem. Most data problems can be framed as a competition.

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Anthony Goldbloom

Joined Vator on

Anthony Goldbloom is the founder and CEO of Kaggle. Before founding Kaggle, Anthony worked in the macroeconomic modelling areas of the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Treasury.
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Jeremy Howard

Joined Vator on

Kaggle President and Chief Scientist; Founder of FastMail.FM and Optimal Decisions; ex-management consultant, now nearly fully recovered.