Kaggle's lessons in building a crowd-sourcing platform
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 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.
(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.)
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.
Anthony Goldbloom
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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.Jeremy Howard
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Kaggle President and Chief Scientist; Founder of FastMail.FM and Optimal Decisions; ex-management consultant, now nearly fully recovered.