Jeremy Howard

Jeremy Howard

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

Website: jhoward.fastmail.fm
San Francisco, California, United States
Accredited investor
Member since December 02, 2011
  • About
Investor interests
Type of investor Angel
Typical investment size $25,000 - $50,000
Typical investments in a year 3
Categories of interest
Credentials Accredited Investor
I am a(n):

Entrepreneur

Companies I've founded or co-founded:
FastMail, Optimal Decisions
Companies I work or worked for:
Kaggle
If you're an entrepreneur or corporate innovator, why?

I want to invent something cool.

My favorite startups:

Kaggle, Airbnb, Square, StackExchange

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?

It's frustrating to have so many ideas but only so many hours in the day to make them happen. Can someone please invent a machine where I put my idea in one end and a startup pops out the other end?

But it's rewarding to being doing what you believe in, with people you believe in. I could never work for a big old stodgy corporate again.

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs/innovators make?

Most hopeful entrepreneurs I meet haven't yet taken the first step: to actually quit their job and start following their dream. If you don't make a start, you'll never achieve it.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

1. Listen. 2. Don't give up. 3. Never stop learning

Full bio

Jeremy Howard is the Chief Data Scientist at Kaggle. Previously, he founded FastMail  (sold to Opera Software) and Optimal Decisions (sold to ChoicePoint).

Prior to that he worked in management consulting, at McKinsey & Company and A.T. Kearney, but he is now nearly fully recovered.


Jeremy's passion is applying algorithms to data. At FastMail he used algorithms to automate nearly every part of the business - as a result the company only needed a total of 3 full time staff, and got over a million signups. Optimal Decisions was a business entirely built to commercialise a new algorithm he designed for the optimal pricing of insurance.


Jeremy competes regularly in data mining competitions, which he uses to test himself and stay on the leading edge of machine learning and predictive modelling technology. His competition performance history is available on his Kaggle profile page (http://www.kaggle.com/jphoward/) . If you have beaten Jeremy in a competition, he would appreciate it if you didn't rub it in too much.