Jeremy from DataRobot here. Thanks for the support! We're looking forward to releasing the product and showing off all of our hard work!<p>Simone: Thanks for the congrats and all your help during and after techstars.<p>NnamdiJr: I did mention Xavier to the wsj--not sure why they didn't include him in the article. Xavier has been working with us full time for close to a year now. Him and I have been good friends and collaborators for over 2 years now. It is true that Xavier was ranked #1 for a very long time. If it wasn't for him taking time away from competitions to work on DataRobot, he may still be ranked #1. Owen, the current #1 ranked Data Scientist, worked with us at Travelers and I've known him and his wife for about 10 years now. Thus, I would say that so far we are recruiting from the intersection of our own network and the Kaggle leaderboard. That said, I think recruiting kaggle-proven data scientists is one of the best ways to ensure you hire a quality data scientist (although there are plenty of other factors that matter like real-world experience building and implementing predictive models).<p>acoyfellow: There are some startups using Datarobot. We have a cloud product for SMB's and startups as well as an on-premise version for enterprise.<p>jawns and blauwbilgorgel: Sometimes I use "Data Scientist" and "Statistician" interchangeably, but I do think that stats is a subset of data science (I subscribe to Drew Conways venn diagram definition of a data scientist). I do know plenty of people who call themselves statisticians but actually meet all the criteria for being a data scientist. Regardless of what they call themselves, true data scientists are extremely rare.<p>If there are any true data scientists (by Drew Conway's definition) that are interested in working with us, please send us an email at careers @ datarobot. We are also looking for great Python, Javascript, and Spark engineers. <a href="http://www.datarobot.com/careers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.datarobot.com/careers/</a>
Seems like DataRobot is building their team directly from Kaggle's leaderboard [1]. Yet another top Kaggle competitor the article doesn't mention who joined DataRobot is Xavier Conort, who was ranked #1 for a very long time.<p>I'm very curious to see how they go about automating preprocessing and identifying algorithms to use, as I thought this step was part of the hard-to-automate magic that separates your data scientists from data analyst/statistician/etc.?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.kaggle.com/users" rel="nofollow">https://www.kaggle.com/users</a>
I met Jeremy and the DataRobot team at Techstars Cloud (San Antonio, TX), where I was a mentor. You didn't need to be a genius to know that they were going to do well. Congrats for this series A!
In this article, I count eight instances of "data scientist" and zero of "statistician." Three instances of "data science" and only one of "statistics."<p>I suppose "data science" is a slightly broader term than statistics, but isn't statistics still at the heart of it all?<p>Edit: Here's a WSJ blog post arguing that "data science" and "statistics"/"data analysis" are separate concepts: <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/05/02/why-do-we-need-data-science-when-weve-had-statistics-for-centuries/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/05/02/why-do-we-need-data-scie...</a><p>I'm still not sure I'm sold on the idea that statistics is a subset of data science and not the other way around.