Making the future.
CTOs and CEOs and Founders and Inventors and Creators.
Never before have the economic and creative prospects been so good for a young person with quantitative or technical abilities. In my generation we had fewer options: defense, academia or big stodgy corporations. Today you can code or analyze data or build mathematical models for a hedge fund, a bank, a social networking startup, a web publisher, an e-commerce site, a video game company, Google, etc., etc. If you can manage a team and communicate your vision to investors and partners, all the better. The sky is the limit.
"The Times gets a billion impressions a day. How do they optimize their ad revenue? To get real-time or nearly real-time analysis of, say, how many people in Wisconsin who were on Zappos within the last hour also viewed a Style section article, we need a big hadoop deployment and in-memory database that let's the user slice through a 100 dimensional parameter space. It's business intelligence on a supercomputer. Remnant ad space is auctioned on AdSense to competing bots, with the whole thing -- cookie analysis, automated bidding, ad fetching and placement -- taking place over 500 milliseconds."
"We're empowering people in rural India by giving them access to piece-rate work over the internet."
"90% of mechanical turk work is web spam." :-)
"They tried to buy us with shares priced on a secondary market, but I wouldn't trade my execution risk against that valuation risk."
"Yes, it's a flashlight but it's LED with a lithium ion battery. 3000 lumens shined into a burglar's eyes will blind them for 20 minutes. Those fins are for heat dissipation; the tip reaches 180 degrees."
"Computer vision is next. Much easier than NLP, but it'll be hacks strung together like everything else."
A few more Foo Camp 2011 photos here. Scott Berkun shares his insights here.
