Anthony Goldbloom

You want to evaluate future borrowers, but in order to train an algorithm that will help you identify future defaults, you have to train it and evaluate it on past data.

If competition for Kaggle's top talent becomes fierce enough among banks, insurance companies, hedge funds - we hope the world's best data scientists will earn more than $50 million per year, just like the world's best hedge fund managers.

It turns out that with Twitter data alone, we can go quite some way into figuring out someone's personality.

I love kite surfing and mountain bike riding. It's kind of interesting; my kite surfing ability has probably deteriorated with the rate of Kaggle's success.

Startup stories are always smoother in the telling than they are in reality. A startup is not one, but a series of 'Aha!' moments, and some which seem like 'Aha!' moments but turn out not to be.

As a young entrepreneur starting an enterprise company, be prepared for the fact that you'll need to get involved in enterprise sales. Everyone wants to speak to the founder, and this is also how you'll get feedback on your product. It's worth bringing in early somebody with enterprise sales experience.

I got really excited about the idea of data-driven startup just as I was starting Kaggle.

Companies are getting bitten by hiring a data scientist who isn't really a data scientist.

Business analytics or predictive modelling is a $100 billion industry, and $41 billion is spent on outsourced business analytics every year. I think that's about twice the size of the movie industry - it's really big.

Without the discipline of having a wife to come home to, you end up just working all the time.

Big data is mostly about taking numbers and using those numbers to make predictions about the future. The bigger the data set you have, the more accurate the predictions about the future will be.