Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Karpištšenko's
career
as a researcher, founder, and manager of data teams exemplifies
what it means to build data-driven software, services, and products. Manifest from his
early days working for the public sector to his present enterprise focused on solving
problems in complex systems embedded in the physical world, Karpištšenko's dedication
to building solutions, nurturing teams, making the environment better for all of humanity,
and keeping values as part of the decision-making process illumine his interview.
Sebastian Gutierrez:
Tell me about where you work.
André Karpištšenko:
Along with two co-founders, I am building a company
called Planet OS. We bring together all of the available ocean and atmosphere
data to help businesses in shipping, oil, and gas, as well as federal organiza-
tions, make better decisions—investment decisions, daily operation decisions,
and so on. So we're a company focused on the dynamic environment and the
data the environment generates. Right now the focus is very much on the
ocean, but the opportunities are much wider. Weather also affects many land-
based companies. Agriculture is an example of a business highly affected by
the weather. Right now we're in our third year, so it's very exciting.
Gutierrez:
Did you have a background in oceanography?
Karpištšenko:
I did not have a background in oceanography when we started,
but I did have a background in data. The story of how I ended up here was that
I founded the data research team at Skype. At Skype we were looking at how
the Internet worked and how we could optimize it from a Skype perspective.
Our overarching goal was to help people communicate—figuring out how we
could best help them find each other and talk to each other in a meaningful
manner. So we looked at data to understand things like how to fit more video
calls into the limited network conditions that were available at the time. I was
deeply involved with data on a daily basis.
One day I met Rainer Sternfeld, founder of the company, and we shared what
we had both been doing with data. He told me a story about a buoy they had
built. The customer for whom they built the buoy wanted to get insight out of
that data, but, unfortunately, it took the customer three months to get usable
data. For me, as I worked daily with live streams of content in the Internet,
it was obvious that this was a great opportunity for technology transfer that
could transform how the ocean industry worked. To me, this was another
stream of data to optimize, so I actually didn't even see a physical buoy until
after we had built a prototype of our service. It was only when we went to
present our product in London that I saw the devices involved. Until that point,
I had just been working with it just as I worked with any other data set.
Gutierrez:
What did you focus on in the first year, and what have you been
focusing on since then?
Karpištšenko:
My focus in the company is the engineering, data, and tech-
nology side of it. In the first year we focused on making sure that we were
