Database Reference
In-Depth Information
When I got married to my very dashing American naval officer husband, moved
out to the States, and left behind my whole professional network in the UK,
I suddenly found myself in San Diego thinking, “What on earth do I do now?”
In a way, this turned out to be really helpful, as it took a while for me to get a
work permit, so I had a bit of time to sit around and think about what I really
wanted to do. I reached out to a friend of ours named Bob Goodson, who
was living in San Francisco, where he had just founded a tech company. At
that time, the company was called YouNoodle and they were building a social
network for entrepreneurs. I reached out to him and said, “Hey, Bob, I think
you probably have some interesting data that you're generating. I would love
to analyze it, and I've got a bunch of ideas for what we could do. And have you
heard of network analysis? I will look at your data for free if necessary, just let
me play with it.”
I started working with Bob and it began an interesting spiral of events. I collab-
orated closely with Sean Gourley, who is now the CTO at Quid, and it turned
out that we were able to build some really interesting things with the data
we had—and were able to start collecting—on entrepreneurs and startups.
What we built and our results were different enough from what they started
out doing and compelling enough that Quid was born around this whole new
set of analytics. At Quid we refined those initial ideas, and built out a team
that built this whole intelligence platform. My career evolved as the startup
evolved.
Within Quid, and at YouNoodle before that, I have had a lot of different
roles, which I think points partly to the ambiguity of what data science is and
partly to life in early stage companies. At times, I've prototyped and tried out
new approaches to analysis. At other times, I've run teams of data analysts.
At other times, I've QAed the engineering team. At other times, I've done
product management. I've written production code to get things to move
from prototype versions into the main product. It's been an interesting and
varied ride, which is why I love data science and working at Quid.
Gutierrez:
How did you arrive at the title of Director of Mathematics?
Heineike:
When I got to Silicon Valley six years ago, there wasn't a name
for what I do. I was just curious about getting to poke around the data and
figuring out what products we could build on it. At the time, it was very weird
to think of having a mathematician doing that. And so I don't think anyone
knew why I was there or what to call me. Pretty soon it became apparent that
combining a mathematical bent with a focus on data and product building was
very useful. People now typically call this 'Data Scientist', but we came up with
the Director of Mathematics title—which I'm sticking with because I like it.
