Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Gutierrez:
How have you learned about different subject areas as you've
gone from academia to research and then to sales?
Radinsky:
In the past, when I was working in Microsoft Research on search
engines, I would go to conferences about information retrieval. There I would
learn about what people see as problems. We would also see many of those
problems inside our query logs, so we could put the knowledge of what was
and wasn't working together.
I also follow people on Twitter to see the development in the field. I just like
thinking about different ideas. I like revisiting different workshops, even smaller
ones, where people can learn about up-and-coming things. For instance, I was
really excited for a long time about bio machine interfaces. My husband and I
did a small project where we utilized an EEG helmet to build a music recom-
mendation system from the feedback the helmet gave. It actually connected
the electrodes to your head to identify your mood and, based on that, it would
give you a better music selection. It wasn't that precise and it took a lot of
time to get it on, but that was pretty exciting. So for me, each time I hear from
somebody who is rooted somewhere outside of my field saying, “Oh, there's
this new thing,” it makes me want to play and explore the new thing.
For SalesPredict, my co-founder comes from a business and sales background,
so he's been telling me about his problems. The more I work with salespeople,
the more I identify the problems they have with sales systems and where the
failure points are in those interactions.
For the SalesPredict technology, I also read a lot of papers on artificial intel-
ligence. I have a lot of colleagues in the space, so they tell me about the prob-
lems they encounter. We talk frequently about whether someone read this or
that about this and that. I have a few friends here in Israel with whom we've
organized a reading group. So from time to time, we read things from different
topics that are raised. It could be something from a conference or something
that comes from somewhere else. We make sure to keep it intimate and fun,
so we generally meet over dinner to discuss the latest paper. As long as it's
fun, it's always easy.
Gutierrez:
What does a typical workday look like for you?
Radinsky:
My day is really diverse because I'm in a startup. It roughly breaks
down into solving problems, coding myself, or helping our team with their
tasks and learning new topics, as well as meeting with people outside of the
company. These things don't happen every day, but those are the things I
spend my time on. In regards to solving problems, I would say that I have a set
of problems that I need to solve each day. I see a lot of problems with data
that come from our customers saying things like, “I don't understand why we
ranked this person as an A, because the salesperson has not been able to close
them after a few months.” I also look at the marketing system. Sometimes
this involves building different tools to actually try to find out what's going
