Transitioning from Academia to Data Science – Jake Klamka with Kevin Hale

Jake Klamka founded Insight. Insight provides intensive 7 week professional training fellowships in fields such as data science and data engineering. Insight was in the YC Winter 2011 batch.

https://twitter.com/jakeklamka
https://www.insightdatascience.com/

Kevin Hale is a Visiting Partner at YC. Before YC Kevin was the cofounder of Wufoo, which was funded by YC in 2006 and acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2011.

https://twitter.com/ilikevests

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon – https://twitter.com/craigcannon

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Topics

00:00 – Kevin’s intro

00:30 – Jake’s intro

1:05 – Applying to YC with one product then changing it

3:30 – How Insight started

4:20 – Jake’s first students and initial coursework

8:00 – Finding out what companies want from data scientists

10:00 – Picking the first class of students

11:30 – Common pitfalls for people transitioning into data science

14:30 – Types of data science roles

16:45 – What data scientists should look out for in companies

17:40 – Chuck Grimmett asks – When do you know you need to bring in seasoned data scientists?

20:00 – How Insight has scaled and changed

22:00 – What happens in the program

23:20 – Examples of a good project for a data science resume

25:50 – Will more data scientists be founders in the future?

28:00 – Teaching product

29:00 – Cleaning data

31:30 – Tools for tracking data

32:30 – Track what are you trying to optimize

35:20 – Churn and conversion

39:00 – Is there an ideal background for a data scientist?

41:00 – Which startups recruit well at Insight?

43:00 – Contracting

45:40 – Fields Jake is excited about