A Data Scientist’s Guide to Start-Ups

In August 2013, we held a panel discussion at the KDD 2013 conference in Chicago on the subject of data science, data scientists, and start-ups. KDD is the premier conference on data science research and practice.  The panel discussed the pros and cons for top-notch data scientists of the hot data science start-up scene.  In this article, we first present background on our panelists.  Our four panelists have unquestionable pedigrees in data science and substantial experience with start-ups from multiple perspectives (founders, employees, chief scientists, venture capitalists).  For the casual reader, we next present a brief summary of the experts’ opinions on eight of the issues the panel discussed. The rest of the article presents a lightly edited transcription of the entire panel discussion.