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brandonb
9,328karma·1,335submissions·January 17, 2011
about
Data for good.
Co-Founder at Empirical Health (https://empirical.health). Don't die of heart disease.
Before: Co-Founder @ Cardiogram (ML for heart health)
CTO at Sift Science (YC S11, machine learning to fight fraud)
Data Science @ UCSF Cardiology
HealthCare.gov rescue team
Google (Android speech recognition, search ads ML)
brandonb.cc
recent activity (1,335 total)
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For those that want to learn more, the author also has a good book "Good boss, bad boss" on what to do and not to do as a manager of people:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Boss…
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Indeed, that was my (new) co-founder!
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It's kind of like eating your vegetables and exercising. You know you ought to. But most people don't. You'll never lose money betting on aggregate laziness and lack of foresight.
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A mobile app for local events. To put it lightly, YC strongly encouraged us to change the idea to a better one:
http://brandonb.cc/no-filter-the-meanest-thing-paul-graham-s... …
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I have some ideas in-progress, but nothing completely firm yet!
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Yeah, not having a backup was totally stupid. Although, to be honest, it probably wouldn't even make my top 10 list of mistakes nowadays. Starting a startup tends to increase the number and magni…
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Yep. There was a lot on the line and the chances were quite uncertain -- Y Combinator takes, perhaps, 2% of applicants. I've seen them say no to more than a few smart all-Google teams (or all-MIT…
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That's what I thought too! But according to my friends on the Google Brain team, unsupervised pretraining is now thought to be an irrelevant detour. In 2006, Hinton introduced greedy layer-wise p…
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I'm not (that's a whole separate topic), but the company is still going strong -- if you happen to run a site that accepts payments, and you're dealing with fraud, you can try it here:
…
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This is a cool tutorial! It's ironic that deep neural networks have become the biggest machine learning breakthrough of 2013: they were also the biggest machine learning breakthrough of 1957. The…
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Thanks! Yeah, part of the reason YC has founders from previous batches hanging out in the main room is to provide a little support to all the nervous interviewees. It definitely calmed me down.
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I'm the OP. This happened two years ago, but I figured I'd post it now since YC interviews start tomorrow, and I already heard of one person in this batch who's going through the same t…
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There's an excellent Quora thread on this with 34 answers:
http://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/Why-are-so-many-people-i... People cite everything from arrogance as a defense…
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The Waterloo students I've worked with have been absolutely amazing and have tons of programming experience. They do co-ops year-round. If you're running a startup, I'd recommend puttin…
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At what level of traction would you recommend entrepreneurs start pitching for a consumer series A? If an app has, say, one million (non-transactional) users, is that interesting? 100k? One of the har…
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Almost no big companies will provide feedback since they interview thousands of candidates per year and become large targets for lawsuits. Startups have a little more flexibility, but, unfortunately, …
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I was worried about getting embroiled in arguments, but in practice it virtually never happened. Most people simply thanked us for providing feedback at all; I only dealt with one case where somebody …
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Most candidates who received an offer accepted it, and multiple people who didn't receive an offer referred others, so I suspect that wasn't the problem. Of course, there's no real way …
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FWIW, I'm the OP and I've spent most of my time on the hiring side (and spent time writing emails with feedback).
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Hmm, did you actually encounter those bad behaviors, or are these hypothetical? I gave feedback to nearly everyone we interviewed onsite, and only dealt with one person who became defensive. I thought…
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Good idea. We've definitely tried to pay it back in other contexts, e.g., helping a person to whom we didn't make an offer fundraise for their own startup. (In that case, I sure regretted no…
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You should! Have you gotten any feedback so far? As somebody on the other side of the equation, I really have no data on what most other startups are doing.