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brandonb
9,313karma·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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That's a huge issue, and it's part of our motivation to use machine learning to combine lots of signals. It's not fair to the legitimate users in Nigeria and other countries to be blocked entirely fro…
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Hey, OP here! I work at Sift Science, who provided all the facts for this article. It's been crazy to see how far fraudsters will go to create fake accounts. We've seen people in the Phillipines use T…
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This article has great advice. I work on fraud detection, and a lot of companies start off by building basic checks like AVS, CVV, proxies, IP-billing location mismatch, etc. What usually happens aft…
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What makes you think that a low answer is what they're looking for?
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>I think the problem is rooted in the business model that seems to be preached by Y Combinator: build a great product, choose investment over income, and exit as quickly as possible. YCombinator n…
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San Francisco, CA | H1B ok Sift Science uses machine learning to predict user behavior. To start with, we're predicting whether a user about to use a stolen credit card on a web site. There's $4B in c…
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1. Split it between you guys, and handle investors later. When a new shareholder (investor or employee) comes in, all existing shareholders dilute equally. 2. Yes. 4-year vesting with a 1-year cliff i…
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As one data point, the average valuation of a YCombinator company for the last batch was $10M:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/22/ycombinator-80-strong/ And that's the average; many were higher. The…
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His numbers are way off. 2M is not a "high" pre-money valuation--most startups nowadays raise a seed round at a 5-10M pre-money valuation. So for $50k, an investor will get 0.47-0.91%, whereas the emp…
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Not only is Josh is one of the smartest guys I know, he's a damn nice guy too. Highly recommended!
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Don't worry about competition, especially un-launched competition. Most startups die due to suicide, not murder. A major competitor of ours launched 3 weeks after we started our company, doing the exa…
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San Francisco, CA - Sift Science [H1B ok] Sift Science is bringing machine learning to the masses. Our initial product is a hosted model to detect fraud online. Fraud is a huge, difficult problem beca…
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I'd love to say but then it'd be obvious to any fraudsters out there. :-(
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My startup works on fraud detection, and it's amazing to see how sophisticated criminals get when there are such large sums of money involved. The black market for stolen credit card numbers is a real…
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I know the OP and he's the "real deal." Hard-working, friendly, insightful, and smart. I'd definitely start a company with him if I hadn't already started one last year. So if you've been thinking abo…
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Sift Science is hiring summer interns in San Francisco! We're a small team of hackers who believe in the power of data. Our initial product is an API to battle credit card fraud, which causes $2.4B/ye…
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When you're as concerned with frontend performance as Google is, computer science knowledge can really come in handy. For example, they wrote their own compiler for Javascript to check for errors and …
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Congrats guys! The Ridejoys are a really friendly, smart, and humble group of people. I'd really recommend working with them if you can, so if you're thinking about applying to their designer or softw…
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San Francisco, CA - Sift Science [fulltime or intern, H1B ok] Sift Science is aimed at bringing machine learning to the masses. Our initial product is an API to detect online fraud. Last year, there w…
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What's your contact info? Your e-mail address doesn't seem to be in your profile.
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AI is extremely useful for web companies since they collect terabytes of historical user behavior and want to make predictions about how users will behave in the future. In particular, machine learnin…
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Cool article. Once the starter project is done, what are the main criteria you apply to make a hire/no-hire decision? Does the hiring manager make the decision alone, or does the team debate the perso…
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An MBA or a PhD aren't good paths to becoming an entrepreneur. A PhD takes 5-7 years to complete, the purpose of which is to give you the skills necessary to be a university professor or researcher. I…