#111 - Jake Klamka and Kevin Hale

Y Combinator Startup Podcast - A podcast by Y Combinator

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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.

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.

You can find Jake on Twitter at @jakeklamka and Kevin at @ilikevests.

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

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Topics

00:37 - Kevin's intro

01:07 - Jake's intro

1:42 - Applying to YC with one product then changing it

4:07 - How Insight started

4:57 - Jake's first students and initial coursework

8:37 - Finding out what companies want from data scientists

10:37 - Picking the first class of students

12:07 - Common pitfalls for people transitioning into data science

15:07 - Types of data science roles

17:22 - What data scientists should look out for in companies

18:17 - Chuck Grimmett asks - When do you know you need to bring in seasoned data scientists?

20:37 - How Insight has scaled and changed

22:37 - What happens in the program

23:57 - Examples of a good project for a data science resume

26:27 - Will more data scientists be founders in the future?

28:37 - Teaching product

29:37 - Cleaning data

32:07 - Tools for tracking data

32:57 - Track what are you trying to optimize

35:57 - Churn and conversion

39:37 - Is there an ideal background for a data scientist?

41:37 - Which startups recruit well at Insight?

43:37 - Contracting

46:17 - Fields Jake is excited about