This web service called YouNoodle reeled me in with their ‘Startup predictor‘. I mean, an algorithm that predicts how successful a startup will be or how much it will be worth in three years. Sounds like too good to be true. I’m not able to judge what those digits are worth, but the environment YouNoodle created is very interesting.
It’s a simple index of startups around the world. The startups are scored with an algorithm and data from multiple interesting sources. The last couple of days I’ve been checking out YouNoodle for a couple of times. And there is some interesting information there. Of course you should question how reliable the data is and of which use the data can be. But it’s interesting to see how information between startups relate.
Algorithms, algorithms and algorithms. They are the centre of what YouNoodle provides as an service. And YouNoodle is not the only one. More startups need algorithms and mathematical analysis for the core of their service. In order to give users / customers good advice solid algorithms are needed. These algorithms are custom and for many of us very complicated.
There are some good examples of big companies that get a math nerd or dedicated math officer in an advanced stadium. Google has dedicated people developing their core search. Even more interesting, they have their own economical expert because AdWords is an economy of it’s own.
In order to compete we’ll start to notice that getting math people in the early stage of your startup is important. Maybe not only for your technical startup, but also your next little web service might profit. Think of the possibilities when differentiating using the power of Math. And not only based on concept, adoption or integrations.
I’m really eager to know if there are startups out there that have dedicated math experts in their team.
A decent developer should be able to figure most of the simple algorithms out by him/herself. Treat the mathproblem as a set specifications just as you do for your applications and you’ll come up with something eventually :)
For everything beyond that, you should hire an expert. But in my opinion, especially for a startup, make sure they have programming-experience and are able to implement their algorithms themselves.
To answer your last question: we started out trying to build a recommendation engine ourselves. But after trying to figure out the numerous academic publications on the subject we ended up hiring a real mathematician to implement the first version of the engine.
Interesting to see that you guys figured the first steps and decided to hire someone who specialized on that topic.
Was he/she able to continue your work? What would you advice to startups? Try to build it yourself and only when you hit the max of the math power of your startup you hire a specialist? Or should startups hire somebody from day one.
I think it’s related to how important math for a startup is. In the case of Wakoopa it’s a big part of the core business. Looking on our plans and products, it’s less important but it could add a lot of value to the product when we have some good math geeks working on it ;-)