Anthony Goldbloom: Big Success with Big Data

The world is filled with so much data that most of the time people don’t know what to do with them anymore. Companies often find themselves in a bit of a pickle when their data analysts can no longer solve the problems brought about by the abundance of data. This is what motivated Anthony Goldbloom to start up his own company called Kaggle – a website where data scientists and analysts can compete to predict outcomes and solve data issues for a prize.

Goldbloom was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. Even as a youngster, he was already quite competitive as he represented his home country in the World Championship of Sailing when he was just in high school. He went on to study Economics and Econometrics at the University of Melbourne where he graduated with a first-class honours degree. After college, he began working at the Australian Department of Treasury where he was a data analyst at the Economic Modeling Unit. He took a break from his job at the Treasury in 2008 to pursue an internship at The Economist in London, which he got when he won an essay writing contest. It was during his stint at The Economist that he came up with the idea for Kaggle. Goldbloom was then working on a piece about predictive modeling and had spoken to key personnel in large companies and they had explained the difficulties they had with making sense out of big data.

Teaching himself how to code, Goldbloom began creating Kaggle back home in Melbourne. In 2010, he was able to launch the site and for starters, sponsored a contest himself. The media got wind of this and ran stories about the site. This caught the attention of major corporations and institutions including Allstate Insurance and NASA. As more and more companies sponsor competitions on the site, the number of data scientists – both professional and amateurs – have grown as well.