The art of hiring a data scientist

Nearly four years ago, I joined the Insight Data Science team and we launched an intensive 7 week post-doctoral training fellowship bridging the gap between academia and data science. Since then, over 400 Insight alumni have been hired as data scientists or data engineers at top tier companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Airbnb, and Google. Although I formally […]

Our guide to marketplaces

Note: We’ve updated this handbook — read the latest and greatest 3rd edition here! At Version One, we love marketplaces. Just look at our portfolio, and you’ll understand how important we think marketplaces are to the future of commerce. Over the past year, we have focused much of our blog content on helping marketplace founders […]

Metrics that matter to social platforms (Part 2/3): Measuring engagement by content

Last week, we introduced our social platform KPI dashboard to help provide a framework for founders to think about their businesses and preempt the inevitable questions that arise during the fundraising process. In the first post, we talked about the high-level metrics to track – such as DAU, MAU, and your stickiness ratio. In the […]

Metrics that matter to social platforms (Part 1/3)

A few months ago, we wrote about the data we focus on to evaluate marketplaces and later shared a marketplace KPI dashboard that we created to guide founders on the important metrics they should track. As we have been developing our investment thesis on social platforms, we want to provide the similar information and tools. There are […]