Finding patterns for success

This episode features an interview with Ben Kepes, a professional board member, consultant, business owner and angel investor. In this episode, Ben talks about how he chooses startups to fund, the overall importance of simple human connection, and finding patterns in data that lead to success.

About the guest Ben is a professional board member, a globally recognized technology commentator, and co-founder of a successful workwear and outdoor equipment brand. Ben has served on the boards of a number of non-profit, privately held, and listed companies in New Zealand and the UK.

Quotes

“I remember talking to a friend once about what makes an angel investor successful or unsuccessful. And his thing was that it simply comes down to pattern matching. You see enough of these companies and you can identify the patterns that predict success. And to me, that is all about data. It’s taking insights from the myriad of different data types that we have available to us. And what’s really exciting is that today, that is able to be done by anyone because of the proliferation of data platforms, and because storage and processing of data is so much cheaper and more accessible.”

“I think the thing that I have observed as an investor, as an observer and analyst of the tech space, is that there are so many entrepreneurs who deeply, deeply understand tech, but deeply, deeply don’t understandpeople. And that just doesn’t work. You have to understand the people you’re selling to, the people that are going to be using the product, and connect with individuals.”

“Leveraging data is very, very important as part of a toolkit that can then augment what you can do as an individual. It doesn’t replace what we can do as individuals.”

“Data has been used for different reasons, but fundamentally, the great thing about data platforms and technology, computer-based data mining, is that the infrastructure is the same. It’s about getting lots and lots of different pieces of structured and unstructured data into a great big database and deriving some insights from that. So, I really liked this notion of a great, big data lake and the ability to look at that data with different lenses. And I think that’s the really exciting thing that we’re seeing in our world —the ability for anyone within the business, within an organization to query data in a way that is meaningful and will derive insights that are meaningful for them.”

Time stamps

[5:23] Looking for patterns for success
[6:26] The right patterns to look for
[9:00] Data does not replace people
[10:51] Deriving insights across the tech industry
[15:19] Combining data with human knowledge for smarter results
[18:31] Looking at both qualitative and quantitative data
[23:53] The next bastion of data analytics
[30:27] How to make better decisions

Links

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn | Follow Ben on Twitter
Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn | Follow Lauren on Twitter

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