jakek

Summary of the ruling with annotations (written & audio): https://guidedsearch.ai/results?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cit.usco...

Founder of Insight here (YC W11). Since 2012 we've been running free fellowships to help PhDs transition to roles in data science [1] and more recently health data [2]. Similarly, since 2014, we have been helping professional software engineers learn and move into data engineering roles [3]. Finally, since 2016, we have been helping researchers and engineers move into top applied AI teams working on cutting edge products [4]. Over 1200 Insight alums now work on data teams at 300+ companies.

For the past year, due to the growth in applied AI / deep learning teams in industry, many top teams are now hiring product people to lead teams of data scientists, AI engineers, etc. We’re also increasingly receiving applications from product managers who have experience building data-driven products and want to build sophisticated products during their time at Insight. The new Insight Data PM [5] will take an existing PMs experience and help layer on the AI / ML / analytics piece needed, with Fellows interviewing for Data PM roles at top companies immediately after the fellowship.

[1] Data Science: http://insightdatascience.com [2] Health Data: http://insighthealthdata.com [3] Data Engineering: http://insightdataengineering.com [4] Artificial Intelligence: http://insightdata.ai [5] Data Product Management: http://insightdatapm.com

This is fantastic news for entrepreneurs everywhere.

Garry has been instrumental to the success of my company from the earliest days when we were back in YC W11 through to the present day - I'm so excited for all the new founders who will get an opportunity to work with him as a result of this new fund. Garry is not only an extremely kind person, extremely smart,but also completely understands what it means to have ups and downs as a startup since he's been there and helped hundreds of other companies through those ups and downs. So when you need someone in your corner he's there every step of the way. If you're an early stage founder I couldn't recommend Initialized and Garry more highly - super excited for what Garry and team are going to build.

Yes, absolutely, one of the goals of the program is to help researchers with strong quantitative backgrounds and experience in machine learning enter the industry, despite not having a background traditionally associated with ML.

Since the New York session is a bit further out, we're still finalizing the mentor companies. That said, for our NYC data science and engineering programs, companies hiring Insight Fellows include Facebook, Bloomberg, Capital One, New York Times, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and dozens of others. We expect many of these companies plus other NY AI teams to be actively participating as we have already received significant interest.

The litmus test for me on whether we're adding adding value as an education company has always been: are there Insight Fellows who get rejected from companies X,Y,Z prior to Insight then get offers from X,Y,Z after Insight? From the very first session through to today, we have numerous examples each session of this happening.

A recent example was a Data Science Fellow who was a physics postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab prior to Insight. Right after his postdoc ended, he applied to half a dozen bay area tech companies (all the usual brand name suspects), got rejected from all of them. He came to Insight and during his fellowship built a video scene segmentation & object detection project with a YC startup. After Insight he got an offer from every one of the companies he previously got rejected from. He went on to accept an offer on the LinkedIn data science security team (which is led by another Insight alum).

We’ve seen this happen time and again on the software engineering side as well with our data engineering program. A Data Engineering Fellow prior to Insight has a generalist software engineer experience but a passion for big data, wants to do big data full-time, but no one will take a chance on her/him. At Insight they build a sophisticated data pipeline on AWS, while being mentored by leading data engineers, and then the same companies previously rejecting that Fellow for data engineering roles make offers because they now have the evidence they need that she/he can solve the types of specialized problems the company is facing.

For the data science (DS) program we’re very open to strong quantitative fundamentals without ML experience, as many of the DS roles are focus on analysis. For the AI program, since the focus will be entirely on getting you up to cutting edge of what’s happening in ML, it will be important to already have had experience with the fundamentals of ML. Luckily, for someone with your background, it’s completely possible to build some impressive side projects in a couple of months than can demonstrate your ability to learn ML at a rapid pace. We’re far more interested in how quickly you can learn than your current level of knowledge, so doing a side project and mentioning your starting point prior to the projects will give us strong signal that if we accept you into the fellowship you’ll be able to pick up the necessary techniques.

As an aside: it’s astounding how quickly Fellows with strong quantitative backgrounds can learn when surrounded by other really great people. We’ve had numerous mathematicians and theoretical physicists at Insight who barely touched any data in their PhDs, go on to build sophisticated machine learning data products at Insight and get hired at top tier data science and machine learning teams.

Regarding the location: the initial programs will focus on roles in the SF Bay Area and New York, so we’d like to attract Fellows who are interested in living in either of those respective cities. That said, our network has grown well beyond those cities so I encourage you to apply regardless of geographic preference and just let us know in the application where you hope to end up after the program.

Founder of Insight here (YC W11). Since 2012 we've been running free fellowships to help PhDs transition to roles in data science [1] and more recently health data [2]. Similarly, since 2014, we have been helping professional software engineers learn and move into data engineering roles [3]. Over 750 Insight alums now work as data scientists & engineers at 200+ companies.

This past year, we've seen more highly specialized applied AI / deep learning roles emerge in the industry. We're also increasingly receiving applications from scientists and engineers who have some machine learning experience and are learning to build out sophisticated deep learning models during their time at Insight. The new Insight AI [4] program will focus on allowing Fellows with these backgrounds implement the latest ML techniques from research or contribute to open source projects under the guidance of industry leaders, then join AI teams in Silicon Valley and New York after the program. Insight AI will accept both software engineers and quantitative scientists (no PhD required).

[1] Data Science: http://insightdatascience.com

[2] Health Data: http://insighthealthdata.com

[3] Data Engineering: http://insightdataengineering.com

[4] Artificial Intelligence: http://insightdata.ai