The Short Version
I am an entrepreneur living near Chicago. I sold my last startup to Cisco in July 2007, worked for them for a few years, and am now working on another, Applied Data Labs.
The Long Version
When my Dad got our first computer I was 11, and I decided I wanted to make my own games. So I taught myself to program by reading my Dad’s C Programming course textbook. Then I wrote and published a book about game programming starting when I was 14. (you can still see the book’s digital ghost on Amazon
I went on to work as a programmer and eventually an architect in the call center industry, where I met my future co-founder Chris Crosby, who was in operations. After seeing a need for reporting and analytics on customer contact we eventually founded Latigent LLC to build a solution to the problem. We built the first real enterprise-grade real-time Web-based reporting system along with a completely custom data warehouse solution based on Microsoft SQL Server. After about 5 years of operation we ultimately sold the company to Cisco Systems in 2007.
I worked at Cisco for 3 years where I was a Technical Leader responsible for product architecture in the reporting and analytics group. I sat on the patent committee and worked with the CTO team to investigate emerging technology. During this time I had my first real exposure to Linked Data (“Semantic Web”) and Big Data (Apache Cassanrda, Hadoop, etc) technology. I instantly saw the incredible problems these solved, fell in love and decided to learn as much as I could about this technology.
I left Cisco in the summer of 2010 and spent a year immersing myself in “data science”, learning everything from accepted wisdom to newly-released research papers in the areas of machine learning, database indexing, n-dimensional hashing, vector quantization, etc. To me this is the most exciting and potentially most profitable area of computer science out there at the moment.
I realized that of the intellectual property that is going to drive the next 50 years is going to be developed within the next 5, and I want to be a part of that. To that end I’ve founded Applied Data Labs, an incubation and licensing company for the technology that I’m actively developing. You can read the “official” version of what’s going on on the ADL Web site, or you can get more of a behind-the-scenes glimpse on my personal blog.
Other than that, I am a married father of 2, soon to be 3, and I enjoy all kinds of activities in my off time. I’m into wine, philosophy, painting, biking, reading, relaxing in the pool with margaritas, and so on. But my main hobby is analytics research so yes, I’m a pretty big geek.
I can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @jasonkolb, or you might bump into me at one of the technical meetups around Chicago.
You can see my more traditional CV on LinkedIn.
I’m also active on Quora and Hacker News, you can follow me there as well.
