Kaggle gets new CEO, founders quit after a decade

The co-founders of Kaggle, Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, have decided to step down from their positions of CEO & CTO respectively. D Sculley, former Director of Engineering, Google Brain, will take over as the new CEO. 

Recently, Kaggle celebrated its 12 year anniversary. What started as a light-hearted competition to predict the voting matrix for the Eurovision Song Contest in 2010 has today become the benchmark of talent, discussions and contests revolving around AI/ML. 

“There are several aspects of what Kaggle has achieved that we are really proud of. First and most importantly, the impact on peoples’ lives. Many have learned machine learning through Kaggle. Of our almost 10MM users, 1.1MM have submitted to the Titanic getting started competition and almost 1MM have completed exercises from Kaggle’s courses. 18.7K college courses have run classroom competitions with 880K students submitting to those competitions,” said Anthony.

Kaggle, a subsidiary of Google LLC, houses over 150k public datasets. The online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners allows users to find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.

Kaggle has also provided a credential to the machine learning world. We have given those who are sufficiently determined another way to break into the field. Already back in 2012, Facebook was using Kaggle to find strong machine learning talent. By 2017, we were well established as a great way to land an elite AI job. Today, well-regarded AI companies like NVidia and H20.ai hire teams of Kaggle grandmasters, Anthony added.
Read Anthony and Ben’s farewell post here.