“We don’t need an army, we need talent!”
May 1st, 2014
Mr. Stuart Cornew T’84 has more than a few war stories to share. From surviving a recent plane crash when a duck took out his engine to starting an insurance company and selling it to MetLife to creating a model for restructuring country debt to founding AnswerMine Group…my ears are certainly still ringing with his war stories.
In 1983, Stuart made a choice to either buy a car or a PC. Because Dartmouth had connections, (thanks to President John Kemeny, who had written Basic) he could get a PC! Now just think about making that choice.
Stuart stated that:
- Everyone has big data; finding meaning in that data is the real challenge for most companies. It doesn’t take an army to find that meaning – it takes tools and talent. (Facebook has only 12 analytical people!)
- Data in a vacuum isn’t good enough; your own performance data coupled with terrestrial data provides the insights, forms the models and guides business action.
- The data set that is a mess right now (and affords the greatest opportunity to solve) is health data. He even called it “filthy.”
- Diagnostic aids present a great opportunity for health providers to reduce referrals and add confidence to diagnosis (his company built the original recommendation systems for Netflix and Blockbuster, so AnswerMine probably has a good idea on how to do this!)
Stuart challenged the audience to consider the following – which all combine to make living now an exciting time:
- Google and Facebook are trying to bring free internet to the world – to the WORLD! Do you think AT&T and the like are nervous?
- Shouldn’t credit card banks be worried about the iTunes dataset? Think about the experience iTunes could deliver versus what we experience now…
- Amazon can’t make drone delivery work profitably – but guess who has routes on all the homes in the United States? The USPS! Could you imagine getting your groceries delivered by your postman – talk about redeploying a dying industry.
You can hear all of Stuart’s amazing war stories, or at least the ones we were lucky enough to hear at Tuck, on this podcast and in video highlights below.
