#154 Tech enthusiast to AI leader: Getting to know podcast host, Felipe Flores. Part 1 - Career Walkthrough & Tips
In part one of this special episode, Felipe reflects on the path his career has taken from his first start-up company to how he started Data Futurology and to his latest role in Healthcare. In this open and honest conversation, he reveals the mistakes he made along the way and the lessons he learned from those failures. Successful people do have struggles, but you must be willing to ask for help.
Felipe Flores is a data science senior executive with almost 20 years experience. He has worked across data engineering/warehousing, reporting, business intelligence, analytics, data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is currently the Head of Data Science at Healthcare AI company, Honeysuckle Health.
Passionate about his field, Felipe began the Data Futurology podcast in 2018 when he realised he needed a productive outlet for his obsession! Fast forward to today and he has interviewed over 200 guests from Australia and around the world from companies such as NASA, Formula 1, the AFL. And even a futurist!
Listen in next week for part two as Felipe takes Q&A from the audience.
Enjoy the show!
Quotes:
“This investor that we had, we thought we hit the jackpot with him because he had started and built a consulting company that was very successful and he grew it to 200 consultants. We took a lot of lessons from him.”
“Looking back, a lot of decisions we made and the advice that we took from him was the mindset of someone who had a 200 person consulting company instead of a start-up.”
“The first few months were rough, and we tried building a product as well which we didn’t get any market feedback on, we thought the product was going to be excellent, we tried to build a product to solve the pain points of people working in the analytics business but it didn’t work, so we went back and focused on consulting.”
“We almost went bankrupt in the first year twice or even three times. It was super stressful. But then we found our feet. We started doing some consulting and whenever we could put one consultant on a client’s site, that gave us the margin for one software developer to work on our products. And that was a good model.”
“We built the world’s first benchmarking platform for organizations to benchmark their development of this new wave of mines that had the largest underground mines in the world.”
“We wanted to have different focuses. He wanted to be creating the tools of tomorrow and I wanted to be solving problems that people have today.”
“There were so many things I did wrong during that time and so many things that I learned during that time, but it was the best training ground because the stakes were so high, and I felt like I had to be improving so quickly. It taught me a lot of lessons and a lot of what has helped me to well incorporate is the lessons from my time as an entrepreneur.”
“The bug started earlier for me when I was at University and I worked at a research centre. I ended up being part of a project where we were trying to measure tiredness and fatigue in truck drivers in mines and we did that with EEG. I designed the onboard computer that sat inside a baseball hat that the drivers could wear with a machine learning model to go from brain wave activity to a number from 1 to 5. That research project then became a commercial company that is still running today. That gave me the entrepreneurial bug.”
“The first year was tough. There was a huge education piece. Nobody understood data science. Nobody really cared about data science. I would go and speak to business heads and executives let’s talk about what we can do for your area. But people did not take it very seriously.”
“In the first year, I got some budget to get some consultants but only a small team of two consultants. We did a bunch of POC’s and pilots. We did about 80 to 90 pilots in the first year for different business areas and different business heads. It was literally like throwing stuff against the wall and see what sticks. But nothing really stuck. All we were doing was to see what would happen, it rarely leads to the big success and uptake that you expect. I did that for 9 months before I said this is not working. We would build dashboards that would make it into conferences. We got a lot of airtime, but no business changes would happen as a result of our insights.”
“If people internally do not really care, then let’s go externally. Let’s go to our customers.”
“We started to get some momentum. We were seen favourably by the CTO which helped open some doors for us.”
“What we ended up doing was using data from the retail side especially from credit cards. We used that data to give insights to large companies. That was a strategy that worked well because we were leveraging unique data assets that we knew our customers didn’t have. We were giving them customized, personalized actionable insights.”
“I’ve interviewed over 200 guests, including the CTO from Nasa, Martin Ford a futurist, that was super exciting. We have had people on the show from all different industries. It’s been awesome.”
“Healthcare is something new. I like the aspect that you are helping people live healthier lives by applying AI and machine learning to that. “
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