$1.5 million bet he can beat the markets

Arnaud Castillo, CrunchDAO

Arnaud Castillo got $1.5 million in prepayments from customers who think he found a way to make accurate predictions about financial markets…the weather…venture capital…and anything.

Arnaud created CrunchDAO, which holds online tournaments in which data analysts compete to see who can create the best predictive models. Skeptical? He might remind you of the Netflix Prize, the $1 million tournament in which a team of outsiders improved Netflix’s recommendation algorithm by 10.05%, or his entrepreneurial track of proving skeptics wrong.

Arnaud Castillo

CrunchDAO

Arnaud Castillo is the founder of CrunchDAO, which is building the future of asset management.

Andrew: Hey there freedom fighters. I’m Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. Before I started recording this interview, the founder you’re about to meet told me something interesting about the Netflix prize. See back in 2006, Netflix wanted to improve its recommendation engine.

So it created a million dollar tournament. Interestingly, the people who won weren’t just outsiders, but they were a team of many competitors who joined up and won the Netflix prize of a million dollars. And that idea of a tournament where outsiders can compete to improve on a prediction model, that idea Is the basis of the organization you’re about to find out about.

Arnold Castillo created CrunchDAO to create competitions like the Netflix Prize, where outsiders could compete to create better prediction models. This interview is sponsored by Origami, which...

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