Interview Series — George Earl
Hosted by Career in Analytics
Welcome to the second installment of Career in Analytics’ interview series. This forum is designed for decision science professionals — both beginners and veterans — to meet one of our members and engage in a conversation with them. We want our group to be a place for great conversation and debate.
This week we welcome George Earl who is Head of Global Business Intelligence at PayPal and the Founder and CO of Corsair’s Ventures.
CiA: Welcome, George.
George: Hey Shiv. Happy to help. I must say this idea you had for a LinkedIN group has been quite impressive. I think I was one of the first few members and watching the growth and energy has been quite amazing.
CiA: Thanks George, so to get started, can you tell us a little about yourself?
George: I am a guy who makes a great living teaching other people to solve problems and showing them how to model their business. I am the son of a sailor, an avid reader, and a passionate bootstrapper. I get bored easy, hate incompetence, and never met an analogy I wouldn’t try. Effectively, no one of consequence…
CiA: What is it that brought you to and keeps you in the analytic market?
George: Does one of those exist? Seriously, looking back over twenty odd years (and they were odd), I have yet to get the sense that the field of analytics is anything more than a long-lived buzzword.
I was an Earth Science major at Penn State. I was programming, analyzing, modeling, and simulating for some of the top minds across an array of disciplines. I was in on the ground floor of GPS/Remote Sensing, Gaia Theory, Climate Change, and Energy Exploration. I watched as science was co-opted by politics, the quest for research grants, and in a few of these cases fanaticism. Only Remote Sensing stayed pure and that was because it didn’t pay… at least not in those days.
Eventually, I left my near-minimum-wage-paying, ultra-high-government-clearance-requiring job building maps from satellite imagery for the DoD and CIA (not yours) and went into a field that paid for analytic prowess — Banking. Banking in the 90’s was still hung over from the 80’s with a ‘hair of the dog’ vibe. So I jumped to a dotcom, just long enough to realize what a farce that error (not a typo) of analytics was… it took 6 weeks.
To bring a long story to a close, I went back to banking/financial services. I embraced e-commerce early, online payments as well and after helping to build a billion dollar start-up, got acquired by PayPal.
At no point along the way did any of this feel like an organized discipline or market. My colleagues all had backstories as odd as I did. Our insights ranged from highly valued to wildly misunderstood, from life saving to exploited & corrupted. It was a wild ride and ultimately quite frustrating.
CiA: What do you think the most exciting challenge is for the field of analytics?
George: I think it is getting organized. Analytics should be a discipline, not something tacked on as an afterthought to other academic majors. This idea that today, everyone is an analyst — is nonsense. Maybe everyone is a bad analyst, but what good is that?
When you think of disciplines like Law, Medicine, Engineering, etc — a short list of top universities and programs come to mind; MIT, Wharton, Johns Hopkins, etc. Try that with Analytics! Is anyone claiming that everyone is a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer?Analytics is the essence of comprehension, problem solving, and decision making. Yet, it gets so little love. Hell, now all we hear is how soon machines will do it all for us… uggh, frustrating.
So just to say something positive, things are improving. A little slowly, but people are starting to recognize the need for analytics as a discipline again. They are recognizing that this market is broken. Hell, I even have some hope for the new ‘cognitive science’ buzzword. There are some very positive attributes there.
CiA: What are the biggest analytics mistakes you’ve seen people make?
George: I am an avid and prolific blogger. I actually just wrote my 150th article this past weekend. Business and analytic mistakes are featured in so many of those articles, I’d hate to repeat myself.
Let me give several colorful statements that all analysts should consider:
- Analytics is an applied science. If you aren’t creating value, you aren’t doing it right.
- The distance between behavioral analytics and the scientific method is vastly under-appreciated. The latter is great but it was designed for the laboratory. The behavior of any living things is hard to control and test. Worse yet, if animals are difficult, humans are just plain crazy.
- If horse racing is the ‘Sport of Kings’, then analytics is the ‘Legacy of Geniuses’. Learn from it, there is nearly 3000 years of insight to draw on.
CiA: George, thanks for your colorful perspectives on these questions. You actually provided us with some excellent career advice last week to help with the launch of this series. Do you have any final thoughts?
George: Connect — Learn — Engage was a fun article to write. I am glad it helped. My thoughts on analytics are easy to come by, I post new ones almost daily. I also post on professional development, history, and education. I view these topic to be incredibly linked. I will shamelessly encourage all of you to read those articles and subscribe to Corsair’s Publishing. Not because I (or my contributors) have the greatest opinions, some monopoly on facts, or any other boastful nonsense, subscribe and read because we are committed to helping you Connect, Learn, and Engage… and for my money, that is what analytics is all about.
CiA: Thank you, George. Now we will turn things over to our members and see what questions they have.
Career in Analytics is a forum dedicated to connecting beginning analysts with experienced and veteran mentors. Our topics cover a variety of interests in the area of analytics and professional career development.
We would also like to thank — Corsair’s Publishing for their help in bringing this content to you!
