What is one reason that I would want to hire / contract a data scientist to work with my company? The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses. 1. Data Insights Lead to Breakthroughs When I hired a data scientist to dig deep into my company, he was able to glean insights into areas that my team and I were blind to. Suddenly, we had more information to guide our choices, and the results have led to some of our biggest revenue breakthroughs. – Mark Krassner, Knee Walker Central 2. Data Fuels Decisions Having a data scientist extract actionable data and communicate that in an understandable manner can increase a company’s decision-making accuracy and speed by orders of magnitude. Without an understanding of collecting and interpreting data, we are all just guessing. – Phil Chen, Givit 3. Extrapolating Data Is Invaluable With a proliferation of “listening” tools, it’s easy to gather vast amounts of data. But how do you parse through it to identify the actionable items? We still need human capital to extrapolate the data and create something meaningful out of it. This is where a data scientist can be an invaluable resource for deeper understanding and optimization. – Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, AirPR 4. Conclusions From Data Are the Backbone Think beyond data scientists. In today’s world, harnessing data and drawing conclusions from it is vitally important and serves as the backbone of Internet companies. That said, it’s important to think beyond “data scientists” and explore information systems or statistics professionals to meet these needs. – Luke Skurman, Niche.com 5. Data Scientists Drive Change Data scientists have the ability to drive change by identifying and prioritizing problems and areas for improvement. The ability to prioritize based on data means you can tackle high-impact projects first, ultimately driving change in the most efficient way possible. – Katie Finnegan, Hukkster 6. They Can Unlock Hidden Value Most companies have vast datasets they don’t know what to do with. Truthfully, these datasets are untapped goldmines. Digging into your data can reveal new information about your customers and their consumption decisions, about your product and its shortcomings, and even about your employees and their productivity. A data scientist can unlock these valuable insights to make you stronger. – Brewster Stanislaw, Inside Social 7. Data Scientists Help You Understand We are living in the information age. This is largely because of a revolution in the way data is captured and stored. We can store more data today than in all of history combined. Making sure you have data scientists who know how to understand your data (terabytes daily, in our case) is critical. You wouldn’t run a business without financials; why would you run it without understanding your data? – Michael Seiman, CPXi