Jeremy Fain is the CEO and co-founder of Cognitiv, the first self-learning, fully automated neural network technology available for marketers.
With over 20 years of interactive experience across agency, publisher, and ad tech management, Jeremy led North American Accounts for Rubicon Project before founding Cognitiv.
Prior to Rubicon Project, Jeremy served as Director of Network Solutions for CBS Interactive. He also formerly served as Vice President of Industry Services for the IAB, where he shaped interactive industry policy, standards, and best practices.
Episode transcription:
F: Jeremy, I'm happy to have you with us here today. Thanks.
J: Thanks for having me.
F: Awesome. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to co-found Cognitiv.
J: Sure. So I've always been technical, I've always been interested in technology and business. I was a coder when I was younger. I grew up doing computer science in various magnet programs in Maryland and always wanted to work on the internet. When I was in high school, the internet became commercial. It came out commercially. And even before that, because I grew up in Maryland around the government, with, um, you know, IH, I did my internship at the army research labs. And my science program at high school was very connected to the government side of the Internet before it was commercial. And so really that was always my path. I was very excited about the worldwide web. When it came out, I was very excited about how it could be used, with images and texts. And now we can do so much more than we could back in the nineties. I always wanted to work in that business. So, after getting an electrical engineering degree at Yale, I went into business consulting, helping blue-chip companies learn how to use the internet and the worldwide web and other internet technologies such as email and having their own website and using the Internet to connect their systems together. I helped them do that for a while and continued on into marketing and digital and how to use websites and email and all the new pieces of the Internet for finding out more about your customers and how to communicate better with your customers and how to service your customers better. And so that naturally has evolved over my career into Cognitiv today. What we do is we use the newest technology out there, deep learning to predict consumer behavior, so we create algorithms for marketers to predict their customer's behavior, to predict consumer's behavior in a way that helps them become customers. And actually I started the company with two of my friends from growing up, Mark and Aaron. And so we went through the same magnet programs and science and engineering programs together all the way through high school. And we got back together to start this fund company about this new technology, deep learning. Great companies can achieve a competitive advantage by applying transformational approaches that power, their deep learning algorithms.
F: What are some of the strategic recommendations you would advise organizations to take so that they can ensure effective application of deep learning techniques?
J: Yeah, so deep learning and any kind of machine learning or artificial intelligence at this point requires a lot of data. Data requires a lot of labeled data. In fact, the first thing that we always recommend at Cognitiv is that a company really understands its data at a very discrete level. I mean, a lot of people are using off the shelf reporting platforms or even very expensive ERP platforms like SAP and Oracle, PeopleSoft, et cetera. And those are all customized to a certain extent, but in the end, a lot of those systems are aggregating data, throwing away the log file level data and using it only for reporting and analytics. But when you want to use the most advanced machine learning to predict patterns, to find patterns, to analyze the data itself, you have to have that discrete data and storage is
