John Foreman
Chief Data Scientist, Mailchimp. On 1 show, 0 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
John Foreman is the Chief Data Scientist at Mailchimp. He was featured as a speaker at Data Driven NYC.
1shows
0appearances
13statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything John Foreman said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Data science deserves no special treatment over simple UI design changes
“Data science products should receive no special treatment. If a designer Can do a better job solving a problem by changing the color of a form than I can do with some AI model or something, then that design product should win.”
Most tech data features are built to impress investors, not help users
“When you see examples from other companies out in the wild, generally they're to improve, they're sort of to impress investors or the media.”
Gmail's tabbed inbox launch dropped Mailchimp open rates by 10 percent
“This is three weeks before and after tabs were introduced, and we can see about a raw one percent difference, so maybe about a 10% decrease in engagement. We've got three weeks. Blue is weekday. Yellow is, ah, weekend, and these are open rates. So you can see …”
Mailchimp's data science team spends 80 percent of time building tools
“And right now we spend about 20% of our time doing insight, which is just one-off reporting or one-off sort of consulting engagements, and we spend about 80% of our time building tools or capabilities”
Data scientists should consider changing the business itself when models fail
“If a model's not working out, you should always ask yourself, can we just change the business? You know, as opposed to somehow optimally solving this problem, can we just stop doing this thing I'm trying to solve?”
Mailchimp infers recipient age and gender via cross-network subscription graphs
“We can actually determine a lot of demographic data through this, ah, age, gender, things like that.”
Mailchimp sends 6-7 billion monthly emails across 4 million users
“The last time I checked, four million users, somewhere between six and seven billion emails sent every month.”
Mailchimp expects to hit 10 billion monthly emails by late 2013
“That'll probably be ten billion by the end of the year.”
Mailchimp had 200 total employees in 2013, with 100 in support
“We have 200 employees. About a hundred of those are support personnel.”
EPA email engagement fell to 10 percent during the government shutdown
“Down there at the bottom, EPA was, like, garbage, right? 10% of the engagement after the shutdown as before”
One sixth of Mailchimp compliance tickets were solely for user vetting
“A sixth of our compliance tickets had nothing to do with being bad. We just wanted to vet you.”
Mailchimp used Redis to maintain dossiers on billions of email addresses
“For our fast storage, we used Redis. We've got one dossier per email address of all the email addresses we've ever seen, so billions of unique addresses and a bunch of events about everything they've engaged with in the past.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens John's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MADLEDGER | Chief Data Scientist, Mailchimp | 0 +1 | 13 | — | full record on the MAD Podcast → |