Scott Sorensen

CTO, Ancestry.com · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

13statements → 7claims → 2claims resolved → 4.08/5average certainty → 1.31/5average debate potential →

1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

7 assertions · 5 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Scott argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Ancestry has 2.7 million paying subscribers and leads online family history
“So, ah, at Ancestry.com, we're the largest online resource for family history, and, ah, we've got 2.7 million paying subscribers.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 0:42 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

229 words/min while actually speaking · 38.9 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Scott Sorensen: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,216 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Scott Sorensen said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Ancestry embeds data scientists into software teams to ensure production readiness
“What we've found, at least at Ancestry, is that we have to embed our data science Scientists into the actual engineering teams and make them talk every day. It improves the feature engineering, improves the domain knowledge, improves the likelihood that engine…”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 20:23 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Predictive machine learning models are useless if they cannot inform interventions
“One of the key learnings was that just because something's predictive doesn't mean that it's actionable.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 8:25 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Entity extraction elevated Ancestry's worst-performing data collections into its top 10
“It took what was some of our worst performing collections out of our 30,000, ah, collections, and put some of those collections into our top 10 best, ah, best collections.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 9:35 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Technical architecture mirrors organizational structure, requiring coordinated team and system decoupling
“It's uncanny how technical architecture follows an organization, and so if you want to decouple systems, you have to decouple the organization. If you want tightly, ah, integrated, if you want something tightly integrated, you have to tightly integrate the org…”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 21:52 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Granting academics access to large datasets creates a data science recruiting pipeline
“If you have a large data set and can make it available for academic research, then you could create yourself a pipeline of potentially good data science candidates because they know how to deal with large amounts of data, but they also know your data pretty we…”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 22:42 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
Ancestry has 2.7 million paying subscribers and leads online family history
“So, ah, at Ancestry.com, we're the largest online resource for family history, and, ah, we've got 2.7 million paying subscribers.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 0:42 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Partly supported
Ancestry generated $480 million in 2012 revenue across eight countries
“We had, we did, ah, four hundred and eighty million dollars in revenue last year, and we've got offices in eight countries.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 0:52 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ancestry holds over 12 billion records and 10 petabytes of data
“We have over twelve billion records and images, 10 petabytes of data, and we've worked with government agencies to collect this institutional content.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 3:37 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ancestry users built over 50 million family trees containing 5 billion profiles
“We have our customers who have built over fifty million family trees with more than five billion people in these family trees and many, many of these trees have stories and photos uploaded to these trees.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 4:02 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
Ancestry uses user family tree attachments to train information retrieval algorithms
“Every time that a user associates some content with somebody in their family tree, they're making a judgment that we can use for training data in order to train our information retrieval algorithms.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 4:37 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Adding social features shifted Ancestry family trees from deep to broad
“Initially we didn't have a lot of social features on our site, and our trees were very deep, and they were, ah, very balanced. But as we added social features to our site, it made it easier for our customers to collaborate with cousins. Ah, then they started b…”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 6:19 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ancestry's DNA testing service achieves 90% accuracy when matching fourth cousins
“For fourth cousins, we're 90% accurate”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 11:16 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ancestry's database finds over 40 fourth-cousin matches per user on average
“With over 200,000 samples, we can find on average over 40 fourth cousin only matches and more third and second cousins for every other person on our, in our database.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 12:57 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Jan 16, 2014 23m
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