Why I'm Stoked to Join Recast

Starting my next adventure

People on LinkedIn tend to love to post about "their next adventure." Pardon my skepticism, but I've always found it a bit of a stretch to call switching from one SaaS sales job to another SaaS sales job "an adventure." However, last month I came across an opportunity so perfectly suited to what I want in my career, that the only way I can describe it is as "an adventure."

This week I'll be joining the SaaS startup Recast. Currently, Recast has less than ten employees, so it will be a true 'startup' environment. Recast is building a platform to help eliminate wasted advertising spend with a state of the art marketing mix model that will allow companies to measure and predict marketing ROI over time. Once I have some time in the company, I hope to do an entire post about why I believe they have the right solution to an extremely important problem, but for now just know that I think the company has huge potential to become an essential tool for every marketing team.

I will be joining Recast as a client facing data scientist. Recast has been working with a handful of clients since 2019, but they've reached a point in product maturity where demand for their product is outstripping the supply that the founders can provide, so I will be joining to help get as many companies set up and getting value out of Recast as possible. My job will consist of two main parts: (1) Client-facing: I will help clients get their data into our modeling pipeline and ensure the particulars of their data meet the assumptions of our models, as well as doing ad-hoc analysis to ensure we're answering clients' most important questions and (2) Platform-building: I will take all the common issues we encounter with clients and help engineering build platform based solutions to those issues. Over time, the goal is to be successful enough at platform-building that the client-facing part of my job becomes less and less relevant.

Here are a couple reasons I couldn't be more excited to join Recast:

1. Bayesian Modeling in Stan - Typical data scientist roles seem to emphasize 'jack-of-all-trades' skillsets that prioritize being able to do a little bit of everything. For awhile now my academic side has wanted to go deeper on a particular sub-fields of statistics. At Recast, I'll be able to focus on my all time favorite subfield: Bayesian modeling and the Stan programming language. To see Stan being used in industry is very exciting because it's very hard to do right. My friend who works in insurance recently mentioned "we tried to use Stan once. We never got past the first iteration." Full Bayesian modeling can be extremely computationally challenging and requires serious math and programming skills (and lots of trial and error!) to do right, but it's borderline magical when it works. Two of my strongly held opinions make me excited to do Bayesian modeling in Stan: (1) Bayesian modeling is the right way to do artificial intelligence for small data problems, and (2) almost all business problems are small data problems.

2. Small company, big responsibility - I couldn't be more excited to work at a small startup. As much as I love data problems, recently I've opened my eyes to the fact that businesses face all sorts of problems, not all of which can or should be solved with data science. I'm excited to be able to flex some other muscles that come with wearing many hats at a small startup.

3. Data science as a product - The vast majority of data science jobs employ their data scientists as internal support teams. At Recast, data science is the mission critical product. It's incredibly exciting to me that improvements in our data science pipeline aren't just money savers or 'nice-to-haves' but absolutely essential for the growth of the business.

4. Real equity - I've had equity at my previous jobs, but never enough that I can connect my job performance to my equity value. At Recast, that will be different. If I'm successful at my job, I'll see it in the value of my equity. If I tick off a client by treating them poorly and they leave us, I'll feel it on my own bottom line. That's extremely motivating to me, and makes me excited to get up and do my best every day.

5. Solid company fundamentals - Overall, I've been blown away in my interactions with the two company founders. Their commitment to building a revenue stream (instead of chasing investor funding), their transparency, their philosophy on how companies should be structured, and their dedication to building a product on solid theoretical foundation have all made me super confident in making the leap. The fact that they have real customers and pay real salaries have made it a lot easier to make the decision to jump.

I've seen the statistics on early stage startups, and I realize there's no guarantee that Recast will be a success, but between a strong vision, good leadership, and a livable salary, I feel like I'm playing with house money by taking this job. Worst case scenario, this job is a fantastic resume experience. Best case scenario, we build an awesome product, grow a killer company, and I get to be in on the ground floor of all of it! How do you say no to that?