E234 Kushal Chakrabarti, VP of Research and Data Science at Opendoor

Today's guest is Kushal Chakrabarti, VP of Research and Data Science at Opendoor in San Francisco. Founded in 2014, Opendoor’s mission is to empower everyone with the freedom to move by building a digital, end-to-end customer experience that makes buying and selling a home simple, certain and fast. They have assembled a dedicated team with diverse backgrounds to support more than 100,000 homes bought and sold with them and the customers who have selected Opendoor as a trusted partner in handling one of their largest financial transactions.

As the VP of Research and Data Science, Kushal brings over ten years of experience in large-scale machine learning and data engineering to Opendoor. Kushal has led billion-dollar data science teams, founded two high-growth VC-backed startups and originally made his bones in large-scale statistical models. He regularly advises CEO's/CTO's through key organizational challenges involving data and has worked as a fractional executive at top companies, validating data strategy, proving new lines of data-driven business and building end-to-end data teams.

In today's episode, Kushal will tell you about:

The interesting work they do at Opendoor,

How they are applying Data Science and Data Engineering in real estate,

What attracted him to work for Opendoor,

Interesting projects the data team are working on,

Plans for growth and what he looks for when hiring into the team, and

Future innovation within Real Estate