Welcoming Two New Leaders to PredictHQ

Major team and patent news

Every single new team member is exciting in a startup but the opportunity to welcome foundational leaders into the company is one I don’t want to let pass without noting. This week is a big step up for PredictHQ as we welcome two deeply experienced vice presidents to lead critical functions in the company as we soar past 40 team members and successfully submitted our first (of many) patents.

Introducing our VP of Sales and Customer Success

Tyler Mihevc joins our team as VP of Sales and Customer Support after almost two decades in leading companies, most recently as the Enterprise Area Sales Director for Okta, an identity and access management platform worth almost $10 billion.

He will be joining our San Francisco team to grow and lead our sales team both in the US and as we expand offices internationally. We’re hiring an amazing team of account execs, solutions engineers and more, so head to our careers page to explore.

Tyler will also be heading up our commitment to delivering the best customer support possible. Our demand intelligence is used by some of the world’s smartest companies such as Uber and Booking.com, which definitely keeps you on your toes. We’re stoked Tyler is part of our team.

Introducing our VP of Engineering

Over in our data science and product HQ in Auckland, we’re pumped to have Glen Alexander join the team as VP of Engineering.

Glen brings decades of engineering and solutions architecture experience to PredictHQ and most recently headed up Manager Solutions Architecture at Air New Zealand. Aviation has always been a key industry for PredictHQ and truly understanding its complex demand forecasting challenges directly informs our product thinking.

Glen joining to lead the engineering team will enable us to continue to scale (it’s tripled in 6 months) without compromising the quality or productivity of our output. It also enables our cofounder Rob Kern to move into a fully-fledged CTO role, without any speed bumps for the product teams as they work on one of the most ambitious product roadmaps out there. And yep, we’re hiring for engineers and data scientists also, especially senior ones who are still in love with getting hands-on with complex problem solving. More details over at our careers page.

Glen will be leading the engineering team and working closely with our product and data teams. He’ll be working towards unlocking and predicting what the real-world catalyst is behind any form of demand or disruption for businesses all around the globe.

Tapping into significantly more data sources than any other event API is a huge advantage for PredictHQ, but it’s only the beginning. Aggregating data is useful, but harnessing the power of that data through algorithms and machine learning is far more valuable. That’s why the heart of our business is about the intelligence layers we build on top of our data.

The dynamic and messy nature of real-world event data requires our proprietary 14-stage processing pipeline to make it usable for demand forecasting. This is critical because demand forecasting platforms must have up-to-date and verified data because their performance is dependent on the quality of data they use in their machine learning models. Without high quality, the efficacy of demand forecasting systems predictions becomes a serious question.

We’re adding more capabilities that no other event API has to our data processing all the time. For example, we’re about to launch the ability to identify if an event is recurring and at what frequency, stitching together a history of that event over time. This may sound simple but is fiendishly complex to achieve accurately and simply doesn’t exist anywhere else.

The upcoming launch of Aviation Rank will begin to reveal the intelligence capabilities of PredictHQ’s offering, and it’s only a tiny fraction of what we are working on. Be sure to register your interest and be among the first to test out our newest rank.

Patent-pending

To this end, our team was thrilled to have successfully applied for a worldwide patent of the technology underlying Aviation Rank. This recognizes the unique work our data science team is doing, as well as continuing to develop the data moat around our business. It’s only one of many patentable technologies we’re working on and I can’t wait to share more about upcoming ones with you all very soon.

This upcoming patent will be a huge win for our team after months and years of very complex problem solving that required a lot of tenacity and creativity. And it lays the groundwork for us to continually double down on the intelligence power of PredictHQ.