Why Joyance? A Win-Win Opportunity to Leverage Data Science for Good
I began at Stanford with the intention of achieving a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy and a minor in Computer Science. Then, the pandemic hit, and a year before my original graduation date, I made a daring decision: the unsatisfying experience of online education, combined with a driving feeling that I could be doing more to help others during such a tumultuous period, motivated me to take a year off to rethink and refine my career path.
To that end, I spent the majority of my gap year as a technology specialist assisting a school in Manhattan transition into hybrid learning. Also during this time, I met a group of students from Vanderbilt University interested in starting BASON Ventures, a company based on an innovative approach to the hockey sports betting market, and attracting investors. Working at BASON ignited a new interest in me around the intersection between data science, statistics, and sports. Following my experience with BASON, I decided I would take as many statistics courses as possible in my final year of school and begin a personal project in sports statistics. After graduating, I continued to work on my passion project as well as working at Promise Academy II, a local charter school, on a temporary contract as a math teacher.
As my time with Promise Academy II was coming to an end, a friend asked if he could pass my number along to Jenna Jung, an acquaintance of his and an Investment Associate at Joyance Partners who had a question about web scraping. A massive part of my passion project had been scraping the web for all the sports-related data I could find, so I happily agreed. A week later I was on a phone call with Jenna and another Joyance team member, Claire, explaining my process. After a few more weeks, Zoom calls, and face-to-face meetings later, I met most of the team. The end of my contract with Promise Academy II, my meetings with the team, and the Joyance annual offsite meeting, where the company convenes to review past achievements and future goals, all occurred in the same month. Perhaps most serendipitously, since the offsite was in NYC, I was able to attend in person.
My desire to work for Joyance crystallized at the offsite for three main reasons. First, Joyance was offering me the opportunity to do the kind of data science work — scraping, amalgamating, and analyzing — that I was interested in and passionate about. As people discussed plans and projects for the upcoming year, I began to see pockets of space where I could contribute great value. Second, Joyance was not just offering what I wanted to do, but how I wanted to do it, by creating a flexible, open-minded environment. At the offsite, nobody was limited in their outlook by their specialized role within the company, and all opinions were welcomed. For me, the ability to be cross-disciplinary is a must, as I had experienced through the expectations with my earlier roles in education and at BASON. Lastly, the Joyance ethos resonated deeply with my reason for working. On the second day of the offsite, I was introduced to the phrase ‘Delightful Moments’ in a discussion about the Joyance mission statement — Joyance is committed to supporting companies that deliver ‘Delightful Moments’ derived from science. I, too, am committed to ensuring that my time and effort are dedicated to causes that will have a positive impact on humanity.
In my role at Joyance, I focus on building internal software programs to help with data collection, management, and usage. The programs can vary from scraping tools to recommendation algorithms. Building out scraping tools better systematize the process of searching for founders. Recommendation algorithms build a story with all the data we have collected on founders and venture funds and ensure a better match between the two. In addition, the data team and I are moving Joyance’s data from cloud services to our own private database, offering greater efficiency and autonomy in our data collection process.
Ultimately, I want to spin my passion project on sports statistics into the basis for a company that sells insights based on collected statistics to sports teams, from amateur to professional. Working as a member of the data team at Joyance gives me the opportunity to deepen and expand my statistics and computer science skills, offers valuable insight into the world of founders and venture capital, and allows me to contribute my time and energy to support technology and innovation destined to change the world.
By Data Engineer Terrell Edwards
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