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Welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan Chan.

All right. Well, welcome Alex. So the first question that I ask everyone that comes on is,

how did you get your job,

aka how did you find yourself doing the work you're doing today?

Yeah, absolutely. It's been a long journey, as I understand it has been for you all as well.

We started the company officially in 2011, but have begun thinking about it many years prior.

I was actually in law school at the time that we officially incorporated, you know,

incidentally focused on internet privacy and doing empirical studies on the efficacy of click-rap agreements and things like that.

But it was set across the backdrop of, you know,

companies like Netflix transitioning to streaming and all of a sudden, you know,

recommendations were this hot topic. And in fact, Netflix had a million dollar prize for

who could improve the efficacy of their algorithms, which at the time were all DVD ranking

data.

And we sort of took that challenge head on and realized that there was huge pitfalls to

sort of using data sets that were siloed in particular categories.

And so this is something that I pursued with kind of an academic interest at first.

I, as a hobbyist, I play the saxophone, the tenor sax, and I play some piano, and jazz is one of my big passions.

I also love mid-century Italian cinema.

And I began to see this sort of relationship between all these different areas of tastes that we wanted to explore more systematically.

And so all of that to say kind of embarked on this journey of could we do a better job sort of mapping, understanding tastes, and is there a business to build around this?

And our original premise was that there was, and it was

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