Lessons learned from 10 years of applied research in a fast growing startup

Hello world! :-)

After 10+ years of an academic career, I co-founded Feedzai where I am the Chief Science Officer leading the Research department since its inception in February 2012.

Feedzai is a leader in the next generation of fincrime prevention software, providing the worlds largest financial institutions and merchants the opportunity to not just protect their clients from fraud and money laundering, but also to allow for more financial inclusion.

This month we celebrate 10 years of Feedzai Research, a period in which we grew from a handful of people in a small office to close to 600 people in 10 offices and 4 continents, serving the worlds largest financial institutions and protecting 800M individual accounts worldwide.

Feedzai Research is an applied research department at Feedzai with the goal of disrupting the company from within. We grew from just trying to understand, adjust and use the state-of-the-art, to actually develop award-winning, state-of-the-art work published in top conferences such as KDD, ICLR, ICDM, FAccT, or VLDB, collaborating with external researchers, producing dozens of patents, and transferring disruptive innovation to the product with the help of our colleagues in Product and Engineering.

In this newsletter I will write about lessons and observations from the perspective of someone who had to navigate between research and business, science and people, long-term and short-term.

Although I was and am supported by many (especially my friends and co-founders Nuno and Paulo), the views are my own, are likely biased by my specific experience, and are probably also naturally incomplete. Still, I feel that there is potencial for them to be useful for others, as the path was not trivial.

My goal is to have those lessons more crisply captured, for me, and hopefully for the benefit of others.

My first few posts will be the three areas that I believe are more important: 1) deciding on what to work, ie, the direction and goal; 2) on and how to operate, i.e., how to get there; and 3) how to get people motivated, working efficiently in teams, and resilient.

• What to work on:

  • “What are the important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?” - Incorporating Richard Hamming’s question

  • Look ahead with mega-trends and mega-truths

  • Choose very large problems with compoundable benefits

  • What to listen and what to ignore

  • Handling the overwhelming, ever-growing state-of-the-art

• How to operate:

  • Innovation is like feeding a baby: expect resistance, use patience and love

  • Aim very high to remove solutions from the space of probabilities

  • Select the easiest case first

  • Lose great people to other teams

  • Revising the Eisenhower matrix

• People and culture:

  • Create a culture of trust, sharing, fun, and curiosity

  • Set the pace to comfortably uncomfortable

  • Always learning, always teaching

  • Fight like you are right, listen like you are wrong - Robert Sutton

  • Finishiative >> Initiative

I will also talk about dealing with failure, motivation and purpose, not being intimidated by my own ignorance, how to keep a good work-life balance, and how I was able to train and complete an Ironman while working full-time in a fast-growing startup.

If you are interested, subscribe the newsletter.

Constructive feedback is always welcome! :-)

Enjoy!

-pedro