Eytan Bensoussan

I started North One because of the potential to help small business owners get their businesses up and running and do so in a way that doesn’t cost them the rest of their lives when they’re trying to manage the finances of the business. Data science is central to any company starting up these days but really to ours. One of the biggest problems that we see in the market is that, you have banks which sit on reams of data, enormous amounts of data, and they’re not necessarily leveraging that data to provide the insights that can be best used by that small business owner. We actually build the finance department for the small business right into the bank account and that, when you think about it that way, it unlocks an enormous amount of value for them where we’re able to help them get their accounting and their bookkeeping done, make predictions on their cash flow in the financial health of the company or just manage expenses more intuitively.

We’ve implemented a lot of data science thinking, but also planning. More importantly to get to a proper predictive model, you need data. So we are setting up a lot of our technical infrastructure to accumulate and store that data in a way where we’ll be able to go in and dig for insights. My data science goals were actually both basic and very sophisticated at the same time it wasn’t an easy task.

I’ve done plenty of online courses, I’ve done everything from UX design to other data science programming. They all have their advantages and disadvantages but none of them have been as effective as Data Science Dojo, there’s nothing like being in a room for five days and being concerned that had I prepared a little harder I actually would know what’s going on here or had I actually been doing this online it might have taken me months to get to that same level and then the train has already left the station and I needed those insights before so it’s actually quite helpful to do it in that way.

We learnt about the different data science platforms during the bootcamp, that allowed me to have a very informed conversation with my own team back home as to what was best for our needs and so by understanding our use cases or their clients use cases and how we’re going to need to involve data science to solve those. It allowed us to make some important technical choices for example we will be building on AWS, it allows us to do a lot of what we want in the most elegant way, for our needs, and I might have got into the same decision otherwise, but the level of confidence I have in that decision is an order of magnitude greater now.

As the CEO of the company I cannot be too deep in data science all the time but it allowed me to open up that whole part of the world and I do go back in and I’m able to spot-check a lot of our analyses that we do. I’m able to kind of provide provocative questions to the team when they’re running their own analyses. It’s been great, it’s actually been quite empowering and it built a lot of confidene with our investors as well. My name is Eytan Bensoussan. I’m the CEO and founder of North One and this is my story.