Nick Therkelsen-Terry — CEO and Co-founder at Max Kelsen and cognitiveCX
I spent the majority of my time at THINK with Nick, whether it was attending sessions
together, attending and watching his sessions or grabbing lunches, dinners and craft beers.
Nick was one of the most inspiring people I was able to meet during THINK, which is saying
alot when thinking about the calibre of some of the people I managed to score interviews
with. Nick - a law and economics graduate - worked for all but a week at a law firm before
deciding he wanted to do something different. Nick is now the CEO and Co-Founder at Max
Kelsen, a machine learning consultancy based in Queensland Australia. In just 4 years Max
Kelsen have done some amazing work in natural language processing, predicting
immunotherapies for cancer patients using genome data and more recently reinforcement
learning for circuit building within the IBM Q Experience platform. What particularly amazed
me about Nick - besides his passion - was the technical knowledge that he possesed
considering his position within the company. The team at Max Kelsen are superstars and I
cannot wait to continue to watch them grow and flourish. Enjoy the podcast!
Coming soon! These take me a long time for the 15 minute podcasts. I have not comes to terms with doing a 45 minute one right now but bare with me haha.
💡 Key Messages
Here are my key takeaways from the podcast.
Your degree doesn't have define your career - As a graduate in economics and
law, Nick has completely transformed himself through reading and self teaching. Nick
loves to read Papers With
Code and listen to This
Week in Machine Learning and AI
It's about the data stupid - In the end it comes down to understanding the data,
which does not just mean knowing what the rows and columns are. Nick strongly believes
that in order to be succesful they have partnered with subject matter experts to ensure
that they really do have a thorough understanding of the inputs to their machine
learning models
Learn the math - To be a good data scientist you have to understand the math. As
platforms and tools reduce the activation energy required for people to build machine
learning models, simply piecing together packages with some code is not enough to be a
good data scientist today. You have to learn and understand the math
Read Animal Spirits - A book that really
ushered in the period of behavioural economics. With an economics degree, Nick has
always had an interest in the field and felt that the assumptions that people are
rational and therefore markets are rational is absurd. Nick feels it is important to
read this book to understand how human psychology influences the economy - and to throw
in a slight dig -why purist rational economists are always wrong
Read The Trial - Nick is a huge fan of Franz
Kafka and believes everyone should read this book at some point in their life. Nick said
that not only is Kafka a fantastic writer but that the term kafkaesque was really
spawned out of this works
About Nick Therkelsen-Terry
Nicholas Therkelsen co-founded Max Kelsen in 2015 to provide big data and machine
learning services to clients large and small. In his position as CEO, Nicholas is
responsible for designing and executing strategic vision, project design and management,
fiscal and legal governance, and team building. Prior to this, Nick was consulting for
companies across a range of industries to assist with their technology requirements.
Nick holds a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Economics from the University of
Queensland.
Nick has a broad range of expertise spanning business, economics, sales, management and
law. Nick has a deep theoretical and applied understanding of cutting-edge machine
learning techniques, and has been widely recognised as a domain expert in this field. He
is a regular speaker at artificial intelligence meetups around the country, and also at
conferences such as Gartner ITXPO, NSW Gov DC, Urbanity and IBM Think 2018.
Nick also co-founded Cityshape in 2016, an application focussed on aggregating property
development planning data and serves as its CTO. Likewise, in 2017, Nick co-founded
cognitiveCX, a platform for enterprises to analyse and process unstructured data from
any source.
We are an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning consultancy. Max Kelsen takes big
data and turns it into big ideas. We utilise cutting-edge technologies to provide
powerful insights, innovation strategies, and tailored solutions for your business.