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!

Contents

🎧 Listen In

📖 Read Along

💡 Key Messages

🎧 Listen In

Here is the podcast.

📖 Read Along

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