On the TechTO & TechVancouver stages ×2
How team culture enables growth | Ian Wong (Opendoor)
Watch on YouTube ↗The Entrepreneurial Journey | Ian Wong
Watch on YouTube ↗First seen on the TechTO & TechVancouver stages in 2020. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Ian ↗
In their words
In mindset it's like, why can't a Vancouver entrepreneur lead the next 100 billion dollar company? There's literally no reason why that can't be the case.
In engineering there's this notion of a post-mortem — like you have an outage or a bug, what's the root cause? I think it's helpful to actually take that mindset and apply that to a team. It sounds meta, it sounds kind of a waste of time, but it's absolutely not.
And I realized, holy crap, none of the things I was studying in school was useful. In fact it required a completely new way of actually handling data, quite new ways of actually thinking about products and machine learning at scale.
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Quick answers
What is Ian Wong known for?
Co-founding Opendoor in 2014 and serving as its CTO for eight years, building the pricing and machine learning systems behind buying and selling homes at scale. He now runs Summation, an enterprise AI company he co-founded after leaving Opendoor.
What did Ian Wong do before Opendoor?
He was Square's first data scientist, hired when the engineering team was about 13 or 14 people, where he built fraud detection tools and machine learning systems. Before that he dropped out of a statistics PhD at Stanford, where he also did his undergrad in electrical engineering.
What is Ian Wong's connection to Canada?
He came to Canada from Hong Kong in the 1990s and grew up in Vancouver, going to middle school and high school there before leaving for Stanford. He still calls Vancouver home, and returned to the TechVancouver stage in December 2021.
How many times has Ian Wong spoken at TechTO?
Twice — a September 2020 talk on how team culture enables growth, and a December 2021 in-person Vancouver talk on the entrepreneurial journey.