A former tech lead for both Twitter and Airbnb, Florian “Flo” Leibert today holds a position as the CEO and founder of Mesosphere, Inc., in San Francisco, California. In addition, Florian Leibert serves as an equity partner in Data Collective, a venture capital firm which has invested in promising early-stage companies focused on Big Data, such as Kaggle.
Kaggle is a data-science competition platform established in 2010. The intent of the company is to help people showcase their data-science skills to earn jobs, provide businesses with a resource for solving data-related issues, and be a virtual hub where data-science research can be shared and worked on collectively within a larger community.
In 2017, Google confirmed that it would acquire Kaggle, adding a platform used by around 500,000 data scientists to its operations. Journalists in the tech industry speculated at the time that the addition of Kaggle would benefit Google from a talent perspective, producing a larger pool of data scientists to recruit from as the company seeks to improve its footing in the development of cutting-edge AI technology.
