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Context Relevant CEO Stephen Purpura is working on the leading edge of big data — helping companies use their data more effectively. But Purpura, whose company scored $21 million from Bloomberg Beta, Madrona, Vulcan and others earlier this year, followed a career path many of his peers advised him against. After working at Microsoft, Purpura decided to go back to school, earning a degree from Harvard and studying at Cornell before returning to found his own company. He describes being CEO of Context Relevant as “one of the most exciting things that I could do in my life.” At Context Relevant, Purpura and his team are leaders in the field of big data and automated machine, exploring a space few other companies have investigated so deeply. Explaining why he loves his position, Purpura says the big idea behind Context Relevant is “to analyze data without hiring an expert.” [1:40] Though an executive now, Purpura’s focus has always been on the technical. He explains that he wanted to be more than an “empty sui

Former Seattleite Jon Jenkins, the Head of Engineering at Pinterest, has taken the lead of a “super scrappy, super agile” team of engineers building one of the biggest social networks on the web today. Using billions -- or maybe even trillions -- of data points supplied by users around the world, he and his team are curating personalized experiences for every Pinner, helping to show them new things they didn’t even know they liked yet. I sat down to talk to Jon about solving some of the most exciting challenges of his career in this edition of Nextcast; here are a few of the highlights: This PolySci graduate with a knack for “hacking around” has done the big company and the startup thing more than once in his career. After spending almost 9 years at Amazon in Seattle, he hightailed it to San Francisco to join the Pinterest startup team, who piqued his interest with an intriguing set of problems to solve. Jenkins says he is “fascinated by challenges associated with scaling things...and challenges associated w

Though he’s only held one other job since college, WhitePages founder and CEO Alex Algard thinks he’s found a pretty good fit in his growing company. “I like the feeling of making an impact and a positive difference in the world,” he says of his role running a site that boasts over 50 million monthly users who come to them for contact information. And it’s not hard to see how he translated this into his role running a company based on delivering “directory assistance to the masses for free”. He has learned a lot along the way, from why getting rid of investors might just be the best thing you can do for your business to how being a great leader makes great products possible. Here are some of his top lessons that he shared with Nextcast. “We’re in collective denial,” Algard jokes about his now 10+ year old business. “If you look at how we do business...we have much more in common with how startups do business and how startups interact team-wise.” What this means is that despite having a team of over 100 peo

As a one-time English PhD student, Janis Machala didn’t always know her career would lead her down a business path. But now she helps other people pursue their passions and get the education they need to achieve their dreams, as the Executive Dean of Continuing Education at Bellevue College. On this edition of Nextcast, I interviewed Machala and learned how technology is changing education and why working at a big company might be a better first job for recent graduates. Plus, Machala shares her tips for creating an amazing startup culture. “I never thought of myself as a business person,” Machala says. But when a friend referred her to her school’s business school as a possible avenue for jobs, she found herself enrolling in an MBA program, eventually specializing in marketing. “I loved the complexities you get in the marketing field.” (2:00) Once she entered the workforce, Machala began working in textbook publishing -- an industry which, at the time, was struggling with how to integrate software and CD-R