From Intern to Venture-Backed Entrepreneur With a Little Help From Big Data Competition site Kaggle makes predictive modeling more effective and efficient--and a lot more fun.

What it is
Think of Kaggle as The Amazing Race for brainiacs. The site manages competitions in which statisticians, scientists, academics and other whizzes compete to uncover the best predictive modeling--also called data mining--to solve specific challenges. The winner receives a money prize in return for intellectual property rights to the model. Kaggle has helped an insurance company find out which drivers are more likely to crash a car, worked with a financial services company to gauge default risks for particular customers and figured out how to rate chess players.

How it started
Through an internship at The Economist magazine, founder Anthony Goldbloom was able to interview chief information officers about the role of "big data." The biggest complaint he heard was that predictive modeling, a top priority for large firms, was confusing, expensive and came with no guarantee of accuracy.

Goldbloom, who had worked in macroeconomic modeling at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Treasury, saw an opportunity to tap an international pool of academics and scientists itching to get their hands on the giant data sets held by enterprise businesses.