Bryce Broughton
Company: Untitled Firm
Title: Senior Data Scientist
Age: 25
Hometown: Benzonia, Michigan
Resides (city or neighborhood): Jeffersonville, Indiana
Education history: Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from the University of Southern Indiana; Master’s Degree in Health Data Science from Saint Louis University
Hobbies: Running, hiking and kayaking
Twitter/Instagram/other social media handle: Instagram - brycemarie3
Favorite tech gadget: Noise cancelling headphones
How did you get into the career you have today? For most of my undergraduate career, I thought I wanted to be an actuary. It wasn’t until I took a time series and regression course that I decided I wanted to do more work that revolved around programming. After college I moved to Louisville and was lucky enough to be hired as an intern at Untitled and ended up loving everything about the company and the work I was getting to do.
What’s one thing Louisville can do to improve its tech and/or startup ecosystem? I haven’t lived in the Louisville area long, and COVID accounted for 50% of it, so I’m not sure how qualified I am to speak on behalf of Louisville’s tech/startup environment. But one thing a lot of communities could do to broaden tech awareness, specifically around artificial intelligence, is host more conferences/activities. Almost everyone has heard the term "artificial intelligence," but it’s a broad term with many different facets that aren’t often talked about. Having in depth conversations around the different aspects of artificial intelligence and what’s required to get there could spark new ideas or new career paths.
Who has been one of your top mentors? Why? Aaron, Connor and Kramer (the Untitled founders) have all played such a big role in my professional development, but I’ve had more one-on-one time working with Aaron. Aaron has not only helped me grow my knowledge in the data science field, but also in the data architecture, database management and business intelligence fields. Aaron is always finding new ways to innovate that improve the clients’ everyday life. If it wasn’t for Aaron, I don’t think I would have gained so much knowledge in such a short amount of time or be thinking as unconventional. It’s been so inspiring and exciting to work with such an innovative group of people that are so passionate about what they do.
What’s your best piece of advice for companies and individuals looking to be more innovative and disruptive in their fields? The best advice I could give would be to trust the process. Being innovative is a big investment for those looking to be more disruptive in their fields so it is important for companies/individuals to be patient. Although the benefits of a digital transformation take time and may not be recognized right away, I have yet to see a company that Untitled couldn’t help in some way. Whether it be something simple like automating a file ingestion, to something more elaborate like designing a pipeline to move on prem data to the cloud, implementing a BI tool and then creating a machine learning pipeline, the benefits will outweigh whatever is causing hesitation.
What accomplishment are you most proud of? My biggest accomplishment, professionally, was building and launching Untitled’s first MVP of a marketing analytics platform. In about 90 days a small team of us were able to stand up a database, create ETL (extract, transform, load) and transformation processes, build multiple BI dashboards and implement some machine learning models.
What innovative company (other than your own) do you admire and why? When I was in college, I was a member of the cross country and track and field teams and was required to track my weekly mileage. The biggest competitor in the market to track activities today is Strava. Strava has been around since 2009, but really didn’t start taking off until 2017-2018. Since then, Strava has had exponential user growth and claims that it gains 1 million new users every month and 19 million activities every week. When the company started in 2009 the infrastructure wasn’t in place to handle such high data volume, but Strava was able to recognize their growth while also innovating to maintain user engagement. With all the user data Strava had been collecting, they also recognized an opportunity to help communities. This is an aspect of Strava’s business that a lot of people are unaware of which provides anonymous activity data to communities. Strava has over 3 billion activity records that map various routes users take on their commute to work or in their free time, this allows communities to better understand where new infrastructure or running/biking trails can be placed to improve the overall health and experience of the community.
