Most rising sophomores are still debating what major to declare going into their second year of college. Rahul Desai has known his calling since high school, possibly even before.
Upon meeting the ambitious young 18-year-old (now 19) at his favorite D.C. cupcake joint, it was easy to grasp how motivated and committed Desai is to his passion. A go-getter enrolled in Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, Desai puts his whole heart into everything he does, for he understands how far hard work goes in a startup – especially one that hasn't even officially launched.
Desai is the brains behind Trendify – a self-described meta-startup that uses machine learning and big data to reliably predict whether any given startup will succeed or not. He serves as the CEO and co-founder of the data analytics engine, positions which have suited him well given his personality, analytics skills and incredible ability to look past negative feedback and continue full speed ahead with an idea he believes in full-heartedly.
Although he may not have a traditional tech background, Desai has interned for budding D.C. startup Encore Alert – a company that interprets social data to effectively provide value for digital marketers. Identifying key mentions and trends from a brand's social media, Encore Alert helps marketers get the results they need by sending real-time alerts to their inbox. In the past we've described Encore as "a 21st century marketer's dream," and we stand by that to this day.
Desai left his internship in April to pursue his own startup dreams, but while at Encore Alert he took advantage of the opportunity to seek mentorship from CEO James Li. A wise move by Desai, guidance from Li alerted (no pun intended) him of new leads that allowed him to see that while there were plenty of companies focused on stock prediction, there weren't any substantial front-runners crowding the startup prediction space.
That's when the light bulb went off.
After thorough research, Desai realized that startup prediction is a fairly open market where risk management tools have the potential to rule. By working with both investors and entrepreneurs alike, Desai imagined what a tremendous impact a company that could determine any given startup's success would have on the business world as we know it today.
Confident that his idea would take off, Desai took charge and began gathering open data in February to build a set of more than a million data points spanning 7,000 companies. The information he has collected can now indicate success and failure with confidence levels, with his model accurately predicting the eventual success of businesses like Dell, Beats and Box, as well as the failure of Fisker.
The problem with the tech world, Desai said, is that "people approach startups like they do horse races. They make the choice emotionally rather than use data." Sure, your gut sure can be persuasive, but it's data, he said, that can show statistical significance and figure out the most contentious factors that lead to a startups success or failure.
For investors, "Trendify determines whether startups are worth investing in," Desai explained. "We help mitigate the cost and time of doing due diligence." As for new up-and-coming businesses, Trendify "figures out the most salient things that will hurt startups in their market."
Trendify is using data to optimize the way investors and startups operate. In doing so, Desai and his team, Eamon Cagney and Zoe Epstein, believe they can help both parties succeed more than they do today.
