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Biography
As one of the leaders of the infamous MIT Blackjack team, Jeff Ma was the inspiration for the main character in the best-selling book, Bringing Down the House, and the hit movie, 21.
In addition, he has helped start four different companies, including GolfSpan.com (sold to Demand Media), CircleLending (sold to Virgin), Citizen Sports (sold to Yahoo), and tenXer (acquired by Twitter). In that time, he has become a sought-after speaker showing companies how to harness the power of numbers to make better bottom-line business decisions; decisions that, often, are the difference between winning and losing.
Beyond his work in the start-up world, Jeffrey Ma has worked as a consultant to the San Francisco 49ers, the Portland Trail Blazers and Adidas, helping them to make better decisions using data and analytics. He spent two years working as on-air talent for ESPN and served as their first Predictive Analytics Expert. His book, The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business was a business bestseller and draws on his unique experiences at the table and in the sports world, creating a truly accessible work about business analytics. Ma is the host of the Bet the Process podcast, one of the top sports betting podcasts.
As of 2020, Ma is the Vice President of Microsoft for Startups. He previously served as the Vice President of Analytics at Twitter, where he led the central analytics and data science team, helping the company to make better data-driven decisions. He left Twitter in May of 2018 and is currently exploring opportunities around the intersection of media, analytics, and legalized sports betting.
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Jeffrey Ma and his MIT blackjack team were pioneers in the use of data and analytics - the foundation for modern AI. The former head of data science at Twitter and the author of a bestselling business book on the topic, Ma continues to be at the forefront of modern AI, having just completed a stint as an executive leading all the startup work at Microsoft. In this role, Ma worked closely with OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. In this thought-provoking and funny presentation, Ma uses his colorful experiences to explain and demystify new advances like ChatGPT while giving the audience the building blocks to understand how data and artificial intelligence can help any business. With a uniquely accessible approach to the topic, Ma tells stories with data, showing audiences how to use these tools to make better decisions, overcome cognitive bias and drive innovation.
Not only did Jeffrey Ma devise the innovative system that helped him and his friends from MIT win millions of dollars, but he also started—and successfully exited—four different companies, selling his startups to Richard Branson, Yahoo and Twitter along the way. Ma recently led a team at Microsoft working with startups to unlock innovation in the enterprise, and in this new speech he shares important lessons learned in his career both as an entrepreneur and an executive—lessons in confidence, teamwork, trust, creativity and goal-setting—that will help you and your organization unlock innovation, challenge convention and grow.
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Booksby Jeffrey Ma
The House Advantage
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