MG

Mike Greenfield

Data Geek + Entrepreneur

Palo Alto, California

Education

Work Experience

  • Co-Founder, CEO, and Chair of the Board

    2024

  • Co-Founder and Chair of the Board

    2022 - 2024

  • Co-Founder and CEO

    2017 - 2022

    I started Change Research in the wake of the 2016 election. The company was built around a new way to conduct public opinion polling that is fast, accurate, and affordable. By better understanding the hopes, needs, and wants of the public, Change Research aims to make the world more humane, scientific, and just. I moved from CEO to Chair of the Board in May 2022.

  • President

    2021

    As a Foundation, we strive to do three things: 1. Creating opportunities for the success of young people by supporting their health and well-being, and giving them access to education and experiences; 2. Encouraging artwork, especially that which can improve our collective understanding of social issues; and 3. Making our governing institutions more ethical and effective.

  • Trustee

    2003 - 2021

  • Founder and Stats Guy

    2000

    I started TeamRankings.com when I was in college, because I believed that there were better ways to assess and rank sports teams based on the results of their games. TeamRankings.com has grown far beyond what I initially imagined, and today offers up a wide range of evaluative and predictive tools and analyses for sports fans. I now work with Tom Federico (TR's CEO) and the rest of the team on business and tech/data strategy.

  • Angel Investor and Adviser

    2012

    I occasionally invest in startups. Most use data in innovative, compelling ways. My general heuristic for investing is "if I were a recent college grad, would I want to work for this company?"

  • Panelist

    2002

    I have the privilege of serving on a panel to select the top investigative reporting stories of the year. I represent the Greenfield Foundation and judge with a small group of policymakers and journalists. The prize was established by my grandfather Bob Greenfield and the Shorenstein Center to reward high-quality investigative reporting, with the goal of positively impacting public policy.

2013 - 2016

  • CEO and Co-Founder

    2013 - 2016

2012 - 2013

  • Growth Hacker-In-Residence

    2012 - 2013

    Worked with some awesome companies from 500 Startups to drive metrics and distribution via product/marketing/data improvements. That process led to large (10%-500%) increases in signups, usage, and or revenue for many startups. In addition to helping those companies directly, I worked with the 500 team as we developed a model that will allow 500 to best help others in the future. I continue to be involved with 500 as a mentor/adviser/LP/friend.

2007 - 2012

  • CTO and Co-Founder

    2007 - 2012

    I founded Circle of Moms and led our product development team until the company was acquired by Sugar in February 2012. Under my CTO-ship my team registered over 6 million users, had 9 million Child Pages created by moms, grew to 3 million monthly unique visitors, and featured over 10,000 communities. Plus, we built out our own pretty sweet a/b testing platform, an effective content management system for ourselves and our partners, and a super valuable engine to automatically optimize and target the emails our users received.

2004 - 2007

  • Sr. Analytics Scientist

    2004 - 2007

    I established and led LinkedIn's data analytics team. Our team: -Designed an Analytics Prototyping Engine, to show users personalized, analytics-driven content including People You May Know, job suggestions, and more profiles like this -Defined and tracked LinkedIn's important business metrics -Built intelligent algorithms for standardizing data -Built ML models to match users with targeted jobs, other similar users, portions of the site they may find interesting, and other relevant content -Defined a framework for a/b testing the effect of different interface elements on LinkedIn's metrics -Optimized LinkedIn's viral growth

2000 - 2004

  • Sr. Fraud R&D Scientist

    2000 - 2004

    I was responsible for much of PayPal's back-end fraud modeling. I designed and coded random forest software to easily build predictive machine learning models to track down fraud. I believe that this was the first ever commercial implementation of random forests (the first version launched in 2001). Using my software, my colleages and I built 50+ statistical models to assess the risk of PayPal's users. The models were then implemented on the site's back end (by one of us and/or engineering) to find fraudulent transactions before money from them left the system. Collectively, these models saved PayPal many millions of dollars.