Hugo Bowne-Anderson

“Hugo is one of these people I'm honored, thankful and humbled our paths crossed. I'm going to skip over Hugo's technical skills, not because they are not impressive (quite the contrary), but because they are the most obvious one. Hugo has an impressive education and a breathtaking academic background, and he's an incredibly skilled and renowned data scientist. At DataCamp, after designing our Python curriculum (that, at the date I'm writing, counts more than 130 courses and 40 projects), he applied his expertise as a data scientist and then created the DataFramed podcast, engaging in weekly conversations with major actors of the field (Cathy O'Neil, Wes McKinney), from leading organizations (AT&T, McKinsey), to thoroughly tackle questions around central topics (critical thinking, organizing teams, election forecasting) and tools (Jupyter, pandas). This podcast became one of, if not the leading podcast in data science, counting 60 episodes with an average of 4.9/5 on iTunes based on about 200 ratings. But all of this is public information. What is less known about Hugo is that his soft skills are just as, if not more, impressive as his hard skills. After doing research at some of the best academic organizations in the world (Yale, Max Planck Institute), he had a myriad of opportunities in front of him, that some of us could only dream of. Still, he chose to take a bet on a small startup, fresh out of Tech Stars 2015, coming in as employee #7. This company would end up raising more than $30 millions, hiring more than 100 collaborators, and becoming one of the leading names in data science education. Hugo hired the company's first Content Developer (Yashas Roy), who would end up leading the Content team, taking a bet on me, and being the best manager I ever had. When I was hired, I had been contracting as a support agent for 9 months: I was just creating issues on GitHub. The first time I met Hugo, he not only knew who I was but also how I had contributed so far, despite us never being in contact. Hugo was a driving force at DataCamp. His dedication, vision, hard work, intelligence and joyfulness have made it a delight to work alongside him. He has always acted as an advocate for the students and his colleagues, asking the hard questions and taking ownership of the solutions. It's been humbling and empowering to share a part of his journey. He will be dearly missed, but I'm very excited about what he will achieve next. When he left, Hugo confessed that, coming from an academic background, he originally had some doubts about his ability to deliver in the business world. Having gone through several business and management schools, I can without hesitation state that getting business students to come out of their school with half the vision, leadership, management, problem solving, productivity and team work skills (to name a few) that Hugo demonstrated would already be an incredible achievement.”