#11: Dan Wulin: International E-Commerce, Price Optimization, & Home-Good Product Recommendations

Data Journeys

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Dan Wulin is the Director of Data Science at Wayfair: an international e-commerce company specializing in home goods.

Wayfair is a $5B company growing 40% year-over-year, with 10 million products and over 8,700 employees around the world. Their data science team is 80-people strong and growing fast, using econometrics to optimize prices, biostatistics to boost marketing, and computer vision to personalize product recommendations.

Prior to joining Wayfair, Dan studied Math & Physics as an undergraduate at Columbia University and, thereafter, received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Chicago. Coming out of school, he worked as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group for a year in Chicago before transitioning to Wayfair in Boston.

In this conversation, we cover a wide-range of topics, including:

His childhood obsession with text-based multiplayer RPGs like Gemstone
Dan’s roots in academia, how studying the physics of superconductors taught him (painfully) how to break down complex problems in simple ways
How a misalignment of his problem solving approach with standard consulting frameworks at BCG led him to Wayfair
Dan’s first major effort at Wayfair, project Athena, that saved the company millions of dollars on Google ad spending
His passion for setting up Wayfair’s data science team to be successful, how teams within the organization partner, as well as who and how they hire
The computer-vision-driven approach Wayfair takes toward measuring people’s creative taste on subjective things like furniture preference

Enjoy the show!

Show Notes: https://ajgoldstein.com/podcast/ep11/

Dan’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-wulin-02169a2a/

AJ’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajgoldstein393/

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