Igniting Innovation at Equifax Spark

Last week, the events team headed south and joined Equifax for their first ever customer conference in Atlanta. More than 250 of Equifax’s customers and partners from financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies, including SunTrust, Bank of America, Cox, and CreditKarma, attended Spark to learn about the latest trends and industry insights in consumer credit.

In the spirit of sparking inspiration and innovation, Equifax Chief Data and Analytics Officer Prasanna Dhore opened the conference by sharing his personal journey as an immigrant and how he built his credit from zero over the decades. His talk highlighted the information asymmetry that can exist between credit consumers and financial institutions.

Day 1 of Spark continued with the announcement of a new strategic partnership between Equifax and FICO.  In today’s information age, Equifax and their partners have more data, technology, and analytics than ever before. More accurate customer views allow for smarter decisions for financial institutions and lenders, and more importantly, better credit access for consumers and a stronger economy for everyone. To accompany this philosophy, the  new partnership serves help lenders better understand their consumers.

The rest of the content followed the key themes of data, analytics, and identity. Notable sessions covered the significance of data indicators such as student loan history, employment trends, generational differences; new analytics technologies such as explainable AI that are powering tools to better understand and predict consumer habits and behavior; and the role of identity to combat fraud and mitigate risk.

Artists from the Sketch Effect were onsite to help capture all the key session points and spark-worthy ideas. Other conference highlights included:

• Equifax and Moody’s Economic Outlook session: A deep dive into current consumer trends and indicators for 2020

• Equifax’s Innovation Studio Expo: Hosted at the Infinity Club of SunTrust Park, data and analytic leaders demoed some of their latest cutting-edge tools and solutions

• Erik Qualman’s energizing keynote: Voted the 2nd Most Likeable Author in the World behind J.K. Rowling, Erik offered a guide for leaders in the digital age  

After an eventful two days of thought-provoking content and demos, Spark left attendees feeling inspired and empowered to tackle the biggest challenges for our economy and consumer credit.

Interested in planning a customer conference like Spark? Let’s connect at events@credpr.com. See more of our event management here.

How’s Your Data Game? An Inside Look at Strata Data Conference

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If you are in an industry that touches data and engineering (who doesn’t these days?), there’s no doubt you’ve heard about O’Reilly events and specifically Strata Data Conference (@strataconf). If you didn’t have a chance to attend this year, we’re giving you an inside look at what went down this week when the cred team attended Strata Data at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Who was speaking on stage?

Only the best and the brightest in the data space, including amazing fierce women leaders.

Amy O’Connor (@ImAmyO) kicked off the main stage content on Wednesday with her keynote on “The journey to the data-driven enterprise from the edge to AI.” As Chief Data and Information Officer at Cloudera, she talked about how the company “drinks its own champagne” by running Cloudera on Cloudera and what they’ve learned on their journey from the edge to AI.

On Thursday, former data scientist and product manager at Airbnb Theresa Johnson (@missjohnson) talked about how she organized uncertainty at Airbnb and why black box models are not helpful. She talked about the internal tools they built to drive an end-to-end metrics forecasting platform, leveraging machine learning, Bayesian inference, TensorFlow, Hadoop, and web technology.

Did it get technical? You bet it did!

On Wednesday, Sonal Gupta, Research Scientist at Facebook, taught us about natural language understanding in task-oriented conversational AI. She outlined a way to do more advanced compositional understanding, which can understand cross-domain queries, using hierarchical representations.

We love seeing our cred clients on stage, especially Manifold.ai CTO Sourav Dey (@resdntalien), who always brings his personality to very technical topics. He did two talks this week, I caught his second on Thursday where he talked about how to attack clustered data with Mixed Effects Randomized Forests (MERF).

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Who wants some swag? Let’s check out the Expo Floor.

From professional headshots and massages to “techtris” and skee ball, the fun never stopped at the expo.

We were excited to stop by the Okera booth and congratulate them for their win for Most Disruptive Startup. Their platform tackles the hardest issues behind data access and governance across distributed environments.

Sippy cups are no longer just for babies—this one is for WINE! The team at Alteryx must have known cred was coming, this was winner of favorite swag grab of the day. We also learned a bit about the company, which offers an end-to-end self-service platform for data science and analytics.

We also snagged some cool socks and stickers from Talend, a recognized leader in cloud data integration and data integrity.

Last, but certainly not least, we chatted with our good friend Jonathan Symonds, CMO at Minio, about the company’s open source, enterprise-grade, Amazon S3 compatible object storage. Also got some pretty cool T-shirts to boot.

Should you attend Strata Data?

If you fall into one of the three categories below, we definitely recommend you check out the next Strata Data Conference or one of the other great upcoming O’Reilly events.

• Work in data & engineering? This is a great opportunity to learn the latest and greatest tools in the industry, network with your peers, and potentially snag that next great job.

• Company with a data science & engineering team? If you’re trying to recruit top talent in the data science & engineering space, Strata Data is the place to connect with prospective candidates.

• Company looking to better incorporate data into your business? Attend sessions to see the many cutting edge ways data is being applied within companies across industries and visit the expo floor to meet some amazing companies who may be able to help with your data game.

Want to speak at an event like Strata Data? Get in touch and we’ll see if cred can help you get on stage. Also follow us on Twitter for more great event news and recaps.

Texas Forever: Celebrating Ideas and Innovation at SXSW 2019

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As cred’s resident Texan, my home state is known for many great things—cowboys, the Alamo, and one of the best conferences in the world (in my humble, Austin unicorn opinion): South By, aka South by Southwest (SXSW)! An annual festival happening every spring in Austin, SXSW is part conference and part film and music festival, with the goal of bringing together leaders and thought provokers across all industries to share their knowledge.

Along with listening to talks from the likes of Stacey Abrams, Brené Brown, Kimberly Bryant, David Byrne, and Tim Ferriss, I was able to see cred speakers like Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder & CEO of Mighteor, Edith Yeung, Partner at 500 Startups, David Schwartz, CTO at Ripple, and Omar Tawakol, CEO & Founder at Voicea, take the stage and share their thoughts on the future of health, tech, politics, entertainment, and much more.

Here were some of my top three favorite talks:

Featured Session: Blockchain Beyond the Hype: The Ripple Effect

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In front of more than 600 attendees, Ripple CTO David Schwartz spoke candidly about cryptography and the future of blockchain. Joined by Business Insider Editor-at-Large Sara Silverstein, David discussed his interest in bitcoin, the difference between XRP and Ripple, SEC regulation laws, and why XRP is not a security.

Keynote: A Cultural Crystal Ball

In front of a packed house, Bozoma Saint John, CMO at William Morris Endeavor, and Ashley Graham, model and host of the Pretty Big Deal podcast, discussed how to spot trends that will be the next big thing. The session dove into how being authentic has helped them navigate trends and how they have each developed or impacted the culture in their industries.

Filled with golden nuggets of wisdom throughout their talk, Bozoma’s message of “staying quiet and really paying attention to the world around you,” for new ideas and inspiration is something that I’ll be practicing.

Keynote: Shirley Manson & Lauren Mayberry with Puja Patel

Lead by alternative music powerhouses, Shirley Manson, Garbage frontwoman, and CHVRCHES vocalist Lauren Mayberry, this panel, moderated by Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel, discussed their experiences as women in the music industry, how growing up in Scotland helped shape them into the people they are today, how they stay creative, and how social media impacts them in both positive and negative ways.

Curious about where else cred has been so far? Check out our other event spotlights here!

Brand Building @ Bowery’s Marketing Summit

This week we were on site with Bowery Capital for their first Leadership Summit of 2019, focused around the role of the marketer. Unlike most thought leadership events we manage, Bowery’s Summits focus on tactical lessons learned from not your industry, but your position, whether it be in marketing, talent, finance, or sales.

From branding to hiring techniques, we were inundated with tactical learnings from some of the best of the best marketers in SaaS. We've summarized our learnings on the day here:

It was clear marketers play a key role within their organization. With an infinite number of possibilities and strategies to experiment with, Clare Carr, VP of Marketing at Parse.ly, showed us how carefully planning your marketing and content strategy helps build a long term, successful plan. She also touched on the importance of pushing back when people try and get in the way of your focus for ‘quick-wins.’

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Tami McQueen, Co-Founder at 31South,  encouraged attendees to think outside the box and get creative when building your lead gen strategy. Thought leadership and branding through experiences proves to be much more powerful in amplifying the right leads.

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Overall, sessions throughout the day clearly conveyed an underlying tone of the importance of branding. Get your infrastructure set and align your team with your vision and mission, which will ultimately carries through to your messaging, website, sales efforts, and more.

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Hope to see you at a future Summit this year!

• People and Talent Summit on Thursday, June 20th

• Sales Summit on Thursday, October 17th

• Finance Summit on Thursday, November 21st

Meet cred’s Spring Intern

The cred team is excited to welcome another intern for the spring semester! Our intern program is as unique as cred, offering newcomers a chance to take a deep dive into the world of communications and events—from pitching clients for conferences to supporting speaking opportunities and researching industry events.

We sat down with Sonali Gupta, a senior graduating in May from the University of San Francisco, to chat through her experience. From interning at Chirps Chips, a startup featured on Shark Tank and backed by Mark Cuban, to joining us for the spring, we loved hearing about Sonali’s path to cred.

Check out our full interview below!

cred: Where are you going to school and what are you studying?

Sonali Gupta: I’m currently at the University of San Francisco and I’m studying Business Marketing!

cred: Why did you choose to study marketing?

SG: I chose to pursue marketing because there’s so many different aspects to it (digital, social media, product, etc) and over the course of my studies and classes I realized I was passionate about digital marketing.

cred: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

SG: I’m originally from Sacramento so it was a big change for me to move to San Francisco, which is such a populous and a busy city. I love brunching on the weekends and spending time at Dolores Park with friends. I am obsessed with Game of Thrones and I love binge watching random shows on Netflix!

cred: What do you want to achieve while interning at cred?

SG: My past experiences have been heavily focused on digital marketing and a little bit on events, so I really want to get more experience in the PR/communications industry and learn more about the backend work of running events. It is nice to see that cred focuses on events, because not a lot of companies do that. Being able to tap into that niche market and help run events seamlessly is very useful for people who want to have an audience to talk to. I’m super excited for all the new things I’m going to learn!

cred: If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?

SG: Taco Bell Chalupas 24/7.

cred: Can you give us one interesting fact about yourself?

SG: I interned at a startup (Chirps Chips) that was featured on Shark Tank and invested in by Mark Cuban!

cred: What is one thing you want to accomplish in the next five years?

SG: My dad and I have a few new entrepreneurial ideas for products and companies, so I really want to work with him to start a company of my own!

Curious to learn more about what we do here at cred? Learn more about our open positions, including internships, on AngelList, or email Gina King at gina@credpr.com with your resume!

Water for Peace: CreativeMornings Sacramento

The third Friday of the month means one thing at the Urban Hive, home of our Sacramento office: CreativeMornings!

CreativeMornings is a breakfast lecture series serving the creative community. Local chapters from cities around the world host monthly events to celebrate their city’s creative talent and open their space with like-minded individuals. The Sac chapter of this international event series features a rotating list of speakers, breakfast, and—of course—coffee. 

At today’s event, doors opened at 8:30 a.m. and attendees enjoyed breakfast burritos and fresh fruit from a local co-op and sipped on fresh local coffee. The main event began at 9:00 a.m., with an opening from CreativeMornings Sacramento host Rebecca Plumb. As always, she read the CreativeMornings Manifesto, which begins, “Everyone is creative,” and set the tone for the talk.

March’s theme, picked by the CreativeMornings Perth, Australia chapter, centered around water. Who better to speak to this than La Mission Por Vida Founder William Mendoza? Through his nonprofit organization, William works to bring clean water to developing countries and has impacted more than 1.5 million people globally.

William shared his story of addiction and how it led him to start the nonprofit. To William, “Water is hope, opportunity, progress, [and] education.” Through providing access to clean water, William believes he helps bring peace to communities.

The event wrapped up with Q+A from the audience. We left feeling inspired by William’s story and his work to improve the lives of people around the world. We’re proud to work with organizations and companies that share this same vision for social good—including fashion eCommerce site Olivela, which donates 20% of all its proceeds to support educating girls worldwide, and Cathay Pacific Airways, which was the first airline to invest in a biofuel company and has committed to reducing their net carbon emissions by 50% against 2005 levels by 2050.

Interested in learning more about CreativeMornings? Check out their website to find your local chapter, and maybe we’ll see you there!

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The credSac office closed. Check out our brand new office in SF.

Hear Us Roar: Happy International Women’s Day!

Stacey Boyd, CEO and Founder of Olivela | Milken Institute London Summit 2018

Joanne Chen, Partner, Foundation Capital | amoConf 2018

Caitlin Bartley, CEO, cred | SaaStr Annual 2019

Sarah McCrary, CEO, GasBuddy | Unacast Real World Talks 2018

Sree Menon, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Global Operations, Tophatter | TAP 2018

Rebecca Stone, Vice President of Marketing, LiveRamp | RampUp on the Road London 2018

Yamini Rangan, CCO, Dropbox | SaaStr Annual 2019

Happy International Women’s Day! Across the world, March 8 marks a global event for women and men to celebrate the “social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women.”

Here at cred, we are proud to partner with a number of dynamic women speakers across industries to help share their stories, wisdom, and unique perspectives on what’s next in innovation and entrepreneurship. As a women-led company ourselves, cred recognizes the importance of having strong female leaders who are not afraid to rattle their industries and inspire movements for generations to come.

According to the 2018 Pew Research Center’s Data on Women Leaders study, only 4.8 percent of CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies were held by women. We hope to see this number grow over time as we continue to work with outstanding female leaders to give them a platform to broadcast their voice. (Related: credTen: Top Ten Conferences in Female Entrepreneurship)

Today, we celebrate the amazing women we see on the stage, in our office, and around the world.

See below for a sample of some of our amazing women speakers.

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Know a female founder whose voice should be amplified? Send them our way hello@credpr.com.