It’s the ambition of a continually curious Doctor of Mathematics.

If this all sounds a bit pie-in-the-sky, you’re right. But this is a conversation for somewhere years and years in the future.” He points to the 7 Privacy by Design principles as a strong foundation, also citing the company’s three core values: privacy, transparency, and algorithmic responsibility.Ī true deep tech venture, when asked about what’s going to keep the lights on, Gould was a bit vague, answering only in model verbs: “It could be an affiliate fee, perhaps similar to what duckduckgo is doing with its anonymous affiliates, or it could be a white label solution. If that be the case, as history, peppered with a healthy dose of fines and lawsuits, has taught us, with great power comes great responsibility a factor Gould says is already being accounted for. films, books, restaurants, podcasts, etc., depending on what they learn along the way (lean methodology), coupled with user demand (product/market fit), he imagines Choice Options growing into, “a recommendation engine for life”. In an interview, Gould told me that while the company is starting out with a focus on 'experience goods' verticals, i.e. What Choice Options is doing will help you and me find the personally meaningful needles in the haystack, the signals through the noise. Awash in a seemingly unending array of choices, countless studies and papers have found that too much of a good thing is indeed, too much. Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything - to maximize.” - Barry Schwartz, “ The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less”Īnd there we have it.

“The ‘success’ of modernity turns out to be bittersweet, and everywhere we look it appears that a significant contributing factor is the overabundance of choice. To understand where Gould and co-founder Johnny Hunter are going with this mission, we need to have a look at the founding principle of every successful business what is the problem they’re aiming to solve? Shores that see machine learning driving the discovery of things we truly love. Rather, instead of pursuing a pure commercial play, he wants to steer the boat towards further distant shores. To be fair, Gould isn’t on a crusade to take down the man and do away with using technology to help us sift through the mountains of choice we're presented with on a daily basis. In so much, yet-to-be-named startup (Choice Options for now, let’s see if it sticks) founder Martin Gould notes that these systems are, and have been specifically trained on, pursuing what he terms supply-side objectives goals that include “maximise the probability that the customer makes a purchase” and “maximise the lifetime value of the customer”. These technologies have done such a good job at driving the bottom line for the tech behemoths that a cottage industry has sprung up around them offering smaller retailers similar 'Amazon quality' services.īut just because these algorithms are providing consumers with fairly ok suggestions on what to buy next, let’s not overlook the elephant in the room: the end-goal of each and every one of these vendors, large and small, is to convert that potential customer into a paying customer.

In fact, reaching back to a McKinsey report from 2013, “35 percent of what consumers purchase on Amazon and 75 percent of what they watch on Netflix come from product recommendations based on such algorithms”. One that's undoubtedly been behind nothing but positive numbers for Amazon. The business of putting the right product in front of the right customer at the right time is a big one. The fund also drew Cocoa VC and several notable angel investors to the table including former Google Ads and Commerce division SVP Sridhar Ramaswamy, Oculus VR’s former Head of Video Eugene Wei, Behance founder Scott Belsky, and Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström. London-based Choice Options has raised £1 million in a pre-seed round led by Harry Stebbings' 20VC.

Netflix startup