Yale Career Panels: A Candid View of AI and Data Services

Sam Hendel is a Co-Founder of Dataminr, the leading company for event and risk detection, which he began with two of his former Yale classmates in 2009. Dataminr’s platform offers the earliest signals of major events to corporations, financial institutions, news media, and the public sector. CNBC recognized Dataminr as one of the world’s “most disruptive technology companies,” which raised $475 million in March 2021 at a $4.1 billion valuation. In 2021, Mr. Hendel partnered with KKR to purchase KMR Music Royalties II, a unique catalogue of 62,000 music copyrights, from Kobalt Capital for $1.1 billion. Mr. Hendel serves as a founding board member of the new joint venture, Chord Music Partners, which owns music rights from artists such as The Weeknd, David Guetta, OneRepublic, Kid Cudi, and Fleetwood Mac. Mr. Hendel recently founded JKBX (Jukebox) to democratize music assets through fractional ownership.

In addition, Mr. Hendel has 20 years of experience in the investment management industry and most recently served as Portfolio Manager and President of Easterly Investment Partners, the $4 billion AUM value manager. Prior to Joining Easterly, Mr. Hendel was Co-Portfolio Manager for risk arbitrage and event-driven strategies at Satellite Asset Management from 2006 to 2009. That position followed 3 years at UBS, from 2003 to 2006, where Mr. Hendel was an Associate Director, serving in both the portfolio trading and proprietary trading groups.

In his personal capacity, Mr. Hendel is an Associate Fellow of Davenport College at Yale University, is a Co-Founder of Accelerate Yale, an alumni shared interest group focused on promoting entrepreneurship at Yale, and is a Co-Founder of the Y Startup Index, a fund founded by Yale alumni which invests in early and mid-stage companies. Mr. Hendel serves on the board of Wejo, the leader in Connected Vehicle Data, serves as the Chairman of OkayMedia, which includes OkayPlayer, a music and lifestyle website founded in 1999 by Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson of the hip hop band The Roots, and OkayAfrica, the leading digital media company focused on African culture. Mr. Hendel received a B.A. from Yale University.

Deb Roy is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. He leads research in applied machine learning and human-machine system design with applications in understanding large scale social media ecosystems and designing communication tools and social networks. Deb is also co-founder and CEO of Cortico, a nonprofit social technology company that develops and operates a conversation platform designed to surface under- heard voices and enable deep systematic listening.

Previously, Roy was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School from 2021-22. He served as Executive Director of the MIT Media Lab from 2019-2021. Roy co-founded and was CEO of Bluefin Labs, a media analytics company that analyzed the interactions between television and social media at scale. Bluefin was acquired by Twitter in 2013, Twitter’s largest acquisition to date. From 2013-2017 Roy served as Twitter’s Chief Media Scientist.

Deb serves on the board of the Knight First Amendment Institute and the FRONTLINE advisory council. He has previously served on the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy, the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder.

Roy is the author of over 175 academic papers including a study of the spread of false news that was the cover of Science magazine in 2018 and was one of the most influential academic publications of the year. Roy’s widely-viewed TED talk Birth of a Word presents his research on his son’s language development that led to new ideas in media analytics, while his 2021 talk envisions a new kind of social platform for a stronger democracy.

A native of Canada, Roy received his Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo and PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

Peter Young is CEO and President of Young & Partners, a leading boutique investment banking firm focused on the life science and chemical industries. He manages the firm and is actively involved in client transactions and financings.

Prior to founding Young & Partners, Peter was head of various related industry groups at Salomon Brothers, Schroders, and Lehman Brothers, a private equity investor with J.H. Whitney & Co., and a strategy consultant with Bain & Company serving life science and chemical companies. Peter received an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar), an M.S. in Accounting from the New York University and a B.A. in Economics from Yale University. He is a member of the Committee of 100, has served on the board of Societe de Chimie Industrielle since 1990 and has served for 29 years on the Editorial Advisory Board of Pharmaceutical Executive.