Christian Rudder

In the age of Big Data, Christian Rudder stands out. Rudder is in personal possession of one of the richest data sets in the world, accumulated from the dating site he co-founded, OkCupid. He's spent the last three years adding to his collection, mining and analyzing the core datasets of our time: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and the like. What he’s found amounts to a new understanding of how we live.

Rudder is one of the founders of OKCupid, one of the largest dating sites in the world, which was sold to IAC in 2011. He still runs it day-to-day, while also heading a small data-mining team that scours the digital universe for meaningful trends on important sites. The original outlet for Rudder's research took place on OKCupid’s blog, OKTrends, which was not only read by millions of people, but also changed the way companies approach data as a media-relations strategy. His research and findings have been featured repeatedly in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and were the subject of a New Yorker feature.

Graduating Harvard cum laude, with a math degree, Christian Rudder got his start as the Creative Director for SparkNotes, a sort of 21st century Cliff’s Notes for the Internet, which was sold to Barnes & Noble in 2001. Recently, he sold his book, Dataclysm, for a seven-figure deal—a usually unheard of amount for a first time author.