ZestFinance创始人：随心所欲多读书

    道格拉斯•梅里尔早已习惯了克服各种挑战。梅里尔小时在阿肯色斯州长大，幼年由于罹患听觉神经感染，他曾失去听力长达三年之久，后来只得重新学习说话。但他人生的挫折还远远不止于此，高中时，梅里尔被诊断出患有阅读障碍。因此梅里尔在人生的早年就已经明白，自己的成功要比别人付出更多的努力。后来梅里尔从陶沙大学（University of Tulsa）获得了社会学与经济学学位，然后赴普林斯顿大学（Princeton University）深造，获得认知科学博士学位，一路打拼，最后当上了谷歌公司（Google）的信息总监。

    2010年，梅里尔创立了一家名叫ZestFinance的公司。这家公司有100名员工，主要利用人工智能、机器学习和大数据等技术，帮助借款人分析潜在贷款者的信用风险。ZestFinance旨在帮助“资金不足”的人以较低的利率获得贷款，经过2007年的金融危机后，这无疑是一个特殊的挑战。

    现年43岁的梅里尔居住在洛杉矶。近日他接受了《财富》杂志的专访。

    1. 你最欣赏的科技界人士是谁？为什么？

    我最欣赏的人已经过世很久，他叫马休•方丹•毛利。他是19世纪美国的一名海军上尉，当时的军舰还是帆船。他曾是一艘军舰的舰长，经常行驶从美国西海岸到日本的航线。有时航线的海况很好，也有时风浪十分恶劣。像差不多所有其他船长一样，他只知道一条去东京的航线，不过每个船长的航线多多少少是不太一样的。

    后来他不幸受了伤，没法再航海了，于是他打算找点别的事做。他偶然发现，有些舰长选择的航线在一年的有些时候海况较好，但同样在一年的其它时候海况较差。另外，所有舰长从一个城市到另一个城市都有自己的习惯航线，这些航线在一年中的海况都有好有差。于是他让舰长们把他们的航海日志交给自己，由他对所有人的航线进行汇总，然后将汇总后的航线交给舰长们。

    结果他发现了信风对航线的影响，并且发现全球各地的海况会随着气候而变化，因此两地之间的最佳航线也会随着时间变化。他基本上是采用了众包的方式筛选出了全球各地的最佳航线。如果你注意看毛利之前的航线数据，你会发现城市之间的海路是随机的。在毛利之后的10到20年里，有了航线众包的概念，航路变得越来越固定，并且对季节性气候很敏感。海洋对全球政治经济有重大影响，它是贸易和信息的支柱，而毛利带来了重大的变化。

    2. 你欣赏哪些公司？为什么？

    我的回答稍微偏离你的问题，我最欣赏的是桑迪胡克希望基金会（Sandy Hook Promise Foundation）。这个基金会是几年前的桑迪胡克惨案发生后成立的一个组织。它是由部分学生家长创立的，也有不少硅谷风投家参与到这项事业中。他们希望通过风投的模式找到巩固校园安全的方法。他们希望让全世界的人想出有意思的点子，看看能否通过种子基金资助这些办法以减少校园暴力。

    3. 最让你感到兴奋的科技领域是什么？

    生物科技。近几年，计算机性能和数学运算能力有了惊人的提高，因此生物科技领域也发生了巨大的变化，从一开始连提出有趣的医学问题都很难，到现在已经可以开始把某些想法整合到一起。比如现在有一家叫Celmatix的生物技术公司，它可以就生育问题给出非常精确的指导。比如如果你要尝试体外受精的话，他们就会做几个测试并且收集你的数据，然后他们可能会说，你可能更适合这种方法或那种方法。他们关注的方面很多。现在有一些公司正在这个领域做一些很有趣的事，这家公司就是一个例子。

    4. 有些人也想从事和你这一行，你对他们有什么建议？

    我认为人们可能经常会获得比如多上一些科学课程或者在一家公司实习之类的建议，这都很好。但是我有一个很有用的经验，那就是我读书读得很广泛，像历史、名人传记、小说、诗歌都有涉猎。这些广泛的信息能为我带来真正影响我思考的东西。我的建议是多随机地阅读一些东西。幸运的是现在阅读的门槛很低，我有很多书都是在Kindle电子书上读的。

    Douglas Merrill is used to overcoming challenges. As a child growing up in Arkansas, he was deaf for three years -- the result of an auditory nerve infection -- and had to relearn how to speak. The difficulty was made more problematic by his dyslexia, which was not diagnosed until high school. At an early age, Merrill learned that he could achieve his goals, but his path wouldn't always be the obvious one. After earning degrees in sociology and economics from the University of Tulsa, Merrill went on to receive a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Princeton and eventually became the chief information officer at Google (GOOG).

    Today, he runs ZestFinance, a 100-person company that he started in 2010. ZestFinance uses a combination of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data to help lenders assess the credit risk of potential borrowers. The company's mission is to help people who are "under-banked" find access to credit at lower interest rates, a particular challenge since the 2007 banking crisis.

    Merrill, 43, is based in Los Angeles. He spoke with Fortune.

    1. Who in technology do you admire most? Why?

    I admire a guy who's been dead a very long time. His name is Matthew Fontaine Maury. Maury was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy in the 1800s, when ships had sails. He was the captain of a ship, and the routes that he tended to sail were from west coast of the U.S. towards Japan. Sometimes the routes were great, and sometimes the routes were very rough. Like almost all ship captains, he knew exactly one way to get to Tokyo, but every captain's path had slight differences.

    Sadly he was injured. Unable to be a ship captain anymore, he was looking around for something to do. He stumbled upon the fact that other captains had other routes that performed better in some times of the year and worse in some times of the year. He noticed that all captains have ways to go from same city to same city, and they all had different times of the year when they were good. He started telling captains that if they gave him their log book, then he would give it back later with the sum of their routes with everyone else's routes.

    What he discovered were the trade winds and the notion that weather changes throughout the year and as a result the time to travel changes over time. He basically crowdsourced routes all over the world. If you look at the data over time before Maury, the routes were kind of random between cities; they were all over the board. So the next 10 to 20 years after Maury had this idea of crowdsourcing routes, the routes got more and more defined and sensitive to seasonal weather patterns. The sea is how everything in the world works; it's the backbone of trade and information. Maury provided massive change.

    2. Which companies do you admire? Why?

    I want to go slightly off the beaten path and talk about the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation. Sandy Hook Promise is a group that was founded after the Sandy Hook tragedy a couple of years ago. It was founded by a group of parents, and a bunch of Silicon Valley VCs are in it, and they are trying to find ways to improve school security by using venture capital-ish formats. They try to let people in the world come up with interesting ideas and see if they can seed fund those ideas to find interesting potential ways to reduce school violence.

    3. Which area of technology excites you most?

    Biotech. If you look at the incredible increase in computational power and math power, even in the past few years, there has been rapid change from having a very hard time asking the interesting medical questions to being able to start putting together some thoughts. There are companies like Celmatix, a biotech company that gives you very precise guidance on reproductive and fertility issues. For example, if you are on a particular path to have IVF, they take a couple of tests and they gather data about you, and they may say, actually you're probably a candidate for this procedure vs. that procedure. They care a lot. They're an example of a company that is doing something interesting in the field.

    4. What advice would you give to someone who wants to do what you do?

    I think oftentimes people get advice to take more science classes or go do an internship at a firm, and that's all good. But what I have found useful is that I read very broadly. I read history, biography, fiction, poetry. I read about fields that I know nothing about at all, like biotech. I find that having that broad-based information allows me to stumble across things that really influence my thinking. My advice would be to go read something random. Luckily the barrier to entry for reading is very low, so I have a lot of books on my Kindle.