Kountable, San Francisco, CA
Before going into more details about my summer experiences, allow me to first introduce the company I worked for—Kountable. Headquartered in San Francisco’s Financial District, Kountable works to enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from developing countries to fulfill procurement contracts with their own customers. Simply put, the company purchases necessary supplies for its partner (an SME) and in exchange takes a percentage off the deal that the partner had with their own customer. Using this innovative approach, the company protects itself from the risks that other trade finance companies are usually exposed to since Kountable can request back the materials and sell them to other customers in case a deal falls through. One of the reasons this business model has proven to be successful in the past few years comes from the imperfections of the global trade system. Namely, it is virtually impossible for one to obtain a credit line if one has no collateral to offer in exchange, which is almost always the case with SMEs in developing countries. By providing those businesses with an adequate, low-risk alternative, Kountable empowers enterprises from developing nations—companies traditionally underserved by the global supply chain—to create meaningful changes in their countries that will last for years to come.
A fast-paced organization of over 80 experts from Europe, Africa, and North America, Kountable is working hard to become a global trade finance leader. Currently, the company is in a transition from a company driven by its financial capabilities to one that is driven by data. It is in this mess of unverified, untested, and certainly dirty data that I was able to find my place. As part of the data science team, I was mostly responsible for the usual data-related processes—cleansing, verification, statistical analyses, visualizations, and management. For example, one of the longest projects that I worked on over the summer included completing, verifying, managing, and storing all data that Kountable possesses regarding deals that the company executed in the past. Our team of five, including two other interns from Williams College, worked extensively on preparing the data by going through thousands of documents in order to build a new profile service. Although seemingly monotonous, the work was rewarding because it gave me the opportunity to go behind the curtains and learn indirectly about the end-to-end execution of a deal—from acquiring the initial documentation and performing primary risk analysis to purchasing, transporting, and delivering the finished goods to the end customer. This project enabled me to truly grasp the functioning and organization of a global fintech start-up, learn about regulatory compliance, and recognize the different stakeholders that all work together to complete a deal.
As the result of this project, I became interested in learning more about the duration of deals and their logistics. This idea formed the basis of my capstone summer project related to deal analysis. In collaboration with the data science team, I worked on developing a system for tracking deals by their stages and representing this information in a useful way. My product turned out to be an adjustable Gantt chart that displays elementary information about a given deal in a user-friendly manner. In addition to learning about business development, working on this project improved my working knowledge of MySQL and R programming languages. As a rising mathematics and computer science double major, I believe this experience will be of immense help to me both inside and outside the classroom in the future, and especially in my class on Bayesian statistics this coming fall.
Besides these two projects, one that I would also like to emphasize brought together the company’s entire summer intern class. Per the request of the company’s CEO Chris Hale ’00, I worked in a team of four to develop and present a company-wide document that succinctly summarized every deal the company has ever completed. Working on this project felt a lot like working with classmates at Williams since both Chris and other interns were incredibly understanding and supportive of mine and each other’s efforts. Feeling empowered to interact with the company’s CEO made me realize the power of flat organization structure that Kountable cultivates, so much so that I expect to be advocating for this structure in teams that I will be working on in the future.
Working in an ever-changing start-up such as Kountable comes with a lot of responsibility and it requires individual effort to seek projects in order to produce meaningful results. With the right support system in place, however, everything gets done more easily. That being said, I would like to thank the entire Kountable team for sharing the workspace and openly inviting me to join their family; everyone at the company went out of their way to include me in their projects and teach me valuable lessons. My great gratitude goes out to Chris Hale and his assistant Jonelle Burke, both of whom worked closely to ensure that I and other interns had an immersive and intellectually engaging summer. In addition, I would like to express my great gratitude to my fellow interns—Nkem Iregbulem, Ben Gips, and Charley Cochran—who made my stay at the company far more enjoyable. Incredibly skillful and equally supportive coworkers, I hope to be able to work with them again in near future. Furthermore, I would like to especially thank the data science team, Yoonjung Lee and Jesse Hammond, who started off as my mentors and ended being my closest friends. Jesse was always there to offer technical advice and knowledge in all my work whereas Yoonjung provided me the necessary supervision, encouragement, and support to ask the big, truly important questions that accompanied my work. It is because of their continuous support and care that I feel encouraged and inspired to become a data scientist myself. Finally, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my ASIP sponsor Mr. Martin J. Collins ’86 and the entire ’68 Center for Career Exploration staff, especially Dawn Dellea, without whose help I would never have been able to intern at Kountable in the first place. This Kountable internship will always hold a dear place in my memory and I hope to be able to return to the company in the future.