The Other "F" Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work

12Stage Three: RecognizePick Up the Signals of Failure Earlier

Your Role: WatchfulMonitor

From Big Bang to Big Data to Big Insights

In early 2014, We Heart It, an image-based social network for the teen and young adult market, identified a group of new and unwelcome accounts on the site. The company encourages social expression and inspiration through the posting of images, similar to Tumblr and Pinterest. It was in a rapid growth phase, adding a million users a month, when President Dave Williams and his team noticed the intruders.

These new accounts were set up by hackers. Automated bots were attempting to hijack the We Heart It community, redirecting users to other sites and degrading the quality of content. Whenever these accounts were shut down, the bots would pop up elsewhere on We Heart It with different profiles. This malicious activity presented serious risks to the growth and long-term health of the community, and to the company overall.

Dave and his team turned to a new, big data venture, Wise.io, for help in identifying the hacker patterns. When seeking to detect faint signals within a high-noise environment (like a globally popular, high-use social network), where better to turn than a business founded by whip-smart UC Berkeley–based astronomers used to scanning galaxies for minute signals among massive amounts of data? Working together, the teams sifted through ...