With a keen eye on the growing influence of data analytics to hoteliers worldwide, Duetto has moved to appoint a world-leading predictive analytics expert as its Senior Vice President of Product and Analytics. Jeff Ma has agreed to join Duetto, leaving his role at Twitter where he served as Vice President of Data Science and Analytics.

Prior to his time at Twitter, where they are undergoing an operation to delete millions of “fake” followers, Ma worked for two years as the figurehead of ESPN’s new predictive analytics department, helping to establish a host of new successful tech start-ups. The most notable start-up being Citizen Sports, which focused on sports-based analytics and was eventually bought out by Yahoo.

Ma’s role at Twitter

Jeff Ma came to the attention of social media platform Twitter back in 2015. Ma was founder of tenXer, a Silicon Valley tech start-up that was designed to “make work better and your work better”. The management software was designed to help freelance developers and departments of developers to work more efficiently together by increasing the transparency and visibility of data and analytics based on development projects. As reported by Business Insider, Twitter eventually purchased tenXer in April 2015 and the rest is history.

Ma was promoted to lead a team of highly talented data scientists, analysts and engineers at Twitter, with a united goal to enhance data-driven decision making across the Twitter platform. Twitter recently appointed former Nigerian Minister of Finance Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on its board of directors.

How Ma gained notoriety as part of the MIT blackjack team

Undoubtedly, the main reason that Jeff Ma shot to fame was his initial career as a blackjack player. Ma attended MIT after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy and eventually studied for a degree in mechanical engineering in the early 1990s. He signed up to the MIT blackjack team, where he would create history with several other MIT students in fusing statistical theory and card counting techniques to scoop millions at the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Betway cites Ma’s success story with the MIT blackjack team as one of the driving forces behind the creation of the 2008 Hollywood hit movie, 21, starring Kevin Spacey.

Ma’s success with the MIT blackjack team inspired author Ben Mezrich to pen the book “Bringing Down the House”. Ma was renamed for the book as Kevin Lewis and although the Boston Globe insists that some elements of the storyline are wholly fictional and were exaggerated for the purposes of the book, the story is still one of the most popular card game-themed books of this generation.

In the past, Ma has attributed all of his blackjack success due to his dedication to “math, probability and numbers”. In a keynote address at the International Institute of Analytics in 2015, Ma admitted that all decisions made at the blackjack tables as part of the MIT team were “objective”. “It’s all data-driven. I like to think that blackjack was big data before big data was even a term.”

Three years on from that speech and Ma has moved on to pastures new, bagging a key role with the hospitality sector’s sole revenue strategy platform powered by Duetto.

What does the future hold for Duetto?

Ma’s arrival is a landmark moment for Duetto, a company where analytics is at the heart of its value proposition. Ma said on his arrival at the firm that the chance to “apply the ‘Moneyball’ playbook to the hospitality vertical” had a significant bearing on his decision to leave Twitter. He believes that data-led hospitality could help unlock “huge potential for hotels to excel in areas where they have previously struggled”. The long-term goal for Duetto is to assist hotel chains and independents to improve their profitability and personalisation, with the ability to market directly to consumers.

In February 2018, Duetto revealed a sizeable $80 million Series D financing round with the aim of attracting fresh investment. The firm’s ground-breaking application has allowed the hospitality sector to leverage customer-centric data and allow independent hoteliers to accurately price customer segments in real time.

Marco Benvenuti, co-founder and Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Duetto, believes Jeff Ma will “bring [the] product team to the next level by matching the best in Silicon Valley with the best vision in hospitality”. Benvenuti voiced his excitement at the prospect of Ma putting together “a world-class team of data scientists and help shape the industry’s only revenue strategy platform”.