Entrepreneurship is in Peter Wang’s bones. As a Chinese immigrant, he watched his mother make dumplings to sell on their dining room table. He understood at an early age that he would also have to be a tenacious entrepreneur. Peter went on to start what would become the world’s most popular data science platform, Anaconda.

“We're doing all sorts of entrepreneurial things because every dollar you can make is another dollar you got,” Peter says about growing up in an immigrant family. “There's not really a lot of fear of regressing back. There's something about that that bakes into the psychology. It’s like, ‘Well, look, I can go back to a point where I'm living in a little roach-infested apartment, and we just build up from there again.’ So I think there's something about that, that you just know how to go into that deeper, colder water. And so you're not afraid of it.”

Since Peter co-founded Anaconda (formerly Continuum Analytics) with Travis Oliphant in 2011, the platform has gained 20 million users. They are achieving their goal to give anyone with a laptop access to data literacy, so the user can better understand issues in their area and use data science to solve them.

In this episode of Forge Ahead, Peter discusses the importance of democratizing data, opening access to tools, and enabling collaboration.

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