It all begins with an idea.

After graduating from high school in 2002, I spent two years living in Eastern Ukraine as a missionary. During my time there, I discovered that the ways Ukrainians did certain things were better than what I had known growing up.

The idea is counterintuitive; everyone knows that in order to produce illuminating, actionable results, researchers should assemble large, diverse pools of research subjects – the largest they can handle – and see what insights they can skim out of this “Big Data.”