As tech innovations continue to change the world winners need to understand data if they want to win in the future. Georgia is becoming quite the swing state. It was ugly this year but not for Governor Kemp who easily won re-election. One reason he crushed it was his data operation that sliced and diced universes to deliver the right messages to the right people. That data operation was led by Mark Stephenson who joins us for this episode. We get real nerdy.  

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Mark Stephenson is the Founder/CEO of Red Oak Strategic, an Alexandria, VA-based data science, analytics and targeting firm, and Amazon Web Services Consulting Partner.  Red Oak Strategic specializes in data science, data engineering, machine learning/AI, cloud consulting and strategy services, and for over 10 years, has worked with Fortune 50 companies, political campaigns and organizations on their data engineering, targeting and data analytics needs.  

Mark has served as Head of Data & Analytics for a major 2016 American presidential campaign, is frequently called upon by national and local media for his data science insights and was called a top data scientist in 2015 by Wired Magazine.  In politics, Red Oak has worked with dozens of national committee, outside group, statewide and local campaign clients, and continues to be an innovative leader in the political analytics space. 

Mark is also Co-Founder of Epidaurus Health, Inc., which is a software startup focused on automating and improving the prior authorization process in healthcare. Receiving their first patent in 2022, the company works on an improved data intake process, leveraging blockchain / smart contracts for security and data provenance and introducing machine learning to a complicated, cumbersome prior authorization process.