How To Hack Your Way Into A Proprietary Data Set

The good news: Declining cloud compute and hosting costs and open-sourced machine learning algorithms like TensorFlow mean it has never been cheaper and easier to build intelligent software. The bad news: It has never been cheaper and easier to build intelligent software, so this is no longer a competitive differentiator; it's table stakes. So, as we enter the "Great Commoditization" era of software, how can a CEO de-commoditize and build a long-term competitive moat around the business? I believe data will be the gold that separates the winners from the also-rans in this next generation of machine-learning-driven software. But all data sets are not created equal.