Fifteen years ago, Brett Goldstein seemed to be just another tech entrepreneur. He was working as IT director of OpenTable, then a start-up website for restaurant bookings. The company was thriving – and subsequently did a very successful initial public offering. Life looked very sweet for Goldstein. But when the World Trade Center was attacked in 2001, Goldstein had a moment of epiphany. “I spent seven years working in a startup but, directly after 9/11, I knew I didn’t want my whole story to be about how I helped people make restaurant reservations. I wanted to work in public service, to give something back,” he recalls – not just by throwing cash into a charity tin, but by doing public service. So he swerved: in 2006, he attended the Chicago police academy and then worked for a year as a cop in one of the city’s toughest neighbourhoods. Later he pulled the disparate parts of his life together and used his number-crunching skills to build the first predictive data system for the Chicago police (and one of the first in any western police force), to indicate where crime was likely to break out.
15年前，布雷特•戈尔茨坦(Brett Goldstein)似乎只是又一位高科技企业家而已。当时他是OpenTable的IT部门主管，OpenTable是一个提供餐馆预订服务的初创网站。这家企业那时正在蓬勃发展之中，后来的上市也大获成功。对于戈尔茨坦来说，生活似乎非常幸福。然而2001年当世界贸易中心(WTC)遭到袭击时，戈尔茨坦突然之间体会到了一种顿悟。他回忆说：“我在一家创业公司里工作了7年，然而就在9•11之后，我认识到我不希望整个人生只是写满了如何帮助人们预订餐馆的故事。我想要从事公共服务方面的工作，以便对社会做一些回馈。”——这种回馈不仅仅是往捐款箱里放现金，还包括从事公共服务。于是，他的生活来了个华丽转身：2006年他加入了芝加哥警校，随后在该市最为棘手的街区之一当了一年警察。在那之后，他把两段迥然不同的人生融为一体，利用他在数字方面的技能为芝加哥警方建立了首个数据预测系统（这在所有西方警察部门中也属领先），用以预测哪里有可能发生犯罪。