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，佈雷特•高爾茨坦(Brett Goldstein)似乎只是又一位高科技企業家而已。當時他是OpenTable的IT部門主管，OpenTable是一個提供餐館預訂服務的新創網站。這家企業那時正在蓬勃發展之中，後來的上市也大獲成功。對於高爾茨坦來說，生活似乎非常幸福。然而2001年當世界貿易中心(WTC)遭到襲擊時，高爾茨坦突然之間體會到了一種頓悟。他回憶說：「我在一家創業公司裏工作了7年，然而就在9•11之後，我認識到我不希望整個人生只是寫滿了如何幫助人們預訂餐館的故事。我想要從事公共服務方面的工作，以便對社會做一些回饋。」——這種回饋不僅僅是往捐款箱裏放現金，還包括從事公共服務。於是，他的生活來了個華麗轉身：2006年他加入了芝加哥警校，隨後在該市最爲棘手的街區之一當了一年警察。在那之後，他把兩段迥然不同的人生融爲一體，利用他在數字方面的技能爲芝加哥警方建立了首個數據預測系統（這在所有西方警察部門中也屬領先），用以預測哪裏有可能發生犯罪。