An Australian statistician whose "crowd-sourcing for geniuses" website has solved some of the world's most intractable problems has just received an $11 million injection from some of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley.
It comes a day after this website reported that Australian tech entrepreneurship was booming, with hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into local high-tech firms in the past year or so.
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Anthony Goldbloom, who coded Kaggle.com in a small apartment in Bondi in Sydney's east after leaving cushy jobs at Treasury and the Reserve Bank of Australia, is now the toast of Silicon Valley.
The founder of PayPal and Slide, Max Levchin, is one of the investors and he has joined Kaggle as its chairman. The others include Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, Yuri Milner's Start Fund, Stanford Management Co. and a series of high-profile angel investors including Google chief economist Hal Varian.
In a phone interview with Fairfax Media from his new base in San Francisco, Goldbloom, 28, said he spoke to a Wall Street Journal reporter who told him that it was "the most impressive list of investors she's ever seen".
"I've got 500 unread emails in my inbox, mostly from recruiters and job applicants," said Goldbloom.