[jph00]

My experience is the opposite. I entered a number of competitions last year. For a data scientist, the opportunity to access clean data sets and interesting real-world problems, as well as to see how your techniques compare to others', is really compelling. (At least it was for me!)

I won a couple of competitions, and discovered that the competitive environment pushed me to create new algorithms and develop new ideas that I otherwise would not have. (Normally I would have thought my initial answers were "good enough" - but in the extremely competitive environment of Kaggle that is never true!)

And of course there were many more competitions I did not win. Honestly, I learnt much more from these - because by the end of the comp I knew quite a bit about the problem domain, and had tried a few ideas out, so when I then read the winning papers it gave me heaps of new ideas and insights that I could use in future projects and competitions.

I became so interested in the company that I invested in it, and then started helping out here and there, and finally joined full-time and this week have moved to SF (from Melbourne, Australia) and am now Kaggle's President and Chief Scientist.