From: Olivier Koch
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2021 8:59 AM
To: [...]
Subject: Thank you!

Folks,

Today is my last day at Criteo after an amazing six-year ride. Summarizing all these years is a feat. I joined a company that was polishing a massive logistic regression. I am leaving one where rolling out deep models is business as usual.

Looking back, I see incredible years full of learning, hard work, and fun. It all started with a five-people Prediction crew, the EPM group, and insane ventures such as migrating Prediction from MapReduce to Spark. Fast forward a few years later. CAIL is an incredible community to be part of, where learning and teaching are one and the same thing. With deepr, we put lightning in a bottle and built a new engine that is transforming our products across the board. With Universal Catalog, we rebuilt a critical component of Criteo and made the first client pay for it. Above all, I feel that we reached the level of commitment and excitement that one only gets to see a few times in one's career.

What strikes me most, though, is all the things I learned from all of you. You made me a better engineer, a better manager, and more importantly, a better person. I would like to thank all of you for your patience, your kindness, your grit, your hard work, and really, all the fantastic moments we spent together.

I want to extend a particular thank you to Romain Lerallut for putting his faith in me from day one (I still remember our interview together!) and doubling down on me several times down the road. You taught me to pay things forward, and I hope I did.

I am leaving a few bits of unfinished business which I am sure will be taken care of in due time. TIGER may have come a few years too early, but images will bring their full potential to Criteo one day. We have never been closer to putting KNN into Retargeting. I can't wait to hear the sonic boom rue Blanche when that happens. Criteo Trends is taking off nicely. And this week, the first AB test of onsite reco started!

Ancient times would have called for a traditional pot-de-depart, but obviously, we will have to postpone that to brighter days. There is a place dear to my heart where you will be able to find me for a pint once bars reopen. Follow the Reco folks, they know where it is.

Thank you all again!


- Olivier

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