Graphs Everywhere: 5-Minute Interview with Jean Villedieu, Co-Founder of Linkurious

“What’s exciting for me about Neo4j and graphs is the breadth of use cases I see on a daily basis,” said Jean Villedieu, co-founder of Linkurious.

Linkurious is a graph analytics and visualization startup that helps clients across industries extract key insights from graph data stored in Neo4j.

In this week’s five-minute interview (conducted at GraphTour NYC 2019), we speak with Jean Villedieu, co-founder of Linkurious, about what he finds fascinating about graph technology and the value of the Neo4j community.

What is your favorite aspect of Neo4j and graphs?

What’s exciting for me about Neo4j and graphs is the breadth of use cases we see on a daily basis.

At Linkurious, we are working with banks that are combating fraud, but we’re also engaging with drug companies developing new therapies and new products and also with government agencies, fighting back against national security threats.

Being exposed to all these different use cases and all of these groups: that’s what makes my job and what makes being a part of the community so exciting for me.

How has the graph community changed in the past few years?

There are more people aware of graphs who are reaching out and contacting us. And that’s exciting. But what hasn’t changed is the folks that we’re involved with.

Just today, I connected with someone I was in touch with five years ago. You know these relationships that we are fostering make this a real community where people are exchanging ideas and working on products together. That’s a big part of what makes working on graphs so special for me.

What is your favorite use case for Neo4j?

I guess my favorite use case is the Panama Papers. It’s really a combination of multiple things.

It’s the fact that this project allowed a group of journalists without a lot of technical expertise to have a massive impact on big social issues. It’s also the fact that the Panama Papers helped raise awareness around the potential of graphs and transformed graphs from something a bit niche to something that is becoming more and more mainstream and becoming part of a real technology conversation these days.

What advice do you have for someone getting started with graphs?

Reach out and contact us at Linkurious. We specialize in helping make the graph accessible to business folks and making it useful so that people can use it to make decisions on a daily basis. We love to hear from people who are getting started who want to leverage graphs across their projects and their use cases.

Why do people turn to Linkurious?

I think people come to us because at some point, they need to put the graph that they built in the hands of folks who are not exactly technologists and these folks need UIs and interfaces that they can use to look at the data and use it to make decisions. And that’s really what we’ve been focusing on at Linkurious for six years now.

We are trying to make it easy and intuitive to take a deep dive into the graph, to find answers, and to make Neo4j actionable.

What does the future hold for graph technology?

Graphs everywhere, basically.

I’m very bullish on Neo4j. I’m bullish because I see a lot of teams reaching out to us excited about the technology, and they want to implement it. And we want to partner with these organizations to help make the graph something that can drive business in anti-fraud, in recommendations, in medical research, and across all organizations.

Want to share about your Neo4j project in a future 5-Minute Interview? Drop us a line at content@neo4j.com