Hilary Mason

Who She Was 

Hilary Mason grew up in New York City, earned a degree in computer science, and built a career at the intersection of data, technology, and real-world problem solving. As Chief Scientist at Bitly, she developed systems that analyzed how hundreds of millions of people share and discover information across the internet, turning a simple link-shortening tool into a window onto how ideas spread online. In 2014, she co-founded Fast Forward Labs, a research company dedicated to translating cutting-edge machine learning into practical business applications, which was acquired by Cloudera in 2017. She also co-founded hackNY, a nonprofit connecting engineering students to New York's startup community, and served on Mayor Bloomberg's Technology and Innovation Advisory Council. Fortune, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company have all recognized her as one of the most influential figures in her field.

Why She Matters

Mason built her reputation at a moment when most organizations were drowning in data they did not know how to use, and her work helped change that. She demonstrated that behavioral data, the patterns people leave behind when they click, browse, and share, could reveal things about human behavior that had never been measurable before. Beyond her technical contributions, she became one of the clearest and most compelling voices for making data science accessible, arguing consistently that the point of analysis is not sophisticated models but smarter decisions. Her career shows that the most valuable thing a data professional can offer is not just the ability to run the numbers, but the judgment to know what the numbers are actually saying.