It's experience in the two examples I gave : I singlehandedly built my company : RAMM Science (https://ramm.science)
And he singlehandedly built one of Europes largest online betting system backends (and scaled it to 800 transactions a second using Deep Learning, Kafka and a Hadoop cluster)
Is 800 transactions per second good? It seems like a low number but what do I know. I am impressed that Europe's largest betting system only does 800 transactions per second.
That's 800 credit card transactions a second --- thats people making deposits into their accounts to bet with. (btw I think that's peak - I'm not 100% sure)
The frontends (where the casino / betting games run) do a lot more than this, but they work against the balance in the account, it's the payment gateway that's doing 800/s
It was a bit simplistic of me to summarize it as a payment gateway, it was actually 50-60% of their backend systems that was enhanced, it was called their "Big Data Project"
They do do fraud detection on the deposits, because of anti-money-laundering. The DL models also monitor various other types of abuse (bonus abuse and in-game abusers). They also are experimenting with Deep Reenforcement Learning to actually play some of the games
Well, I think random forests on a feature set probably plays a big role and is probably easier. But to use a deep neural network maybe, you might be able to get away with a convolutional network to extract higher order associations among some input set.
An online betting system has to do fraud detection on a higher level than random merchants, since they can expect to be a target for large scale non-amateur fraudsters, and just as in any other business, if your incoming payments are fraudulent, you lose that money.
Degrees don't matter. (Business focused) results and a track record of delivering do. Still impressive remuneration though -- he must be adding tens of millions in profits to the bottom line.
Degrees matter deeply among the untalented in my experience. I have one of those fancy pee HUDs, but I only whip it out when I'm dealing with the above sort.
Results don't really matter either, you just need to convince people that you are valuable. Many people in business don't have any sort of "provable" results but have excellent people skills.