Rahul Desai (MSB ’17) goes to class, dines at Leo’s and attends club meetings like any other Georgetown student — but he also spends his time working on Trendify, the company he is starting to predict startup success rates.

Currently, as Desai points out, two-thirds of venture capital investments are wasted, and three-fourths of start-up companies fail. Trendify will seek to shed light on which companies will succeed and which companies will fail.

“By combining machine learning and big data, there’s a way you can predict whether companies will succeed or not. It’s a neural network, a calculator of sorts,” Desai said. “You plug in certain variables, it processes them and then spits out an answer, which is success or failure.”

Desai has already compiled ten thousand data points spanning 126 companies, which he believes show key trends in the business.

“If you started a business previously, you should have succeeded in that business,” Desai said, referring to factors that predict success. “There should be women in your management team. Founders should avoid intellectual hubris.”

He discussed the amount of data on specific companies available online through CrunchBase, where he was able to download data on tens of thousands of companies.

“I aggregated a giant data set by hand rather than using an automated data business model.”

He added that Trendify plans to give a fee-based prediction service to venture capitalists and offering consulting to startups in exchange for nominal amounts of control.

Although the company is still in its early stages, Desai has already brought on an impressive list of advisers, including Correlation Ventures Managing Director David Coats, Harvard Business School professor and disruption innovation theorist Clayton Christensen, Greycroft Partners Associate Zander Farkas, McDonough School of Business professor Betsy Sigman, The Advisory Board Company Managing Director of Corporate Strategy Jonah Czerwinski and Accolade Partner Atul Rustgi, among others.

“I think it’s an intriguing idea to try to predict the success of startups, and there’s a lot of data out there on it, and I don’t think that data has ever been put together in quite the same way,” Sigman said.

Desai recently passed the first round of the Startup Hoyas challenge to become a finalist in the competition, which offers a prize of $5,000 to the contestant with the winning entrepreneurial idea. Between the commercial and social tracks of the competition, Desai is a finalist in the commercial track.

Desai points out that the money lost through investing in startups that fail is a $17 billion market per annum. Desai is still working on finding a co-founder and developing a model, which he hopes to have completed by the end of the next academic year at the latest.

Desai’s model for prediction is based on the way the human brain works.

“It’s a computerized representation of the human brain,” he said. “The model that I’m using is called hierarchical temporal memory. Up until now, computers couldn’t aggregate that much information, but today computers can aggregate hundreds of thousands of data points.”

The Startup Hoyas final round will take place April 26. Until then, Desai plans to continue working on his model.

“Behind these big numbers there’s a wealth of data,” he said. He adds that he plans to license out his model to venture capital companies.

Desai feels that the Georgetown entrepreneurship community has been a huge asset in helping start Trendify.

“There’s this awesome Georgetown entrepreneurs co-working session, every Friday people just come out and throw ideas around and help each other with their startups,” he said.

Desai advocated the benefits of the entrepreneurial road.

“A lot of times we get shafted into finance and consulting, the big credible careers that have very little risk. But I dictate my own hours, get to be my own boss and get to do something I believe in,” he said.

Other students look forward to seeing what Trendify will become.

“As Rahul’s mentor this year in Compass Fellowship, I remember reading about his idea for Trendify in his application for Compass, and it’s been amazing to watch him execute that initial vision to such success,” Startup Hoyas Editor-In-Chief Cherie Chung (SFS’16) said. “He is one of the hardest-working people I know, and I have no doubt that Trendify will go far.”