Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and chief executive of DuckDuckGo, the search engine built on the position that people should be able to search the web without being tracked. He started it in 2008 after selling an earlier company, and he grew it into a business worth well over a hundred million dollars while competing directly against Google. Before Super Thinking he co wrote Traction, a widely used book on how startups find growth channels. He holds degrees from MIT, including a master's in technology and policy.
Lauren McCann is a statistician who spent years doing research for the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, where her work involved study design and analyzing clinical data. She earned her doctorate in operations research from MIT and has published extensively in academic journals. Her background shapes the parts of the book dealing with evidence, probability, and the many ways statistics mislead people who are not looking carefully.
The two are married and live outside Philadelphia. They started collecting mental models years before the book existed, mostly for their own use, and the pairing of a founder and a statistician is what gives Super Thinking its unusual range. The business chapters come from someone who has actually run one, and the analytical chapters come from someone trained to spot the errors most business books make.
