In 2012, Carvana Co., an e-commerce platform for buying used cars, hosted a competition called “Don’t Get Kicked!” wherein 570 teams competed to predict if a car purchased at auction was a “kick” (i.e., a bad buy)—a vehicle with a major defect. At the time of the competition, data science was a burgeoning field, and industry watchers wondered if machine learning could help a company such as Carvana develop a competitive advantage.