This rings so true. Last April, I had a chance to chat with an engineer at an (explosively growing) early stage B2C startup. He gave a talk about "data science", so I walked up to him afterwards and asked him if he considered himself to be a data scientist and did anything that's remotely like statistical inference.

He said, "nah, most of what I do is collecting a lot of data and just segmenting them in a bunch of ways. Pivot tables go really far as far as product insights are concerned."

Then, he added, "that whole data science thing in my talk...that was to grab attention."

I am NOT saying statistics and machine learning is useless. They are tremendously useful. But chances are good that it pays a lot more early on to collect a lot of data and ask basic questions from different perspectives.