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Theme that emerged in this week’s email is … data should not be a cost center.
QUOTES
“…we are in the defining ‘decade of data’ – a period marked by the fundamental shifts in power created by the intersection of technology and data and the impact this has in every facet of our lives.“ – Sumeet Arora
News Articles
Podcasts
Cool Charts
Final Thoughts (Funnies)
#1 – Shayla Colon published in FUNDFire Critical Tool for Quant Funds? 'Stress Test' Your Data Models. March 2023. Paywall.
My Take: There is too much data. The data-buying industry is getting better at ingesting and working with the data. As the tools and skills improve, we will be able to make better use of more data, but this takes time. Learn from mistakes. Get better.
#2 – Mark Freeman published in Scaling DATOPS Newsletter SDO Opinion - Do we really need so many data companies?. April 2023.
My Take: There are three parts to this essay.
How did we get to our current market in the data landscape?
What’s the outlook of data startups today?
What does the changing market mean for data professionals?
The Snowflake IPO validated the market’s appetite for data companies. There was a flood of VC money at extremely high valuations in 2021. Now we are going to find out who wins, likely pretty quickly. Provide value. Generate revenue. The rest will take care of itself.
#3 – Vin Vashishta published Why Are Data Science Initiatives STILL Failing So Often?. April 2023.
My Take: Data should not be a cost center. How do we demonstrate ROI? This is not always easy, but requires a change of perspective if nothing else. Vin describes three kinds of “debt”:
Technical – access to entire “data lifecycle”
Strategic – connect business to strategic business initiative
Cultural – become data driven organization
What to do? Identify a couple key KPIs that solve real-world problems & go get some early wins.
BONUS: Bernard Marr published in Forbes Will ChatGPT Put Data Analysts Out Of Work?. April 2023.
BONUS 2: Sumeet Arora published in AI Journal Unlocking the power of data with Generative AI. April 2023.
“…we are in the defining ‘decade of data’ – a period marked by the fundamental shifts in power created by the intersection of technology and data and the impact this has in every facet of our lives.“
BONUS 3: Tom Stabile published in FUNDFire Hedge Funds Scramble for Edge in Crowded Alt Data 'Arms Race'. April 2023 (paywall). Summary of interview with Exabel’s CEO, Neil Chapman.
#1 – The Hedgineer Podcast Episode #4 Alternative Data and AI. April 2023.
My Take: Host Michael Watson, founder of Hedgineer, interviews Sachin Kullkarni head of data science at a credit hedge fund. Most interest to me was the discussion of LLM & GPT-4 and real world use cases. They discuss how data is really like an information supply chain & has many of the same problems you’d see in “real world” supply chains. I also really enjoyed the discussion about equity vs credit (27:00).
Highlights (39-minute run time):
Minute 01:00 – Sachin’s background & description of what he does now
Minute 04:00 – praise for Snowflake, Jupyter, & discussion of other tools, including new one for me called Materialize
Minute 09:20 – LLM & GPT-4 & discussion of use cases
Minute 19:00 – real world example of transaction card data
Minute 21:00 – data as a supply chain
Minute 22:00 – alternative data at the beginning (Sachin has been doing this a long time)
Minute 26:00 – discussion of data flow & how messy it can be (mentions Airflow)
Minute 27:15 – equity vs credit and how it is different
Minute 32:30 – HFT funds showing more interest in getting involved with alternative data
Minute 34:30 – GPT trained on corpus of data
Source: Jason DeRise authored Why some data companies struggle to sell to the financial markets
Source: Some funnies