Thanks for being here!
Announcements:
I plan to be in NY May 16-17-18. Happy to get together if you will also be in the area.
We have a NEW daily data product that offers end-of-day account balances across various types of accounts (savings, checking, etc). Small regional & community banks. No PII. Very granular.
Contact me with questions.
Theme that emerged in this week’s email is … data is key input for generative AI, & progress is being made quickly.
QUOTES
“Data is constantly evolving, so the problem is always evolving.”
Gary Collier, CTO, MAN Group (slide 16)
News Articles
Podcasts
Cool Charts
Final Thoughts (Luck)
#1 – Chris Dorrell published After AI update, Bloomberg looks to boost terminals with more alternative data. April 2023.
My Take: Bloomberg is expanding its alternative data offering this summer. The plan is to make alternative data more readily “available to the masses”. no one has a better distribution mechanism to reach “the masses” than our friends at Bloomberg.
#2 – Mike Doull published Why Every Company needs Data Product Managers!!. April 2023. Related article from same author here.
My Take: The role of the data product manager is to take all the interesting data and make it valuable for the team. Find the signal in the data that will help the people managing the business make better decisions. This requires data skills, domain knowledge, and the ability to communicate effectively. Data product managers become “…the voice of the customer, the market, and the business”.
#3 – Jonathan Chin from Facteus published The Golden Age of Generative AI (ChatGPT) and the Ascendance of Data Companies. April 2023.
My Take: I have been trying to better understand what Generative AI will mean for data companies, specifically those companies that own/possess valuable data. Data is the essential input to these models. To quote the article, data is “the lifeblood that nourishes and fuels the relentless evolution of AI models”. On some level, the more data the better…but not all data is create equal. Consumer transaction data like that offered by Jonathan’s company Facteus (and my company, 90 West Data) offers valuable insight into consumer spending which is largely a ground truth measure for most use cases … meaning it answers a really important question. I believe Generative AI platforms will expand use cases and ultimately make the data inputs more valuable (benefitting the owners of that data).
BONUS: Hedgeweek published Hedge fund demand to drive growth in alternative market data sector. April 2023.
“The global alternative data market grew from $3.23 billion in 2022 to $4.74 billion in 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46.7%.”
BONUS 2: Snowflake’s Torsten Grabs published Building a Data-Centric Platform for Generative AI and LLMs at Snowflake. April 2023.
“Two broad themes: The first is seeing more models and algorithms getting productionized and rolled out in interactive ways to the end user. And second, with the power to be more pervasive than I can even imagine, is generative AI and LLMs. LLMs have the potential to help both developers and less-technically inclined users make sense of the world’s data.”
BONUS 3: How does the IMF contribute to enhance data transparency?. April 2023. Gotta have rules & standards (“guardrails”).
Three tiers of the IMF framework (each tailored to countries’ capacity & are progressively more stringent):
Enhanced General Data Dissemination System (e-GDDS)
Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS)
SDDS Plus
#1 – The Analytics Engineering Podcast published Ep 44: Fun with Differential Privacy, plus related transcript & article. April 2023.
My Take: Interesting discussion, a space about which I am learning. This is a discussion about privacy, governance, and the associated trade-offs. The two companies in the discussion are solving big problems, focused mainly on making data more broadly accessible if you can remove the risk of privacy while maintaining all the utility & statistical properties (“privacy-utility tradeoff”).
Highlights (45-minute run time):
Minute 03:00 – Interview starts: Abhishek Bhowmick, Co-Founder of Samoohaand & Ian Coe, CEO of Tonic.ai
Minute 07:00 – why do people care about privacy?
Minute 09:00 – keeping up with all the important regulatory frameworks is, it seems, a luxury for only the largest and most resourced companies.
Minute 13:30 – discussion of synthetic data (applications, use cases, benefits, challenges)
Minute 23:20 – what is differential privacy? “Mathematical form of privacy that protects role level user data, while still enabling analysts to learn statistics, analytics to run ML on the population as a whole”
Minute 28:00 – discussion of Abhishek’s experience at Apple
Minute 32:30 – privacy perspectives on Generative AI (“data is going to be very important to make progress on future models”)
Minute 41:00 – modern data stack discussion (ingestion, transformation, visualization, w/ cloud data platform underlying all of it)
Minute 40:20 – interview wrap-up with outlook from each participant
Source: Hedgeweek published Turning Point: The New Technologies Helping Hedge Funds Evolve. April 2023.
26-page slide deck. I was most interested in Section 2: Cutting Through the Noise (starts on slide 13).
Slide 15:
Slide 17:
Source 2: SigTech’s Financial Data Impact Report 2023. April 2023. Summary Yahoo Finance article here.
This (17-page) report is based on feedback from 121 global investors, collectively responsible for AUM > $2.5T.
Budgets moving higher (page 4):
High impact categories (page 6):
Data is messy (page 9):
Source: How to be Lucky & increase you odds of serendipity.
A big part of being lucky is carrying an optimistic outlook with you. The study cited in the NYT article linked above makes the point that two people dropped in the same situation will have different outcomes simply due to outlook.
The term serendipity is tied back to an ancient story about The Three Princes of Serendip. The punch line is these three princes travel around and have adventures which largely involve “happy accidents”. The story ultimately inspires 1700’s era author Horace Walpole to use the English language term serendipity to describe such luck.
In the story, the Three Princes leave town, meet people, engage with positive curiosity, and have adventures. Correlated to modern times, they got off the couch, put their phones down, and engaged with interesting people doing interesting things. “Have a bias towards action”.
The term is often associated with great inventions, where perhaps an inventor was tinkering and randomly develops what becomes a brilliant product (penicillin, Velcro, Post-It Notes, etc).
I would argue the same goes with sales & business development. Just like an inventor might never develop that great new product if they aren’t constantly tinkering … in a role where new ideas & contacts might change the course of your business (or life!), being engaged in the market via networking, sharing ideas in public, and helping people, makes all the difference.
And lastly, be a genuinely good person. People will want to help you and see you succeed.
I remember when the SDDS first started in the 1990s. It has taken them decades to get to this point. And with three different versions, arguably we still don't really have globally comparable data. But at least its a big step forward compared to having nothing.