Thanks for being here!
Theme that emerged in this week’s email is … the importance of domain knowledge.
QUOTES
“…data products become the fundamental building blocks on which other teams understand, forecast, and grow their business.” Pedram Navid’s The Future of Data
News Articles
Podcasts
Cool Charts
Final Thoughts (Ethical Leadership)
#1 – The Oakland Group published The Ultimate Guide To Data Strategy. May 2023.
My Take: There is A LOT of good information in this 17-page document. I found the writing around why a data strategy is even needed to be of particular interest (p 3). I run into a lot of companies that say, “there is an opportunity in here somewhere” … and they are right, but perhaps underestimate just how much of a cultural change & financial investment is required to extract the most value.
“…a Data Strategy sets a vision, detailed strategy and roadmap which explains how an organization will use data and analytics to realize its strategic objectives.”
#2 – Madison Mae of Learn Analytics Engineering published Are You a Data Consumer or Data Producer?. May 2023.
My Take: Yet another article (indirectly) highlighting the importance of domain expertise for the data practitioner. The ability to ask the right question and understand how the data consumer will be using the data is a key part of this entire process.
#3 – Pedram Navid’s The Future of Data. May 2023.
My Take: Pedram has developed three theories on what the future holds for data. 1- Op teams finally get some love. 2- One semantic layer rules them all. 3- The single biggest problem of incorporating business logic. For me this comes back to the importance of domain expertise. Those that can combine data skills with domain expertise are the unicorns. This stuff is hard.
BONUS: Alex Izydorczyk’s An Alternative Data Algorithm Example. May 2023. ”…the decisions and processes to clean and normalize such data is of pragmatic and commercial importance.”
BONUS 2: Caitlin Moorman published Leverage Your Technical Skills to Work Smarter, Not Harder. May 2023. This gives you the most leverage: 1- Building what your organization needs, not what they request, 2- Making good architectural decisions, and 3- Finding opportunities for scale.
BONUS 3: NOMAD’s Brad Schneider published How OpenAI's GPT-4 Will Transform Your Business — Whether You Want It to or Not. May 2023. “…LLMs are going to completely change the art of the possible, and not in decades, but in months.”
What else I am reading:
SEC Exams Drill Into Expert Networks, Alternative Data. Paywall. May 2023.
DQ Ops published A Step-By-Step Guide to Improve Data Quality. May 2023.
Juras Juršėnas of OxyLabs.io published Web Scraping Should Be Taught at Universities, and Here’s Why. May 2023.
Numerai published Using LLMs to Create Trading Signals. May 2023.
#1 – Mark Fleming-Williams from the Alternative Data podcast interviews Alex Izydorczyk of CyberSyn. May 2023.
My Take: Alex is building a great company in CyberSyn. There is a ton of value yet to be unlocked in data, both the data that is available publicly & that data that is locked down behind a wall. Value will flow to those that have the ability, not just to organize the data, but the ability to combine multiple, disparate data sources together in a way that tells a great story (1+1=3).
Alex highlights the importance of combining the data science skills with domain expertise (= a unicorn) … something the Alt Data Weekly has highlighted for years.
Of course, I love Alex’s articulation of the idea that data is wonderfully sticky … tough to get there, but extremely valuable once in place.
Highlights (43-minute run time):
Minute 01:00 – interview starts
Minute 02:00 –how Alex first came across alternative data & Coatue
Minute 05:00 – first alternative data efforts at Coatue
Minute 09:15 – after Coatue; getting to know Snowflake; discussion of tech broadly
Minute 15:30 – how did CyberSyn come about; new data as a service (DAAS) company that sells data
Minute 21:30 – training data for LLMs; acquiring data
Minute 23:45 – discussion of the snowflake led $63m funding around
Minute 26:00 – update on the current status at CyberSyn
Minute 29:30 – adding value to existing datasets; types of data (importance of history)
Minute 34:00 – discussion of how to ensure stability of data source
Minute 35:30 – 5-year vision (“SIM city of the real world”)
Minute 37:00 – who is the customer? (anybody who uses data)
Minute 39:00 – data company not an application company; who are competitors?
Source: The Oakland Group published The Ultimate Guide To Data Strategy. May 2023.Also highlight above in the article section.
A couple of very busy pictures here … but wanted to share.
Source: Yonason Goldson published 6 questions to ask to find out if you’re an ethical leader. 2020.
“If you want to be respected as a king and not reviled as a despot, you need to command, not demand, loyalty. And the way your employees see you will depend on whether you conduct yourself according to the principles of ethics.”
Here are the six:
1. Empathy: what impact will my words and actions have on those around me?
2. Trustworthiness: do I trust others, and have i earned their trust?
3. Humility: am I interested in what benefits my community or in what benefits my prestige and my ego?
4. Inquisitiveness: do I want to know as much as I can, or do I want to look like I know it all?
5. Courage: am I more afraid of looking wrong or of being wrong?
6. Self-discipline: what do I need to improve today so I can do my job better tomorrow?