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The Big Announcement:
I am joining the wonderful team at Vertical Knowledge starting Tuesday September 5th … I am anxious to get going!
See more detail in the “Final Thoughts” section below.
Theme that emerged in this week’s email is … the pace of technological change is increasing. Data is at the forefront.
QUOTES
“With the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence, I've come to realize that there is a very high probability that I will see artificial general intelligence and be able to make use of it in my lifetime. And I think it's going to happen within 10 years.” – Bob Muglia
"Quantum is a ground-breaking technology that will require great data and data science and CDOs need to pay attention." – CDO Magazine
News Articles
Podcasts
Interesting Charts
Final Thoughts (My move to Vertical Knowledge)
#1 – Vin Vashishta published NVIDIA Is Just The Beginning: AI And The Exponential Age. August 2023.
My Take: This article caught my eye because the author discusses how rapidly change is happening … and we are just getting started. What used to be 7-10 year technology cycles is now 2-4 year cycles (Bob Muglia expresses a similar sentiment in the podcast highlighted below).
As a manager, how do you plan during a time of such rapid change. One way is to pay attention to the thought leaders like NVDA. “One way to predict the future is the build it.”
No one really knows, but when asked about plans for using data & AI, a good managers answer cannot be “nothing”.
Please check out Vin Vashishta’s July 2023 book From Data To Profit: How Businesses Leverage Data to Grow Their Top and Bottom Lines.
#2 – Annabel Smith from The Trade published Buy-side market data costs on the rise as asset managers tap fixed income, equities, and ETFs for the greatest spend. August 2023.
My Take: Data is essential & getting more expensive. Market data is table stakes (i.e. you cannot effectively manage money without access to increasingly expensive basic market data).
Two things caught my eye, first that budgets for Alternative data were only forecast to increase 3% next year, but 44% of firms surveyed indicated Alt Data is used in portfolio construction. Second, data quality is the primary feature of importance, NOT price. This tells us that good data is really valuable.
See similar article published in Pensions & Investments Money managers plan to increase spending on ESG data – Bloomberg survey. August 2023. “92% of executives surveyed are projecting they will increase their ESG data expenditures by at least 10% this year, with 18% slated to increase their spending by 50% or more.”
#3 – CDO magazine published Are Data Officers Ready for the Next Leap Forward in Quantum Computing and Data Science?. August 2023.
My Take: The answer is apparently “no”. We are still using tools from the 2nd and 3rd leaps as we enter the 4th leap. The good news is those tools are coming. Here is the plan to enable data scientists to embrace this situation:
Educate
Seek out new models (open source likely)
Start with foundation in governance, management
BONUS: Pedram’s What the hell is going on with data? August 2023. “Data just isn’t fun anymore.”
BONUS 2: Gradient Flow’s Generative AI in Finance: Opportunities & Challenges. August 2023. “By focusing on addressing the specific challenges of the financial services sector, startups and vendors can help to pave the way for the widespread adoption of GAI and LLMs in this industry.”
What else I am reading:
Mark Rayner of World Economic Forum published AI: 3 ways artificial intelligence is changing the future of work. August 2023.
Part 3 of Jason Derise’s 3-Part Series: How to drive alignment and thrive when business, technology, and data converge. August 2023.
Matt Ober’s Looking back on some of the successful rollups of the past. August 2023. & Training Data. August 2023.
WSJ’s AI Startups Have Tons of Cash, but Not Enough Data. That’s a Problem. June 2023.
SemiAnalysis published Amazon’s Cloud Crisis: How AWS Will Lose The Future Of Computing. March 2023.
Source: Richie Cotton of DataFramed Podcast interviews former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia. July 2023.
My Take: Really enjoyed this interview. Bob has a great perspective and I’m excited that he is excited about AI (and data). He has a unique ability to articulate where we are headed. We are going from having the ability to find any information … to having bots anticipate, find & deliver the right information to us at the right time.
For Bob, it seems the big change is the “arc of data innovation” … this arc is happening much sooner than he had earlier expected. Seeing advancement in progress that is beyond human speed … acceleration of progress.
“More and more data just keeps coming at us.” – Bob Muglia 05:00
Bob makes the point that we can all do things now with data that none of us could do 12-18 months ago. The tools are advancing that quickly.
Advice for what to do first? First thing … get your data assets in order (governance, access policies, etc) … this is the “core step in preparing to move forward into this artificial intelligence world”. I’ve written in the past about companies wanting to monetize their data (high margin revenue!) … BUT in order to do so they have to go through the painful valley of data organization. This is hard. And not just from a technical perspective … there are A LOT of business questions to be answered, like who needs access and why? What data is available to be included in models? Governance issues, etc. It isn’t easy and it is not just the “data guys problem”.
Highlights (53-minute run time):
Minute 01:30 – interview starts
Minute 04:00 – Bill Gate’s 1990 vision of everyone having access to data from the desktop
Minute 08:45 – impact of technology & data being more accessible to everyone
Minute 10:30 – thoughts on the modern data stack (historical reasons data is found in silos)
Minute 18:00 – “it cannot be overstated, the importance of the large language model, AI technology that’s emerged over the last 12-18 months.” - Muglia
Minute 22:30 – applying internal data to open-source models … more becoming available every week
Minute 26:00 – vector databases
Minute 28:00 – where to get started from organization (first thing … get your data assets in order)
Minute 32:00 – common mistake … not doing anything
Minute 37:00 – Bob’s thoughts on Isaac Asimov’s writing
Minute 43:00 – the arc of data innovation
Minute 49:00 – what is Bob most excited about?
And from the realm of interesting … Asimov’s three laws for robots:
Robot may not harm a human
Robot must obey instructions from humans, as long as those instructions do not conflict with first law
Robot must protect its own existence, as long as this does not conflict with first or second laws
I also wanted to highlight Bob Muglia’s book The Datapreneurs: The Promise of AI and the Creators Building Our Future
Source: Three Data Point Thursday’s How to create a data flywheel for your business. August 2023.
The real questions is: what happens in the grey box on the right!
The flywheel in action:
BONUS: Coalition Greenwich published Market Data Spending Is on a Roll (paid content). August 2023.
Hello to everyone who has made it this far down the post.
I am starting at Vertical Knowledge1 Tuesday September 5th. I’m anxious to get going.
And, yes …. you’ll be relieved to know that this Alt Data Weekly will continue to be published with some slight branding improvements!
I will be at Neudata’s SF conference September 28th. Please reach out if you’ll be in town.
So the big question… Why the move to VK? There are a few reasons behind my decision to join the company.
People - I have gotten to know many of the people at VK over my years in the Alt Data space. This is a very good group that is extremely knowledgeable in the alternative data space. When 90 West Data started to struggle & it became apparent I was going to need to make a move, my first call was to VK. Surround yourself with good people and most things will take care of themselves.
Product - VK brings unparalleled skill, best-in-class data products, and superior insights to their customers. Since 2006, VK has been delivering high-quality & proven data products that are unique, agile, and comprehensive -and can generate timely, actionable insights for any organization. One theme regular readers of the Alt Data weekly will recognize is the importance of good data. Data from the web is core to most data products & AI models. VK has the best quality web data available anywhere (best = consistent, clean, complete, w/ the most history available). In addition, VK has worked to “productize” its data in a way that will greatly expand the TAM by delivering data products that meet customer needs, skillsets, and technical requirements.
Ambitious Future - The public data industry is growing at exponential rates, and VK is positioned to make a giant leap in the coming years as the value of data explodes. They have a team of specialists with the skills, intelligence, expertise, and technology to harness unprecedented quantities of global data, and I want to be a part of their exciting journey.
What happened at 90 West Data?
I started 90 West Data almost exactly 4 years ago. Our plan was to license existing “exhaust” data to market & sell (monetize) that data to institutional investors.
We executed on that plan. We spoke to dozens of companies and ultimately licensed two datasets: US transaction data & US gift card data.
90 West lost the Transaction Card Data license in June of this year. This data is no longer available in the market. At the end of the day, the market for this type of data became increasingly competitive. Certainly from a price perspective, but also from a quality of data perspective. Despite some early wins, our data panel was smaller relative to peers, more geographically concentrated, and less granular … all of which combined to make the offering less relevant.
90 West retained the Gift Card Data license and is moving this into the hands of a new owner (not VK). Current clients of that data will see no change. This gift card data is a valuable offering & will continue to be available in the market. If interested in learning more let me know & I will pass along your information to the soon-to-be-announced new owners of that license once the deal is complete.
I am anxious to get going at VK next week. This is going to be fun!
You’ll continue to see this Alt Data Weekly going forward.
Any questions … please reach me at 216-577-3618 or john.farrall@vk.ai
About Vertical Knowledge
Vertical Knowledge (VK) is a data products, insights, and intelligence company that wrangles, structures, and enriches complex Publicly Available Information and Commercially Available Information to deliver a Decision Advantage to their most sophisticated customers. VK’s comprehensive and vast library of data products and proprietary technology platforms, such as managed attribution, collection, and discovery tools, allows VK to comb through a massive amount of globally available open-source data to find, assess, and frame information and insights on any given industry, ecosystem, or topic.
Glad the newsletter is going to continue! Congrats on joining VK. They have a great team that's going to be even better when you join them.