Thanks for being here!
This is the Alternative Data Weekly for Friday, April 5, 2024.
Announcement(s):
Note I have been on vacation the week of April 1st. This week’s ADW was written and posted for publication in advance of the actual April 5th publication date. If anything seems out of date or I missed some big news, this delayed publication schedule is the reason. Back to normal next week (and the week after that …).
Check out Battle of the Quants NYC May 9th.
Theme that emerged in this week’s email is … raw data is cool, but the refining process adds a lot of value.
QUOTES
“While the technology stack changed over time, there’s one thing that didn’t in these years: selling web data is f*ing hard”. - Pierluigi Vinciguerra
News Articles
Podcasts
Cool Charts
Final Thoughts (Data Strategy)
#1 – Pierluigi Vinciguerra of The Web Scraping Club published Ten years of web scraping: a personal perspective about selling web data. March 2024.
My Take: Really interesting background on how and why this group started DataBoutique.com. I enjoy these stories to know that my experience is not unique. They are trying to remove the friction in the process of selling data, specifically the process of selling web scraped data. Not an easy proposition!
#2 – Todd Harbour’s The Paradox of Data: A Commodity Unlike Any Other. March 2024.
My Take: Todd’s Data Harbour is a must follow for those in the data space. Excellent thought piece on data comparing/contrasting data with physical commodities (“data is the new oil!”). While rivaling physical commodities in importance, data is very different in some core features like cost, price, and value. The “refining” process is much more important in the world of data and can potentially change the value considerably.
#3 – Barr Moses from Monte Carlo published Reflections on Strong Momentum and Category Leadership in Data Observability. March 2024.
My Take: Data trust is huge issue. Doing it well sets you apart. The dawn of AI has brought this issue much more attention. This is a great update on Monte Carlo and the data observability space generally. Big companies are being built in this space.
What else I am reading:
Seattle Data Guys’s 5 Real-Time Data Processing and Analytics Technologies – And Where You Can Implement Them. March 2024.
Data Chorus’s Don’t Bore Us—Get to the Chorus!. March 2024 (I had highlighted this article last week…good one).
ModuleQ’s Can LLMs Answer Investment Banking Questions?
OpenAI Data Partnerships. November 2023.
Ocean Protocol Update || 2024. February 2024. Recall, now that everyone cares about crypto again, Ocean is a “Decentralized Data Exchange Protocol to Unlock Data for AI”. #ANewDataEconomy
Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools. February 2024.
Jared Blank’s Gobbledy Why a cashmere brand advertised for its competitors (not a good reason) . March 2024. While not a “data” SubStack, this is a fun read and should be required if you think about marketing.
Source: Mark Fleming-Williams Alternative Data Podcast interviewed Ed Lavery of Placer.ai.
My Take: Ed joined Placer.ai summer 2023. Recently another data market veteran joined the Placer.ai team as well, Felipe Torres. That change prompted me to listen to this podcast from September 2023.
Of most interest to me is Ed’s view on how different the data market is today vs 5-6 years ago (minute 6:00). Much more noise & you need to be a better data vendor … not just dumping raw data, need to do more work to position for the sale.
Ed’s thought that the alt data industry is plateauing (remember this is Sept 2023) … and at an inflection point.
Highlights (40-minute run time):
Minute 02:00 – background on Ed Lavery’s move to Placer.ai from Similarweb
Minute 06:00 – different challenge as market is different now vs 5-6 years ago
Minute 10:30 – deeper discussion of Placer’s data (more than just foot traffic)
Minute 15:30 – discretionary vs quant fund use cases
Minute 24:00 – Ed’s reflection on experience with SimilarWeb going public; saturated markets
Minute 30:30 – what lessons from SimilarWeb experience will Ed carry into Placer.ai?
Minute 35:30 – discussion of the Bloomberg & Placer relationship
Source: MIT & Databricks published CIO Vision 2025: Bridging the gap between BI and AI. Heads up that the surveys were completed in mid-2022. Interesting to re-visit as we are now 9 months from 2025.
BONUS: Gable.ai
Source: Have a great weekend!