Alternative Data Weekly #203
September 13, 2024
Thanks for being here!
Announcement(s) ... the Fall event circuit in full swing:
World Financial Information Conference. September 15-18, 2024
Eagle Alpha’s NY Unbound Conference October 9, 2024
BattleFin’s Chicago Discovery Day Event . October 15-16, 2024
Battle of the Quants London, October 23, 2024
Beryl Elites events in NY October 28, 2024. Link here.
Neudata Paris, October 30, 2024
Theme that emerged in this week’s email is … the value you are adding should be obvious.
QUOTES
“The future of DaaS lies in its ability to make data more accessible, more actionable, and more profitable.” – Matt Ober
News Articles
Podcasts
Cool Charts
Final Thoughts (Driverless)
#1 – Ben Lorica of Gradient Flow published 10 Advantages of Custom AI Platforms. September 2024.
My Take: Really enjoyed this thought piece about the advantages of custom. As it specifically relates to “data”, the article highlights how having proprietary data specific to your use case/business can lead to a huge competitive advantage (think Netflix’s ability to select content based on their proprietary information about millions of viewer’s habits). That said, many of the examples cited are massive companies with massive amounts of proprietary data. The question remains about how to build a business with “alternative data”. Creating value by taking data created for one domain into another domain, where perhaps the data is interesting, but the ultimate value remains in question.
#2 – Michael Segner published The “Who Does What” Guide To Enterprise Data Quality. September 2024.
My Take: This is a thorough review of how data quality gets done. Detection, triage, resolution, and measurement.
#3 – Sven Balnojan’s The 7 Data Product Strategies (new book!)
My Take: Must read for anyone is the data space (and only $3). There are too many takeaways. Overall, the book is very well organized with clearly stated keys to execution & exercises at the end of each chapter. Probably the most interesting to me was Chapter 1 about building a business around proprietary data (which I tried to do unsuccessfully). Wish I had this book when I started in the data space. Ha!
BONUS: I am following the progress being made at String .
What else I am reading:
Good news from the teams at Code Willing & Jain. Code Willing, Inc. Partners with Jain Global LLC Providing Advanced Research Analytics and Multi-Cloud Orchestration Software. September 2024.
Category Pirates published Simplicity Is Velocity: The One-Sentence Strategy. September 2024.
Ollie Forsythe published The Ageing Population. September 2024. Some cool data visualizations in this article.
Pierluigi Vinciguerra published The AI-Powered web scraping tools landscape. September 2024.
Peter Baumann’s Book Review - "Elements of Data Strategy". September 2024.
Shreya Shankar published Data Flywheels for LLM Applications. July 2024.
How to not use Alternative Data: Goldman Sachs blunder adds to AI stock sell-off. September 2024.
Source: Think Like an Owner podcast with Alex Bridgeman published Auren Hoffman – Growing Great Data Organizations – Ep.234. July 2024.
My Take: Enjoyed this conversation about the data industry and how Auren thinks about building companies, selling data, hiring people, allocating time, and being a venture capitalist. Bottom line, the buyer-market for data has not grown as fast as Auren thought it would (me too!). As a result, most successful data businesses today have not been VC funded because the returns aren’t there. He cited some instances of successful data companies moving from selling “raw data” to adding an application layer, but this is hard.
I thought Auren’s commentary around time allocation & hiring is worth a listen for any founders, or frankly anyone hiring and building a team. Key takeaway is to hire fewer people…most companies have 2-10x too many people. On time allocation, think of yourself as capital allocator when allocating your time and the time of employees. What is the return you are getting on your time/effort?
Last takeaway is to have fun! Enjoy what you are doing (and hard things are the most fun).
Highlights (60-minute run time):
Minute 04:00 – interview starts
Minute 05:00 – slower-than-expected growth of the data market; other DaaS trends
Minute 12:00 – applications on top of data rather than raw data; not that many great businesses
Minute 14:00 – “data is the new oil”; most data businesses should not be venture funded
Minute 18:00 – different sales motion for each type of data business
Minute 22:30 – different phases of SafeGraph leadership
Minute 26:30 – how to manage your time?
Minute 29:00 – what do you look for in new additions to your company?
Minute 34:00 – leveraging good people
Minute 42:00 – your company is like a weird ice cream flavor; hire those who like that flavor
Minute 45:00 – humbling experience of making the same mistakes over & over again
Minute 52:00 – importance of being upfront
Minute 55:00 – the good part of having a low EQ (related Twitter post) … this resonated with me having high EQ has been a positive for my overall life, but Auren articulates how having too much EQ can be a negative with regards to startup mode (I agree!).
Minute 55:45 – Flex Capital pitch
Minute 57:00 – the power of the cold outreach
Source: TracXN published Data as a Service Industry Report (h/t World of DaaS).
Also check out Matt Ober’s The New Era of Data as a Service- How DaaS is Redefining the Data Economy. September 2024.
Source: I took my first Waymo ride a few months ago. I am hooked and convinced the future is here, it is just not widely distributed.
I assume my future grandkids will never drive a car. Similar to the fact that no one I know rides a horse. In 100 years no humans will drive cars, except for sport and entertainment.
This is top of mind because I came across two articles published by Timothy B Lee this week.
We could be months away from driverless semi trucks on Texas freeways. September 2024.
Human drivers are to blame for most serious Waymo collisions. September 2024.
My first Waymo:
Source: some data from Waymo
