Alternative Data Weekly #260
Theme: The Next Five Years Belong to Builders of Data Value
ADW’s Fifth Anniversary!
Special thanks to our sponsor EventVestor.
QUOTES
“Data monetization, the process of converting proprietary data and analytics into measurable economic value, represents a transformative opportunity for enterprises to enhance valuation” – Matthew Bernath, Alternata, Data Monetisation and Business Valuation
News
Pods
Charts
Final Thoughts (Five Years)
#1 – Matthew Bernath of Alternata published Data Monetisation and Business Valuation. October 2025.
My Take: Data monetization involves 1- selling data directly to third parties, 2- deploying data internally to improve operational outcomes (underappreciated!), and 3-creating new data-driven products and services.
The goal is to drive value for the data owner. The market is rewarding companies that commercialize their data.
Related article from Nick Zervoudis & Arielle Roland, DPM Community Notes #1: Data Monetisation. October 2025.
#2 – Ben Lorica published Think Smaller: The Counterintuitive Path to AI Adoption. October 2025.
My Take: This article resonated with me. Let’s not try to boil the ocean. AI companies (any companies) should simply try to add value and build a tool people will use every day (KPI = adoption).
Become the system of action that performs work for the human. A simple solution that does a basic task & works.
Make the value obvious.
“Instead of building complex, all-encompassing systems, AI teams should consider dramatically narrowing their focus — in short, think smaller. Much smaller.”
#3 – Jason Derise published The End of Quarterly Reporting in the US? Here’s What That Means for Data-Driven Investing. October 2025.
My Take: If the “golden source” of KPIs that you are trying to measure against changes, what are we targeting? Changes in reporting structures are making the selection of KPIs to predict against (golden source) even more important.
“These figures have become so important and trusted that they have become the target variable that institutional investors use other datasets to try to predict.”
BONUS: Didier Lopes published The hidden incentive war behind financial terminals. October 2025. “the data vendors are primarily optimized to protect and grow their data profit streams, while the ideal interface should be optimized to reduce user friction and empower workflow flexibility. These two priorities collide constantly.”
What else I am reading:
Daniel Beach published Fivetran + dbt Labs merger. What does it mean?. October 2025. Additional thoughts on the deal from Portable’s Ethan Aaron.
Macquarie Bank to deepen the integration of data and AI into customer experience design. October 2025.
Ron Lefferts and Gianluca Biagini published LSEG everywhere: Trusted data for AI. October 2025.
Seattle Data Guy published 7 Questions Every Data Team Should Ask the Business. October 2025.
Maribeth Martorana published Every Product Is a Data Product, Especially in the Age of AI. October 2025.
BMC published Data Pipeline Orchestration is the Secret Sauce for Domino’s Pizza. October 2025.
Increase Alpha Raises $3.5M to Launch Proprietary AI Prediction Engine for Institutional Investors
Source: Ben Lorica discussed Beyond The Agent Hype with Evangelos Simoudis. September 2025.
My Take: Interesting conversation about AI Agents. Of most interest to me was the idea that, to effectively release AI Agents into production, you need to understand your workflow & understand the quality of your data.
They are seeing “Shadow AI” at enterprises, which I think is just individuals using AI without the approval of internal IT groups.
Brooks Rule: “Any robotics demo you see is ten years away from production”.
Two aspects of reliability & trust:
Am I getting the right answer?
Will I always get the same answer to the same question?
Highlights (29-minute run time)
Minute 01:00 – intro, discussion of recent conference.
Minute 02:30 – AI Agents being tested at corporates.
Minute 08:15 – data quality needs to improve; understanding your workflow is key.
Minute 09:30 – hardware version of agents (vs software).
Minute 11:30 – reliability of AI applications.
Minute 13:15 – the agents are, really, just prompts.
Minute 17:30 – the issue of reliability.
Minute 23:00 – H-1B visa discussion.
Source: Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital published The State of AI Report 2025. October 2025.
h/t Zeke Gillman, Nell Norman, Ryan Tovcimak.
313 slides!
Bonus: Evolve-IQ helped me answer the question: How is The Alternative Data Weekly showing up on the ChatBots? Spoiler alert: it’s not good.
See highlighted section in slide #2 above.
My personal GEO Report:
ScalePost is addressing this too.
I hit “send” on this first Alternative Data Weekly on October 23, 2020.
At the time, I was running 90 West Data and needed a way to keep my name in front of potential customers throughout the looooong sales cycle.
Today, ADW is approaching 3,500 subs with 35-40% open rate each week.
This is an engaged community of people. Weekly, I get welcome replies and feedback. During my recent job dislocation (“dissolution”), this network of people has been indispensable.
Thank you!
ADW reached #39 in Substack’s “rising bestsellers in tech” this week.
Thanks John for the mention. I feel that the next five years is our time for all of us in alt data!