ideas | Life As a FA

What’s Teaching Done? (Notes from Feb 24 to March 1, 2020) October 16, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Digital, finance, FinTech, global, gym, marketing, sports, Strategy, Uncategorized.
Tags: Ads, Business, CMS, D2C, Digital, finance, FinTech, ideas, marketing, NFL, SaaS, sports, Startup, Teaching
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It’s 2020. I plan to revisit a number of journeys and roles that have ultimately made the person that I am today and landed me in my current place. Being comfortable with where that is, but not satisfied, has enabled an uncommon, jagged path. In realizing that everyone has different paths, it’s definitely fun to be able to share and learn from others – how they’ve arrived in their current states, what they think they learned, how they’ve best come into their place and where they may want to be shortly. That reflection is something that I believe should be a rote process for people age into their late 20s and early 30s.

I really enjoy keeping myself sharp and helpful in teaching/tutoring. I’ve set aside somewhere between 5-50 hours for every week since I was finishing high school for this. It was informal at first in high school – neighborhood kids or younger siblings of family friends. Similar with college – classmates who wanted some help. Right out of school, I took a role with a tutoring company in addition to a recruiter role where I didn’t quite appreciate it as much. Different focus when I was first entering the workplace. There was a challenge of learning a bit inside of tech (IT recruiting), talking with founders and hiring managers there, across many industries. Sourcing candidates, gathering requirements and putting everything in line seemed like a role that had more pieces than the teaching side. However, I left that after almost 2 years to go full-time with the teaching company. I was going to become a head trainer of the full west region and manage/oversee the tutors in each of the 9 locations as well as expanding 5 more.

Over the course of nearly 2 years where I got to oversee much of the training and processes for the NorCal’s tutors, as well as auditing results for students, talking with parents/students/center directors at each location for action plans, it was all very process-oriented. There were people in these students where you had to match how they may learn best, or how they operated. You can have a teacher who knows their stuff but if there isn’t an adaptation, it doesn’t help always. Everyone can teach but it’s learning to adapt that really finetunes the learning process – both for the teacher and student. I’ve heard this repeatedly in talking with those still learning now – teachers that blatantly declared “online/virtual isn’t the way to teach” or that they would only do video recordings or to “just read the textbook” and they’ve given up. That’s not the norm, but it’s a bit too common. Hopefully pointing out that not everyone enjoys their job and work day in and day out – it’s something they can do. And, more importantly, it’s not something you want to eat/sleep/breathe outside of work.

I left the full-time role due to that last point. And that’s why I made it more about teaching those that I wanted to teach or saw those that were willing/able to adapt. It’s fun when I know that my students know I’m helping because I want to. And that’s allowed me to teach some fantastic people. There are connections I have from all of this that have attended some of the best institutions, gone on to do some very interesting work, traveled all over, have positions at some of the best firms. Others still have started business, data and finance clubs after some of our discussions. Siblings of others who recognize the work and time that was put on from both sides. It’s rewarding.

It’s also sometimes difficult. There are failures. And my close interaction with them puts me in the wake – deservedly so. I set extremely high expectations for most of the students and they get scared to tell me – most do still, but I’m more worried that that pressure is externalized from what they’re putting on themselves. A few that I enjoy seeing or emailing back and forth every year or semester or so – check in to see that they’re on a track that they’re comfortable with – not that we ever know what that means in the future, but one that they’re good with. Their development will always intrigue me. Then, I continue when I adapt.

All of this to say that I’m curious. Some days, talking with those that are younger teaches me about new things. Other days, it’s talking to older mentors or someone out at a coffee shop who can drop some knowledge. If you can inspire someone, they may light a fire for you. Being there by just being there is adequate – a peculiar repeated check-in does more than we believe, so reach out.

Who gets paid, and who doesn’t? (Build Your SaaS – bootstrap in 2020, 1/28/20)
- Talking about not using percentages in year/life but we do in Kindle / ebooks
  - The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander
  - Working for yourself or remotely – some sense of not being grounded, lonely possibly
- Environment contributing to an interaction – people aren’t present as often, anymore
- Wanting to rebuild the dashboard for Transistor.fm – going from SemanticUI (all-in-one library, CSS and JS)
  - New Rails app and getting integrated with Tailwind UI
- Not truly valuing the CMS because of WordPress/Webflow, etc
  - In podcasting, tools like Audacity and Grabband are free
Dave Sims, co-CEO of Floify, Flux (The Indie Hackers Podcast 11/18/19)
- Start with naivete – starting first business in 2000, 2 initial failed and the third took hold
  - Started another 13 years later, had recruited and retained important people
- 90% Floify and 10% Flux
- Successful CEOs of mortgage companies with hundreds of employees, who partner with motivated entrepreneurs to help
  - Partner legally – each own shares and do it together – pumping out profits
- Used short-term financing to get into house when moving to Boulder with his wife – did long-term refinance after 90 days
  - Talked to local credit union – worker emailed requests for the long-list of papers
    - Didn’t want to email tax returns – for security, he encrypted and sent them
  - Wanted to make the loan officer assistant’s life easier, so he figured he could solve it with 5 people
- 400k loan officers in the US, big enough market
  - Had another idea – meeting with JPMC where you can create bank accounts with APIs
    - Excited but not sufficient enough people that were interested, and it was too slow
- Finding a business idea – medium level of effort and insight
  - Work on what you know, but industries are so deep where you never knew much of it or tech need or business
  - He knew nothing about the mortgage industry other than as a consumer
  - Some small software companies that weren’t that big, not with much traction doing similar stuff
    - Borrower/loan officer assistant in operations don’t get the same love as officers/compliance
- He wanted to make Floify as 1 screen that a borrower could go to where he could interact with the mortgage loan officer/co, bank/cu
  - Make it easier to do encrypted docs, w2, pay stubs and DL, such (at the start)
  - First customer – down in Austin, TX and he’d visit the office a few days a week to see how it worked
    - Built capabilities for messaging realtors
  - He thought the loan officer would be his customer – but occasionally the loan officers would be part of company to wrap up
- What’s happening in email? Spreadsheets? – he has customers in other real estate, solar, commercial
  - Could use it as attorneys or accountants, also – but stayed niche
- To get someone to pay – GitHub check-in from June ’13
  - He wrote a press release in August of 2013 – was doing thirty day trials, screen share and trying
  - He called and took the credit card over the phone in September
  - Backend was Java, NoSQL D/B (no longer there) and helped for speed of development – just had to work, MVP and value
- Selling $50-100 subscriptions a month, want <2% churn
  - Went after smaller customers first – shorter sales cycles – actually doing loans compared to higher up who said they had software
- Missing cloud with Salesforce in 1999, 2000 – had kept other people’s files on his computer in 1984 (DropBox)
Paul Gift, Joe Lemire (Wharton Moneyball, 2/26/20)
- Playoff expansion discussion – what are the leagues looking to optimize
  - Find best team, more teams in, more randomness
- Stylistic conflict for Heinke and the 76ers
- MMA analytics – round by round currently for FightMetrics (owned by UFC owners)
  - Not many camps have this data, let alone the money to get it
    - Training has quite a bit of analytics but not necessarily fight/cage data
- Testing fight dynamics for smaller/larger cages
- Technology is training for Lemire at Sporttechie – clothes that add to energy/effort
  - Wearables and exertion data anecdotes – including Nate Burleson being told to leave field by Browns’ trainer
    - Was feeling good so decided to stay, despite wearable saying otherwise – tore his hamstring, retired
- Combine differences – getting into more of the details in sports for how much analytics there really is
- Sports apparel for positional tracking and now more information about wearables
  - Machine only to “techstile” and smart apparel – work with others
Rebecca Kaden, Managing Partner at USV (USV webinar for SimulMedia 2/27/20)
- Incumbent advertising with Google and Facebook – audience has been aggregated extensively
  - Suddenly had increasing parts of the global audience in two places
  - Imperfect markets become perfect as you get closer to saturation of a market
- Starting to lose market with younger audience as it becomes fragmented
- Companies could before, over last 10 years, could mine for performance
  - How can cos use the channels to grab the TV mantle – creating brands to enable mental/emotional shortcuts for recognition
  - Facebook or other things try to sell that the brand awareness is in a click-through, but it’s more a longstanding form
- Build high-quality, easy-to-use and the companies looking to scale will scale with you
  - Slack, Zoom, Expensify, Twilio, Cloudflare, Stripe, etc…
- Split out CAC to steady and experimental – permission to experiment in different channels
  - Kill them quickly for what works or not – open to try many things
  - What’s a good influencer CAC and value (blended, potentially)
    - Modern Fertility startup – work with many influencers as authentic/emotional, telling stories
      - Influencers were buying off of other influencers – then having them talk about their story
- Knowing your funnel and not will determine your marketing channels/spends
- How do you build trust? (D2C question) – any beautiful design won’t build trust day one
  - Very clear on what your brand value is to give to consumer – 1 core promise
  - Nothing more valuable than loud customers willing to evangelize for you
- Finding channels – hypothesis for success needs to be clear initially
  - Bandwidth – as you spend increasingly, you should see the same or better results
    - Scaling doesn’t work, then
  - Unit economics need to work, LTV as tough to figure out early on
What’s Up With All These FinTech Acquisitions, SEC Rules (a16z 16 Minutes News, 2/28/20)
- Anish Acharya and Scott Kupor on Credit Karma’s acquisition by Intuit and VISA acquiring Plaid
- Best companies own distributions instead of products
  - Products aren’t sophisticated, but the reach is wild – CK with 100mln members
  - eTrade in wealth management couldn’t have been easy for Morgan Stanley
- Intuit owns the point of transaction for filing taxes but not durable with customer
  - No ongoing conversation or re-engagement of services/products – bought frequency of engagement
- Morgan Stanley/Etrade to get access of portfolio of consumers – buying/selling stocks
  - Wealthy today on way to retirement, also Amshare Works (co’s with vested/unvested equity)
  - Pre-wealth management and exposure to next gen wealthy folks
- Markets mature with tech innovation (engineers has leverage), product innovation (tech commoditized) and marketing then BD innovations
  - In the most mature phase now – need to reach new generation of consumers, fintech startups are at the right scale
  - No single one app to rule them all – bespoke – company can have old-world money folder (vs button)
- Best companies own distribution and product, having one great won’t be sufficient without other
  - Competitive edge changes over time – macro and micro
  - Company builders should build best product in front of customers and make sure it’s durable
- SEC and cryptocurrency matters – main issue is to clear the underwriter concept and when they’re deemed as such
  - Telegram sold as an investment contract to investors – “grams” as in the future and you’ll have a portion of that
  - If you buy the investment contract for “grams”, you are effectively an underwriter – cannot sell currently
    - Rule 144 (buying private securities holding them for a period of time, you can sell them currently)
  - This type of transaction occurs daily in venture – buy privately, follow rules, you have availability to sell later
  - Very important policy issue is to have a reasoned discussion with the SEC – downstream discussions

Disorganized Trying to Organize (Notes from Feb 3 – Feb 9, 2020) August 4, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Blockchain, Coronavirus, Daily fantasy football, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, global, Healthcare, Leadership, NBA, questions, social, sports, Strategy, Streaming, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: Bill Gurley, Bitcoin, Blockchain, contracts, Coronavirus, Gaming, Healthcare, ideas, investing, Investments, medtech, sports, Strategy
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Productivity tools have been all the rage. Those familiar with adoption of new technology or tools in an office setting bigger than 20 people have likely been through what’s described as the J curve for adoption, popularized by Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock in their paper (see: https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/brynrocksyv_j-curve_final.pdf) of September 2018 on general purpose technologies. There is a slope downward to start for the adoption because the productivity decrease and difficulty in trying to set it up often leads to a loss. Over time and the consistent use, it can go away and lead to the productivity gains we sought in the first place.

Well, I’m in that too many tools, too many valleys section. Bundle and use a tool that tries to do it all? Or unbundle and use multiple tools. If you are trying to optimize notes for one platform and it doesn’t work for your other platforms (mobile/to-go/car), is it optimal? Is 90% great if you miss on the 10% you don’t have a good solution for? I’m not sure. I’m hopeful that audio can work easily – may even jump into Otter.ai for transcription there.

A family friend of ours was so obsessed with keeping track of all his clothes, colors and features that he took it upon himself to build a database of his closet. Upon telling someone else, I recall a similar story for someone who went further and did bar codes on their clothes. You spend so much time obsessing over something you’d love organization over until that organizing takes up the time you were hoping to save. We could take this further and draw similar analogies to corporate, big companies compared to start-ups in growth as an early employee – always something to be done, may not be optimizing the work, just attempting to get something out compared to optimization runs for something that worked until it breaks. Exciting work on either end but ultimately, there’s a line you must draw.

There are tons of benefits to organization for notes, processes, documentation in that someone could come in at any point and figure out what connects to what. There’s a context. I think YourStacks is doing something like this for personal / professional use of tools and games and everything one comes into contact. There have been corporate / enterprise stack technology sites that break down webpage technology or company technologies. Then there are transparent people / companies who document it both privately and publicly for others to see. We try what we think may improve but it’s tough to know where to start.

There’s a lesson to be learned here in starting, trying to going from there. Some of us want to try to optimize all the tools or one tool to its fullest before moving forward. How good is good? Or not good enough? At what point do you pass to the next or add another tool? How many tools are too many? And will we get a bundling or unbundling of different aspects? I’m hopeful we get voice tools that enable bundling for all sorts of this. Currently, I’ve yet to find the solution. Let me know what your set is!

Dr. Tara Smith, Professor of Epidemiology at Kent State University College of PH, Erik Moses (Wharton Moneyball 2/5/20)
- Hockey – East and West split of conferences currently, top 4 teams in the East and defending champs Blues in the West are 5th
  - More or less deterministic (coin flips previously) – 50% as max from a conference if coin flips
- Mookie Betts as trying to get 10 year, $40 mil per because he’s so young
- Joined in August 2013 after being at Univ of Iowa in Emerging Infectious Diseases
Chetan Puttagunta, GP at Benchmark Capital (Invest like the Best 1/28/20)
- Investing in early-stage, MongoDB, Elastic, Mulesoft and advice for POS in enterprise software building Canvas
- MongoDB – 2012 and had experience building consumer apps from 2007-08 trying to build tech that was pretty limited
  - Felt like an advantage between large companies with proprietary data and tools compared to DIY
  - Met Elliott (MongoDB founder, from DoubleClick) – would ask best devs to work with Mongo and they responded “Don’t need”
  - DB expert – MySQL can work with everything but would miss the class of devs that wanted without planning for scale, app may not work
  - DB could handle scale, millions of users, transactional data by 2015-16, right place right time
  - Oracle as building a great database business and moved into application tier with their apps built on their db
    - CRM, HCM (Peoplesoft) to serve application – 1977 to true leader in databases in 80s, relational
  - Other timing – 1992, for instance, and it would not have worked. Cloud has been so open to these techs.
  - Cockroach for globally scalable, relational db – TimeScale for time-series IoT model, for instance after cloud enabled it
    - Specific use cases have more specifically-tailored results
  - Initiating and potential TAM Salesforce estimates from the start compared to now, where it’s much larger now than suspected
- Now, enterprise software permeates into companies all over for IoT and consumer tech
  - Caterpillar, Pharma, Financial Services, Shipping companies are all buyers
  - Diva built a CRM system for healthcare vertical on general CRM, Salesforce – multibillion dollar company
  - Client facing software is very important – system that will be helpful and customers will tackle that and tell you directly
- People come to work and complete a specific job or task – not to work or be an expert with your software
  - New tool into a workflow, only certain amount of walls to learn the software before leaving
  - Go slow to go fast – if you’re building a software solution in the start, build for 5-10 important users
    - Address the needs of those customers – generally applicable to the market (not just the single customer)
    - Won’t become an outside services or dev shop if you deliver services to the general customer
  - Workday and Viva early days – 50% of revenue were services since they entered enterprises (large installation of PeopleSoft)
    - On-prem CRM for Viva – lots of handholding, data migration and such
- Duffel (Global Distribution System) for airlines selling to consumers
  - Convoluted system to sell and the flows is astounding – entrepreneurs in payments looking to innovate in these instances
  - Found airlines and approached them to “Shouldn’t it work like this?” to get your first partners/customers
  - Patient capital of “go slow to go fast” to super efficient business – spreadsheet vs software
    - Example at Greg Shaw – Mulesoft – burned $8mln from $100mln to 200mln in revenue and burned $4mln from 2-300mln
      - Inside Salesforce, they’ve grown top-line revenues further
- Unlikely that someone else is building what you’re building
  - 2004 – Salesforce selling CRM, main competitor was Seibel – Salesforce had ACV of $4k and 15 licenses at a time vs Seibel $100k/1k
    - Go after the larger competitors when you have thousands of customers and users ecstatic about your product
  - Won’t run into competitors directly, just objections to your own system, since it’s incomplete
    - Valuing you against their internal/custom solution – take time to create product maturity before prematurely scaling
- If you’re not missing as an investor, you aren’t taking enough shots
  - 1x your capital if you miss compared to if you pass, miss on 10x or 100x
  - At Benchmark, they’re making 5-10 investments per year, so it’s 1-2 per partner
- Recruiting and sales – candidates have to feel very good as they go through the proces
  - Only way to scale the software business is to hire the best people to make the software
- Hard to stand out in SF as an enterprise software integration problem (Mulesoft)
  - Competing with FAANG in a limited labor market, have to be able to recruit amazing talent
  - For start-ups, they have 2 advantages: really exciting for them to embrace remote talent (global market)
    - Running a remote company at scale has very little to do with the tools, and more so with the work culture that’s friendly
    - Everyone meets remotely on video, even in same room
    - Writing a lot of documentation, transparency about thinking in the wikis docs so anyone can catch up
  - Offline ad inventory is very efficient – account-based enterprise software ads at airports – targeting top of funnels
  - How do you transmit a culture that was highly efficient in 10 person to 20 or 100 or 1000 and further, if you’re doing 100% each year
    - 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 haven’t been there for more than 1 year, 2 years, 3, etc..
- Most portable of early stage investing – Bill Gurley’s blog on CAC and LTV
  - Going down unit economic traps are widely applicable to all tech businesses, consumer, enterprise, etc
    - Can’t drive spreadsheet growth with CAC/inorganic growth for LTV numbers
  - Product engagement – customers in consumer and enterprise
- Benchmark as 5 equal partners at the firm, no juniors or others
  - Don’t have a NEXT topic that they have to move on to because of this, so open-ended discussions can go very deep
    - Wide networks so they can get useful people to talk
  - Probably not a question that they can’t answer
Adam Draper, Founder & CEO of Boost VC (20min VC 2/24/16)
- Seed stage accelerator, blockchain and VR
- Before Boost, angel invested in 20+ co’s, including Coinbase, Plangrid, Practice Fusion
  - Geography – heart of SV and ecosystem of entrepreneurs, recently adding V/R to build
- Founder of Xpert Financial after UCLA graduation, helping later stage companies raise capital in private markets
  - Made every mistake – funding, hiring, firing, product
  - Helped early-stage companies build product and raise capital, including for a friend – wanted to mentor in bulk
    - As a family, helping people get to where they want to go
- Meeting a lot of people while raising money and helping – took him 12 months to raise his fund
  - $6.6mln after reaching out to 3k, 350 meetings and closed ~35 – basically rule of 10
- Had 52 investments in blockchain accelerator (had about ~120 companies) among currency/contracts-based work
  - Been in industry for 3 years, seeing mature products and higher quality
- Mentioned MuggleNet as his favorite blog and TechCrunch
- JoyStream by a solo founder, trying to merge BitTorrent / BTC
Coronavirus (a16z 16min on the News #21, 1/29/20)
- Judy Savitskaya – 2019-nCoV – 10-20% common cold vs epidemic ones would be severity
- Sequencing this virus has been incredibly quick (within 2 weeks of genome) whereas it’s taken longer in past
  - If someone in SF said they had a cold at a general clinic, they could decide if it’s this or not
  - Figuring out treatments and protocols based on genome and live medicine
- Spike proteins used to enter into lung cells didn’t look as bad as SARS, so they thought it was fine
  - Turns out that it’s actually very similar to the protein
- Nobody really knows – animal sources of viruses (evolving away from human hosts, time in animals)
  - R0 – number of people you’d expect to get sick for every one person that has it
  - Breaking down variables in R0 – how well does virus transmit itself (easy in air, for instance)
    - Is it good at infecting cells? What’s the population like? (Chinese New Year and traveling often)
  - If virus is not that deadly, additional time in the host that can get infected (individually, if deadly and fast, population better)
- Increase in genomic medicine – Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations gave out 3 grants to pharma co’s totaling $12.5mln
  - 12-16 weeks time to develop new drugs based on the new sequence
Epic Battles in Healthcare, FICO Changes (a16z 16min on the News #22, 2/6/20)
- FinTech GP’s Angela Strange and Anish Acharya
- Starting with what is a FICO score – 5 factors: payment history, credit utilization, length of history, new credit, credit mix
  - FICO 2, 3, and 10 now as FICO comes out with reweighting
    - 1 trillion in credit card debt now, so people refi from 25% to 12% loans, but it doesn’t change user spending habits
    - Better job of incorporating debt over a long period of time
  - Designed in 1950s to create a proxy for willingness to pay, originally – now, it’s mostly lenders that have their own algorithms
  - Good lenders will use FICO as a factor but they have their own robust models
- Hacks such as adding kids as authorized users
- Old time, 50-100 years credit decisions made on generations, kids play ball with bankers, etc
  - Bank of Italy (now Bank of America), would make loans to Italian immigrants that other banks wouldn’t lend to
  - 2 drivers – willingness and ability to pay
- International vs US – in US, most decisions decided on score/report, not alternative data
  - In international countries, great way to bootstrap a lending business as a proxy for consumer
  - Difficult to introduce alternative data in the US , cash flow streams for instance
- Epic’s CEO (EHR information on data) letter sent – with Julie Yoo bio GP
  - Rule that’s been around for 1 year in context of a longer standing law
    - Opening healthcare records from ONC (Office of National Coordinator for CMS), gov agencies overseeing healthcare spend
  - 21st Century CURES Act – Upton and Waldon – means by which we implement the act (healthcare costs will rise, care will suffer)
    - Contending with nonprofit orgs with slim margins
  - Uniquely stored in healthcare data is the doctors’ context (and dialogue) – for what reason would you need the context vs “code”
  - Connecting data between APIs and interoperability – major concept
- Clause in rule about screenshot sharing – contractual obligations not to share screenshots
  - In trying to see a workflow in a system to connect yours efficiently – one of Julie’s customers at EHR company got hand-slapped for sharing
- Annual meeting with OMB and ONC for driving sharing and interoperability – Epic wasn’t there – everyone else, systems, plans, incumbents, big tech, EHRc
  - HHS secretary was saying that scare tactics won’t affect what they’re looking for
Introduction to ARK’s Big Ideas 2020 (FYI 1/13/20)
- James Wang interviewing Cathie Wood, CEO/CIO at ARK Invest
  - Building on other years – DL, EV, 3D printing, autonomous ride hailing, automation, genome sequencing, digital wallets and Bitcoin
- New ones – streaming media, aerial drones and biotech R&D efficiency
- Streaming media – changing behavior patterns should catapult the industry, roughly $80-90bn, projecting $400bn+ in next 4 years
  - Most people couldn’t understand why she was buying Amazon at $5bn cap at her old firm (when no profits)
    - Believed about their revenues would increase CAGR at 25% for 20 years, deep value play (exp growth wasn’t understood)
  - Terrible sales out of box retailers – want to survive and go to online
  - Gaming could consume media, so is value in content or platforms (say, Tencent showing the way, maybe) – larger than box office now
    - Every time music has come out, it has cannibalized the other, older parts as replacement
    - Gaming was different – expansive, explosive market as stacking (mobile only added to consoles and others)
- Aerial drones – early side of S curve still – released a paper in 2014 suggesting that if FAA would allow Amazon to deliver parcels over 10 mi
  - Amazon, at that time, could have done it profitably for just $1 per parcel for 5 lb package, for instance
  - Food delivery now, air taxis / passenger drones and given battery tech, could save 20k lives associated with heart attacks – drone faster than ambulance
    - Projecting $275bn food delivery (3mi Delivery for cars is about $4.85 – $5) – drones could do it for $.20, profitably
- Biotech R&D Efficiency as converging Nextgen sequencing, AI, CRISPR editing
  - Impact on pharma and biotech sector
  - Fewer trial failures with DNA sequencing and companion diagnostics for trials, time to market decrease
    - Human trials, CRISPR is curing things such as Beta-_ and sickle cell (2 people)
  - Value-based pricing could be installment payments, for every year you live – reduction of trials and drugs to market, higher pricing utility
    - Margin structure could follow more of 1980s and 90s (mid20-30s) – innovations were exhausted from there, but now should be innovative
  - CRISPR and gene therapies are delivering great results, cures and evidence of these
    - AI and software side with mundane, life science has supported SaaS company in Viva – extremely motivated for productivity structure
    - Most AI companies doing R&D drug discovery are early, M&A ripe – tech in Alpha Go search problems, for instance
  - Analysts can’t just be healthcare, have to be technology as well – permeating every sector
- Over past year, innovation has been highly valued in private space – too few opportunities with too much capital
  - Private is valued much higher – seeing some disappointments, public markets should be ripe (P/E ratio is not ideal)
  - 5 year opportunities, not 1-2 timeline and finding out how much growth they’re going to deliver

Failures as Public (Notes from December 30, 2019 to Jan 5, 2020) June 9, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Data Science, Digital, education, experience, finance, global, marketing, medicine, questions, RPA, Strategy, Time, training, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, content, experiences, fitness, health, humanity, ideas, life, marketing, Microsoft, reading, research, social, training
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In the book “The Rise and Fall of Nations”, Ruchir Sharma goes through the emerging and developing countries that have shown patterns in growth or stagnation. How do we see that they failed? How did they succeed? Was it spending as a percentage of GDP? Is it the change in political party? Infrastructure? Social services? So many factors are at play for a nation. And any that have risen have also seen falls. It’s the natural business cycle that we see happen in macro all the way to micro. Why do I bring this up?

Because it happens to the smallest business units like startups, as well as individuals. We can’t help it. Some of us hide the falls, others wear it on our sleeves, open. I think there’s a combination of good for both. I will say that more reviews such as Top 10 Startup Failures of 2019 can be interesting case studies.

Maybe it’s not the companies themselves doing the reflection, but instead outsiders. This is a review exercise that can be useful for any individual to provide thoughtful reasoning. Granted, there were likely other, unseen circumstances that created a downfall but the exercise still works to recognize a large event like that. If more people see that through a lens, we would expect some growth overall. That content creation drives more people to start their own things. And that can only be good.

On to the notes!

Seth Juarez (@sethjuarez), Microsoft cloud advocate (Data Skeptic 12/15/19)
- ML: don’t want to write an algorithm because it’s too messy but use data to extract knowledge, use ML
- “I don’t know how to do ML, so call an API” vs “I know how to do TF, PyTorch, Deep Learning-custom stuff”
  - Build in control things
- Unstructured data into folder, word doc, picture, extract knowledge into an intelligent way (any set of files)
  - Making more intelligent Indexing with Skills
  - When a doc is indexed, an Indexer cracks open doc (text, images, metadata)
    - Skillset aggregates series of skills in step order to go through them (ex: sentiment of text, added to tree)
  - Very similar to an ETL but customized
- Predictions inside PowerBI, for instance – ML on rows of data to show this
  - Azure ML ModelInsights – vary features and see how it affects the predictions
  - Hoping bad ML models don’t affect or bias other models
- Video Indexer – upload video, take text out, show when different people start talking (pictures in a row, for instance)
  - Sequence of audio and pictures – can get sentiment with text
  - When you create an indexer, you marry it together with data storage (where files are) and the SkillSet
- Skill-builders as Excel-jockeys – his interview with a Rotterdam woman Faelina and getting innovation there
- His question: Ethics in AI – models building and make sure there is fairness in their generation
- Azure Cognitive Search links
Greg Zuckerman (@gzuckerman), WSJ writer, author of The Man Who Solved the Market (Resolve’s Gestalt University 12/23/19)
- How asset management has changed after Renaissance book, how relationships have evolved since releasing
- Was fascinated by buy-side investors, bewildered by trade ideas but over time, become cynical
  - 2 and 20 aren’t providing unique, much value
- When you don’t have outside LP’s, you can do other things that you can’t otherwise
- Trend following in clusters of stocks, not necessarily a single stock – baskets against each other
  - Unique methodology into one equities model
- When you talk to Simons and others in the firm early, you’d think they’d be quants but not the case
  - Still human – family office still will look at the office anyhow
- 30 pages of NDA, had issues when he was starting the book
- Everything they have is pattern investing and trading, so this is a problem eventually changing
  - Sophisticated or others that have money in market, but happening gradually
Dr. Rhonda Patrick (@foundmyfitness), scientist (Kevin Rose Show, 1/1/20)
- Discussing Omega3, metformin, sulforaphane research
- Published paper on phospholipid form of omega3 supplementation, DHA – found in marine sources
  - Interest in getting it to the brain – DHA that is bound to albumane
    - DHA-free fatty acid transported blood-brain by passive transfusion
    - Blood-brain barrier erodes as you age
- Brain glucose levels as important for Alzheimer’s disease
- Fish contain 1 – 1.5% of DHA in phospholipid form, whereas fish roe contain 70-75% (including flying fish)
- More from a gram of fish oil (she takes 3g) and eating fish/salmon roe – Nordic Pure3 for Rhonda Patrick
  - High dose EPA can have issues with blood thin
- Epithelia cancers vs blood cancers (in mice)
  - Much of metformin studies are based on Type 2 diabetics – lived longer after metformin with age controls
  - Physical exercise and metformin were not synergistic
- Activation of pulsing metformin – half-life
  - Exercise activates and lasts 48 hours, metformin does 36 hours after last dose
- During fasting, NAD levels increase
- 36 hour monk fast
Roy Bahat (@roybahat), Head of Bloomberg Beta (20min VC 10/18/19)
- - NYC / Valley with portfolio companies in Kobalt, Textio, Rigetti Computing, Flexport
  - Former co-founder at Ouya, new kind of games console raising over $33mn
- “Messy career” where he ran a nonprofit in government in nyc, fortune 500 media company, started the company and now investor
- This day – October 18 – started a third fund, same build as the prior 2 – $75mn, same thing and sticking to strategy
  - Fund size is fund strategy
    - In terms of valuations – company valuation as marker of VCs rating company, but that’s a mistake
    - Want to own as much of the few winners
    - Competitive lanes issue – every time you write a check, you lose out on other companies in the space in a category
- Egg toss of trust – model to be careful, customer calls at the end
  - VCs that ask to talk to customers immediately – slow them down, could be out of order
  - When he met Ryan Peterson at Flexport, he was still a board member at his hardware company and could try it out
    - Flexport reached out easily and offered to help him with his freight of hardware and team member made connection to CEO
- As companies become successful and grow quickly, expectations keep raising
- Fear from 6 years ago was if the VC was founder-friendly – not going to screw you
  - Greylock led a Series A for a friend’s company because Reid Hoffman had said Greylock wouldn’t screw you
  - Most people now are behaving to nudge the company’s upward – at Bloomberg Beta, company is the customer
- Investment decision making – speed of investment decision
  - They try to avoid asking about other VC’s in the process (but want to know if there are timing issues)
  - Their offers are encouraged to be shopped – lots of funds moving down to write checks
  - Concerned about Seqoia, NEA, other funds? Frustrated because they’ve lost a few but have won a few.
    - Had a founder called them after 2 years prior – shouldn’t have taken that money to convince you – nothing
    - Founder mentioned he could do the raise and turn to others and they’d know who it was
- Dependent variable – valuation (not the independent variable as most think)
  - Fund has strategy, do you want to invest? Check size – determined by fund size.
  - Strategy is to know the ownership target. 10-25% (Valuation as a function of fund size and check sizes with the ownership target)
- Ownership to build over time – bigger check – they own what they want to own the day they invest
  - He wants to be on the team the day they want to be on the team
  - Generally, if new investors are there, pro rata and investment is hot
  - First check – anyone can say yes – good accountability, avoid groupthink
  - Following checks – unanimous to follow on
- Greater fool dynamic – if actions reveal that you prey on greater fools at later times
  - Viable strategy in the current market, but maybe not going forward
- Boards at the earliest stages – pretty useless but has sit in Series B’s
- Favorite book: Waters Shut Down, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennit, Ain’t No Making It – how to develop empathy
- Founder secondaries – fan of this, most personal and important underdiscussed aspects of a company
  - Will drive the decisions of a company because the founder is distracted – many valuable reasons
- Thinks the heroes that are set up in the technology industry now have too much power – mainly as a result of money success
- Mistakenly believed that starting a company and investing in a company are similar
  - Completely different roles – wanted to focus on one of these
- Scout programs – Bloomberg Beta has Open Angels – giving money to individual investors is awesome
  - Angels, dollar for dollar, are more valuable in the ecosystem – issues can be lack of transparency (money comes from X)
- Most recent investment – founder named Max Sinkhov – business help close businesses on home purchases
  - Title insurance States Title – validation that the owner in fact owns the home – super big before a website
Arvid Kahl (@arvidkahl), founders of Feedback Panda (The Indie Hackers Podcast, #140 12/16/19)
- Him and girlfriend are founders of Feedback Panda, 2 years to $55k MRR and sold it
- Commuted from Hamburg and Berlin 3 times a week – 2.5 hours each way, 15+ a week
  - Connection was poor so he read and listened to podcasts – automating and taking yourself out of the business
  - Built to Sell book and podcasts – SaaS as online teacher feedback
- An agency keeps you as a freelancer, essentially – so try to make it so that it doesn’t have to be you
- All advice being anecdotal – truth can be applicable to every business, just a matter of you selecting it
- Started with the docparser and mailparser founder podcast with Indie Hackers (sold to Fortress Capital, also)
  - Found it interesting that there would be people to acquire the type of company
  - Received an email from them
- Documentation of prcoesses, business processes and building – make it easy to transition into them
  - Connection from beginning and met Kevin recently
- He started a blog after vacation, thebootstrappedfounder.com
  - Started out Feedback Panda – he was a software developer part-time, she was an opera singer & teaching English to Chinese
    - Feedback writing process took forever – 20 students ~5 min for next lesson and what was taught
    - Built her own system and templates to reduce the extra 2+ hours automatically
  - Knew what the market was because it was her exact same issue. If they could fix the problem, it’d be all over.
- $10/mo would save hours and made one Facebook post as advertising, then word-of-mouth
  - Allowed them to communicate and have discussions – teaching online blog posts
  - VIPanda – interesting person from user base and interview them
  - Engaging enough, relatable content for their strategy – she’d already been in her groups before she got to the part
- Teachers as very underpaid and overworked – good spot for business opportunity but not great for employment
- How to run – he said he probably should have hired for customer service – always did it from the beginning
  - Live chat and messages, would build up an article if others saw the issue again
  - Time when volume happens will be interrupting because there’s new stuff going on while features were coding
  - Forced him to do as much automation as he could build from the software stack
    - Deployment, failure errors, alerting and restarting system
    - Elixir Phoenix, Docker containers and on Kubernetes with ViewJS and other API / browser extension
  - If something broke, it’d come back up – errors automatically reported, etc
- He didn’t know how to hire, so he didn’t do it
  - Did an 11 hour video series for his next developer so he could send the link and felt great for it
- Adding a yearly plan near the start was productive – $110 where people would commit to something for a year
  - After a year, noticed they added a lot of features – had a cloud template sharing system
  - Machine learning for pronoun translation, snippets with text extender and manipulation
  - Product was much better – charge more – grandfathered all existing customers to $10 before $15/mo
- Hooked by Nir Eyal – instrumental – trigger, action, reward, investment – putting own template to share
Keith Devlin (@profkeithdevlin), “Math Guy” at NPR Weekend Edition, Stanford Mathematician (School’s In on Wharton XM, 9/1/18)
- Math throughout the week and your life day-to-day
- Using Tupperware dish – missing the size repeatedly, for instance
- In Alaska, teaching algebra to students – remembers having to teach the quadratic equation repeatedly and lengthily
  - Math as a discipline, potentially
- Math Guy license plate – content of math has changed throughout history, but not necessarily how we’ve done it
  - Save for 2 exceptions that are the printing press and then computing
  - Changes throughout history as connection with ancient Greeks, geometry, and in response to how society grows
    - 18-19th century – chemistry and physics drives, 20th and 21st century – biology and math through commerce, society
- Cell phones as answering 95% of undergraduate exam questions in fractions of a second, execution of procedure that can be coded
  - Faster, better, quicker for as many variables as you want, just from your phone
  - Shouldn’t test these things anymore but how to do them and when to use them
- People should have a general sense of numbers sense – different people have levels of it
  - Tips, for instance – example of doubling tax and then taxi cabs or restaurants starting at 20/25/30% since min ppl will enter own
  - Don’t need to learn to execute – won’t get the right degree of understanding without doing it
    - Teach not for execution, but for understanding now – bunch of high school students reverse engineering UPS/FedEx algorithms
    - Had to understand little things to figure out what would go on – Nueva school
- If you start with technology to interest them, they’re already engaged – good teacher can ask interesting questions given the motivation
  - We shouldn’t have to ask Why’s and How’s and What’s
- Research in 1990s watching adults after buying things and seeing things
  - If they have to do it mathematically, can get to near 98% quickly
    - if you take it out of the context but the same types of problems, it goes to 37%
    - Children doing licorice (to count 10s) won’t work once you remove it from the context
  - Embodiment of math in video games (Kevin’s been working on it) – reward in it to achieve the reward which pulls away from content
    - Small number that do it right – find a way to represent it that’s natural (in process, for instance – thinking process is math)
    - Slides he shows audiences with the same problem and same situation – one side is math symbols, other is game designed
- He got a grant for games where the problem adjusts for the game and shows the manipulation of the symbolic representations
  - Intuitive quantitative symbols – working on online course for teachers/parents
  - Introduce problems (from movies, for instance) where you have to begin with writing a paper

Prioritizing Personal Projects (Notes from December 23 – 29, 2019) June 1, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Leadership, marketing, social, sports, storytelling, Strategy, Time, TV, Uncategorized.
Tags: #business, Amazon, books, community, content, experiences, finance, freedom, humanity, ideas, investing, Jobs, life, marketing, Money, NBA, questions, reading, social, Strategy, Time, training, TV, video
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We overestimate what we can do in a short time but underestimate what we can do in a longer period. This has been reiterated by Jamie Siminoff, Bill Gates, many others. It’s telling but a great mantra if you can zoom out and high level back off. Scheduling makes this so much better.

I have wanted for the longest time to get Spotify or another podcast to listen to me in the car and allow me to say something basic like “Make a note 30 seconds ago” and let me review the notes later. This could work for audiobooks or podcasts. Even allowing ebooks and articles to bookmark this type of stuff for where the page is would be useful. But maybe that’s through an API in the podcast or Kindle? I’ll have to see and report back.

In light of planning further career-wise, I have taken it upon myself to take on projects that I plan on making public for analysis sake. As an external consultant, much of my work has been NDA / kept private in general for good reasons (VC firms and start-ups are likely some of the more controlled privacy-wise). Some aren’t, and those are typically the ones that I’ve noticed have a much better, transparent brand or have less questions around their business models. A few things have stood out to me about predictions/forecasting, especially in annual or quarterly time frames that publications will release. I have focused on ML/Fintech/Edtech/Data companies over the last 5 years more heavily, so looking through the Fintech 50, Next Billion Dollar (Unicorn) Startups and Hottest 50 LA Startups. Outside the bay area / silicon valley, scanning through the different ecosystems can be an interesting landscape for focused, scaling and growing startups. LA because it’s still in California, somewhat close proximity but ultimately an alternative driving force than typical elsewhere (namely the bay).

So, I’ll have a chance to update my preliminary thoughts on the year-to-year changes – how many startups dropped off, which proceeded to move up the list, any funding raises, product progress or expansion. Hope you enjoy the notes!

Decade in Tech (Wharton XM)
- 4G entering 2011 compared to 5G now
- iPad introduction – better than netbook
  - Tablet rampup – Microsoft following with the Slate
- Social media launching
  - Instagram launch in September 2010 – 2 guys at Stanford
  - Taking photo class from a plastic camera that a professor had given him – best, soft focus and filtered photography
  - Offering to buy Instagram in April 2012 for $1bn
- Tesla as “gift of light” Model S – first time supercharging across the country
  - Musk took CEO role in 2008 (Model S 2012)
- WeWork – likeminded individuals wanting to work with others outside of making money
  - Sharing space to be something bigger
  - $16bn in 2016 to pulling IPO in 2019
  - Strength as marketing capability, not necessarily management
- Controversial events
  - Kendall Jenner at BLM Pepsi commercial
  - United – offering money for ‘volunteers’ until 4 people get off flight
    - $400 voucher and up to $800 – escalation, dragging the Chicago doctor kicking and screaming
    - Many other airlines improving overbookings
- Ice bucket challenge for ALS – 70k tweets per day at peak
- A/R rise as it started with Pokemon Go
- Cutting the chord – rise of unbundling
Brant Pinvidic, author of 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More (Wharton XM, Career Talk)
- Mostly reminding people of what they’re doing badly / guilty – awareness but wanted to change it to make it productive
- Help you get as much info in 3 minutes as possible since “elevator pitch” doesn’t really work anymore
  - Meaningful engagement or not now
- Small ideas not actually small ideas – respect the knowledge of your audience
  - Your excitement is a long history of building information – feed them piece by piece
    - Ex – AirBnb for horses: people that travel with horses need to stick them where they’re going
  - Clarity as super compelling – complications are messed up
- Don’t open with the hook – audience needs to build into the potential
  - Katy Perry example: more Guinness book of World Record accomplishments, for instance
- Selling a show in 12 minutes in Hollywood as junior producer between Simon Cowell and Mark Burnett – had gotten down on himself
- People looking for hook – less dynamic personalities (biotech, oil & gas) that pulls the nervous energy out for why it will be great
- Bringing an idea to life on post-it with just a few words – see the value come together
  - 25 bullet points to pitch his show as well as he did (core piece of information)
- Halfway to understanding what the hook is when you can place the hook
Jonathan Lai (@tocelot), cnsmr team; Joel De La Garza, CIO at Box (16min on News #17, 12/20/19)
- Star Wars trailer premier in Fortnite – JJ Abrams coming out of Millennium Falcon and asked to choose which trailer
  - Interactive and persistent collaboration with Avengers and now Star Wars (lightsaber)
  - 12 million people showed up for Marshmello’s in-game concert (of 250 million users)
- Scarcity in a world of abundance – getting people there
- Brand advertisers have a limited set of options to reach Gen Z – no display ads, billboards, maybe Snapchat or TikTok
  - Hundred hours of watching YouTube or Twitch or in-game events that eventually go out after to share
- Fortnite’s Chapter 2 server downtime of 3 days as “Black Hole” that went viral and video
- Security and backdoor encryption – creating escrow keys to get backdoors
  - Can’t create backdoors undermines the trust in general, even if good guys
- Any discussion around weakening crypto doesn’t make sense
  - Conflation between a few things: we have systems that are built and they should provide backdoors/access to law enforcement
    - Backdoor to phones, for instance
  - Phone uses strong cryptography and backdoor there – focus on cryptography
  - Phone and put in safe – nobody talks about the steel of the safe – access
- End-to-end encryption vs getting phone stolen, for instance
  - Roger Stone investigation: WhatsApp and Signal to communicate but iCloud turned on which saved all messages anyhow unencrypted
  - Metadata and other encryption can tell you far more than even the messages themselves
- If you build devices, how much gov access do you want to provide?
  - Joel (grad student, involved in CDN – bad actors, like pedos, would use and work with Interpol to find them)
What to Know about CFIUS (a16z 12/23/19)
- Committee on Foreign Investment in US on Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018, updated in September ’19
- Katie Haun interviewing Michael Leiter (law firm Skadden Arps) about function to review any foreign investment in US business with natsec concerns
  - 13 agencies ran by Dept of Treasury split between 2 camps: want foreign investment and concerned about security (intelligence, NSA, FBI)
  - Semiconductor moving from US to Japan, for instance, that would limit Japanese investments
- CFIUS limiting in 2006 for Saudi Arabia and Emirates and now is Chinese investment in the US
  - Changes in technology, expansion of data and things that weren’t present even 10 years ago
  - Tech, data touch, real estate, work with US gov or anything else (dog food sold to SEALs)
- Everyone working in fintech, credit reports, broad financial data will have more than a 16-digit credit card number and will be subject
  - 1 million people for arbitrary amount of data
- Prior to CFIUS reform, if Alibaba acquired someone, it was up to both parties to submit to CFIUS – vast txns were never seen, no req
  - Both parties come together, transaction description, foreign acquirer, motivation, business reason
    - Good, very bad (president can veto using Article 2), can impose mitigation for sec risk (board of US citizens, data controls, etc)
  - Pieces of reform that are not voluntary – fines and compliance possible
  - Mandatory if company operates in sensitive sector listed, or produce/design export control tech
    - Includes encryption, investment over some size – mandatory filing
    - High-end types of LIDAR – controlled vs standard for automobile, not controlled
  - Could range from (ER99 not, or export-controlled) – computing power, battery storage, sensors
  - Software tends not to fall under CFIUS unless encryption
- WSJ civil military cooperation – some stuff is mandatory and more stuff will be
- US business – interstate commerce, could be French office with US office in US – CFIUS gets to look at US element of transaction if French company is picked
  - Green-field investments – foreign investments can be made and won’t be looked at, really
  - Ultimate parent and ultimate ownership of acquirer or investment (private equity, capital)
- More than 9.9% equity or some other controlling interest – board seat, for instance
Josh Sapan, CEO AMC Network (Wharton XM)
- Challenging to get through people’s gateways to get to audiences
- Base incumbent business for United States – affiliates, selling ads and that represents their financial fundamental part of company
  - Video prices coming down in different options
  - Spending less money on AMC Networks in the skinny bundles
- Toughest marketplace for Netflix to deal with – Indonesia, as CEO said
  - Vertical scaling vs horizontal
Adam D’Augelli (@adaugelli), Partner at True Ventures (20min VC 12/16/19)
- Investments in Fitbit, Peloton, Hashicorp, Splice, Ring, Automattic, Tray.io
- Instructor at Uflorida in Business Finance, founder of Perfect Wave Records (donations)
- Full-time in June 2010, 10 people total about to invest in second fund
  - Met them through vstocksolutions portfolio company (had worked there internship)
  - Reached out potentially – didn’t know where to start at intersection business/finance/tech – UF not as well-known
  - Phil had offered a role – we like you but haven’t hired someone as junior so come and we’ll see
- Joining as a young one – new firm where you have a ton to do and roles not really defined, structured
- Thinking about portfolio construction and business models (under-represented in vc discussions)
  - Fund-level returns for partners – funds at True are around $300mln with specific institutional capital at pre-seed, seed
  - Investments $500k-$3.5mln targeting 20-25% ownership, $2mln for 22.5%
  - Self-selection bias for why they have a better way for them
- They back founders early, invest $1-3mln and try to own 20-25% where the downside is 1% and it will be a maximize risk for timing
- 28 people twice, 8 people three times for the founders they’re backing now
- Amy Errett – starting Madison Reed, wanted $2mln to get off ground for equity
- In ’06, convincing founders to try not to raise as much
- Lead investment amount – meaningful bias for single lead with deep pockets
  - New group of firms that will work with emerging founders where they can bring others in, potentially
- Ring or Splice are interesting businesses now, but in earliest stages, True able to support them through risks at start
- In each fund, make 45-50 initial investments and reserve heavily
  - 1 or 2 founders, investment in company, will generate the whole fund and 6-8 will be fund-level return (25%+)
  - Inputs to each investment: founder taking tons of product, market size market-risk at their price and raising their type of money
- Culture at True: decisions done by protagonist with support of 1 or 2 others in nonconsensus way
  - Support for whole team and company – investment loss as part of process for repeatable out-performance
  - 1 of 10 says the company fits the model, bring on team and then get excited
- Investing at seed stage – 65% near or at company inception, 1 to 3 founders super early
  - Board is access to True, investment team and founder network – monthly call for an hour or so, call me when you learn
  - Board coffees – 15min conversations on this – enable for speed
  - Take board seat at series A – 90 minutes every 8 weeks, roughly, when they have multiple investors, etc…
- Select funds – pitch to founders: be here day 1, continue to invest as you go further, what’s best for company
  - He was on board at Ring during acquisition – partner John still on at Peloton
- Learned a ton from Jamie Siminoff – how fast you can grow is much faster than you think
  - Taking asymmetric risk early on within business is valuable – ex. DoorBot – Jamie rebranded
    - Ring.com domain found, was going to raise $3.5 mln – ultimate cost was $1mln ($200k on that day)
- Favorite book: Doing Capitalism in Innovation Economy by Bill Janeway and Carlota Perez Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
- Biggest challenge in role: Doing more doesn’t correlate with improved performance – Mitchell and Hashicorp had left a portco and later invested in him
  - Steve and Splice – met in Bogota at a conference and happened to meet him in NYC for breakfast after
  - Don’t know which activities are the right ones
- Knowing more about a market – false sense of security to catch up with knowledge
  - Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable – academic paper – markets in many unknowns where knowing more leads to worse decisions
- David Scott at Matrix – software metrics and repeatable business growth
- Randy Glide at DFJ Growth – embraces risk and has a human approach
- Andy Wiseman at USV – small significant syndicate being a great co-investor
- Pat at Sequoia – depth of knowledge on being a great board member and partner to CEOs
- Recent investment: MemBio – mission-driven bio and positive impact creating red blood cells outside the body

Listening and Encouraging (Notes from December 16 to Dec 22, 2019) May 21, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, Data Science, DFS, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Hiring, Leadership, NFL, NLP, RPA, social, sports, Strategy, Uncategorized.
Tags: #business, Amazon, college, community, content, experiences, finance, Google, humanity, ideas, investing, Jobs, life, Money, questions, reading, research, social, sports, Strategy, Time, training
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Sometimes it doesn’t work. Asking the right questions to people in conversations to get a sense of what they’re truly passionate about gives me hope for those that may eventually try something different, new. However, unless I followed up repeatedly, most people let their passion slowly pass, or just remain in thought.

This is a big part of how I learn, engage and stay passionate for the things I’m curious about. Other than being scared of stagnation, hearing people come up with ideas, test them, build and hopefully succeed repeatedly gives me an energy to try to convince others to do the same. I understand the difference between being told of something that has been mulling around in someone’s head or even light discussion among friends compared to prototyping or validating with potential customers or asking people in the field if something’s viable.

A few examples of ideas people have told me they wanted to start and hadn’t (yet some that I believe have done well, just have room in the market) include an HR in Tech stories podcast, traveling medicine / tourism aggregator, and a d2c ecommerce diamond shop (which I’ll go into more detail), more social podcast sharing among friends, and still a market-taking happy hour app (yes, I had to insert my own – I’m leaning toward Glide.app through Google Sheets).

For diamond shop – this was by someone who graduated with entrepreneurship degree, had a validation for the idea and then was told by others it wasn’t worth doing because it’d be high cost. Granted, that was a few years ago, but it would’ve been hackable then. It’s certainly easier now with ecommerce shops via Facebook/Etsy/Shopify and other support, not to mention the audience you’d be in front of. The premise is that a diamond historically took the role of what a pearl represented because of the hardness – you could pass this on as an heirloom to further generations, and you know it won’t be breaking. It’s yours. There’s a legitimate attachment there that defines a core part of the worth/value. For the idea – it’s increasingly cheaper to 3D print a model you can build/customize on CAD (or related tools). This would be printed in plastic that can be melted to be replaced by silver – these rings would be sent to customers that are ordering (possibly with a small down payment / shipping covered, ie $5-20). It’s a model of what the ring would look like, just without the diamond part – but as far as sizing/size/bulk and the other key parts of the ring, customers can try them on and feel it. There’s an emotional attachment here that should occur. If they’re loving it, or have requests for changes, they can do that. Possibly a back and forth could take place, but once it’s settled, the wax/plastic mold can be printed as they would normally do a custom ring and use the materials that have been requested. We’ve removed the in-shop aspect and made it personal, simply by removing much of the fixed costs and labor costs that would go in to this. She was an expert in jewelry and had years of experience. Someone just told her no. 3D printing is now a hobby and can be done there. Many jewelers have other shops do the molding. I’ve been thinking of helping her start by just simply creating a mockup of the site. Can certainly figure out the rest.

Anyhow, let’s see the notes.

Week of December 16, 2019

Tyler Willis (@tylerwillis), angel investor (20min VC 2/16/16)
- Raised with seed companies at Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures
- Port co’s include Lyft, Patreon, Change.org
- First co that he was on founding team on was acquired by Oracle, then had a friend raising a seed round for concept in CV
  - Preproduct, premarket where he did a small investment (decided it was bad to keep all eggs in one basket)
  - Decided to invest in Patreon, Loungebuddy (Airport lounges) and ShopApp inside of Shopify
- Rocketship – valuation doesn’t play a role but ID opps for big (10x path, seed > 10k)
- Customer acq and growth as a lightweight process to get a core part of the company
  - Optimizing for experiments – 1 week to test compared to 8 week deployment
- Founder type – uniquely insightful to the place they’re in
  - Bias for people when he can sit down and get a high-octane thinking / smarts – hard to hang out to the rocketship
  - False dichotomy of domain expertise – could have learned wrong lessons or may not know anything in enterprise, for instance
- East of Eden, Innovator’s Dilemma as great books
- Favorite investors – Naval, Sam Altman, Gus Tai at Trinity Ventures
- Favorite app – Omni (stuff storage), Delectable (learning about wine)
Ash Fontana (@ashfontana)- GP Zetta, Leo Pelovets – GP Susa Ventures (Venture Stories 12/17/19)
- Getting pricing power – need to find balance between incentivizing founders and price, but not a big deal
  - If they get 80% of company, 20% for founders – may not keep them looking ahead
- Company and VC differences – companies have different roles but VC has very similar, solitary roles
- On non-investing side, COO or Head of Ops to run operations but not particularly CEO or investing side needed
- Working with best founders, LPs aren’t as important (but they are the primary VC customers)
  - None matters unless you have results for LPs and providing value – founders need the platform or help
- If you were an LP, what would you want to be in: YC, First Round or Benchmark?
  - YC for Ash – lots of opportunity for capital deployment at many different levels
  - Benchmark for Leo – very large differentiated returns, ~30x according to Leo (YC may be 5x-7x possibly)
    - More variance because of smaller portfolios in Benchmark
  - YC may be beatable but it would be in losing their way as a general accelerator
    - Ash brought up operational risk for LPs – more points of failure because of all the touchpoints
- AngelList as trading to be profitable and dynamic system for new things
- LinkedIn as insurmountable lead in enterprise/business space of social network (as opposed to consumers)
  - Hard to disrupt with multiple verticals
- Requests for startups: data generation/building data (synthetically) – ex w/ params
  - 10k examples of chairs that are brown that have 4 legs, in low light, at this angle
  - Weather climate, also
  - AutoML – making it easy for non-specialist engineers to experiment with ML
- Leo Requests: ISA with bundling with coaching, training, VISAs – realigning incentives
Ben Tossell, founder Makerpad, Sahil Lavingia (@shl), founder GumRoad (Indie Hackers 11/11/19)
- No-code vs code – building a solution to a problem without being technical
- First web-sites like Dreamweaver and tables for no-code – like WYSIWYG
  - Halfway things like WordPress where you can customize or use framework
  - Building a newsletter, can use Substack, for instance – Marc Andreesen
- Sahil’s opinion that we’re unlikely to see a billion dollar start-up without a code base
  - But likely to see many creatives build on their own, have the options
- Choice of no-code compared to code – using Circle as their integration testing methods
- Nontechnical founders that had cofounders for developers or finding for cheap
- Ben as bringing up Lambda School (Airtable, Slack, Zoom, Notion) and Makerpad member who was just starting to say it’s breaking
  - $150mn in Series A to get to worry about things breaking first
  - “What’s my Airbnb version look like?” but should focus on the first $10, 100 before there
- GumRoad as being built in a weekend – not competent enough for him to do no-code
  - Ben argued it was easy to do in no-code but they’re each discussing the same thing from different experiences
- Queries on data for code – tools like Clay/Retool where you can work together – can run queries easily
  - No-coder does query and can recognize it to manipulate
- Powerful for on-code is git and version controls – clear log of security, feedback, quality of code
  - Apply it to other things – pull requests/merge (conflicts)/conflicts in document setting on Notion, for instance
  - 100+ tutorials in MakerPad now – what’s interesting or grab attention
- No-code as Patreon/Cameo/Airbnb/Uber where the overhead for coding sucks so much value from (Patreon at $30-40mln burn)
  - Creator would be interesting with price-motivating factors because you could have a more affordable option
  - “What’s the point of trying if I can’t even get to the ceiling?”
  - Meetup clone – need the “this is how you build it” – go look at the tutorials
- Not enough answers for “Where can it go?” because they haven’t seen enough
Niccolo De Masi (@niccolodemasi), CEO and Chairman at Glu Mobile (20min VC 2/18/16)
- Kendall and Kylie game (#1 at app store at time), Kim K game, Deer Hunter and others
- Was CEO at Hands on Mobile as well as CEO at Monstermob Group Plc
- No money to be made in games in 2003 because they were for feature films, polyphonic, true tracks and he ran a public co before selling in 2007
  - Raised money to get bid for Glu from Hands on Mobile but got a call from Egahn Zander to transition to paid from f2p as CEO
  - Original IP value with games specifically for mobile on hardware
- How will you make money in late-stage startup for future? Next year or two vs past.
  - Forward looking and professional managers – no founders anymore. Built from 350-850 people.
- Moore’s Law as quite predictable but believes there are different models, utilities, and price models
  - Last gen console power in pockets now
- Barometer of quarterly calls driving placements and interim 6 week calls for how they’re doing
  - If transparent in bad times, you may have quick punishment vs window-dressing
  - Rewarded more quickly in the upside, as well – private markets vs public markets
- New startups as worth more than incumbents – bay as more regular here
  - Well ahead in private markets compared to public markets (his counter – at least they have earnings)
- No BD or CorpDev – scour market and wait for inbounds of compellingly priced assets (often distressed), significant private markets
  - When Glu is $6-7, they can pick up companies easily but not so much at $2-4
  - Savings to be had for core customers when they have scale within Glu (mentioned PlayFirst)
  - “retirement community for young people” – startups subsidized, food, clothing and sharing app
- By 2020 – more discipline in different sectors potentially – overvalued will have to come in line
  - King that was acquired by Activision Blizzard – consolidation forced by VC funding and people flow
- Better to be #1 in smaller market than #10 in a larger one – be great w/ you’re good at
Tim Draper (@timdraper), founding partner at Draper Associates and DFJ (20min VC 2/22/16)
- Original suggestion for viral marketing in web-based email to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market
  - Standard marketing technique now
- EE at Stanford before going to Apollo Computer as assistant to President before HBS
  - Came out and wanted to be a VC (grandpa/father both were VCs and didn’t want to do it) – wanted to be a consultant / cheerleader
  - Helped him having an entrepreneurial base but some can certainly do it if it’s your goal
- Borrowed money from gov to get started – knocked on doors with software on them
  - Most VCs needed others to help fund a company so they worked together – moreso now for angels, but not necessarily VC because of money
  - VC has gone global and has enjoyed that expansion – affecting the whole industry
- His son’s accelerator, Boost, focusing so they can accelerate any business – he enjoys investing in 2-3 people with a good mission
  - Get people set up in the right way – medical, eshares, network accounting, and other operational methods
- Favorite pitch – Nicholas Zenstrom at Skyper – most smooth, effective way and he’d agreed before calling and changing business model
  - Enthusiastic, quiet confidence for the enormous successes – Robin Lee (Baidu), Hotmail’s founder, Martin Everhart (Tesla)
- Draper Uni of Heroes (entrepreneurs/founders) creating school during crash for better people
  - Give these people the confidence + tools while ridding them of shielding
  - DraperUniversity and StartupU – great marketing for school
- Bitcoin interesting for a year ahead of the time, and then post-Mt Gox hack it went down only 20% so he jumped in
  - Micropayments, fees in journalism and podcasting as well as ending credits and cross-country
- Enjoys hearing Andreesen, Moritz, McClure at 500 Startups, Plug-n-Play as first incubator, Ron Conway
- Reflects on The Startup Game (his father’s) and Rothschild’s Bionomics and concept of evolution of econ and bio
- Recent investment Laurel & Wolfe (interior decorating as best furniture for crowdsourcing) – closed update Dec ’19
- Also invested in Favor, marketplace food delivery – acquired by HE Butt Grocery
Brandon Deer (@bdeer26), VP of Ops & Strategy at UIPath (20min VC 12/20/19)
- Using RPA combined with business processes for automation
- Using Gary Kasparov’s loss to IBM in chess before saying it’s no longer a chess or human – combination where average + average is optimum
- Having growth and breaking things
Wharton Moneyball, Ken Pomeroy and Brian Burke (@bburkeespn) (Wharton XM)
- Discussing the biggest predictors, NCAA basketball or in football
- Pomeroy and how he’s adjusted his football predictions

Organizing the Mind, Studying (Notes from Dec 9 to Dec 15, 2019) May 6, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Data Science, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, medicine, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, books, content, directlistings, experiences, finance, humanity, ideas, IPO, life, marketing, medicine, Money, Netflix, questions, reading, research, sports, Time
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As I try to stay organized overall, and especially in our current environment, it does seem that I have hit a snag in where/how to curate all information. I’ve attempted to settle on Roam to do notes since it keeps bi-directional links and essentially enables a personal wiki. However, this is awesome once we get to enough notes/details/lists. It’s a pain in the ass until then because it’s just not set up.

Until I get to the point where I can export all of what I want and stylistically group it, it will be a very large work-in-progress. Why? Well, I started to list a few things of what I like to keep track of. Here’s a few off the top of my head:

Notes from Podcasts/Webinars that I usually keep in OneNote (top include 20min VC, FinTech Insider, a16z, Wharton Moneyball, The Indie Hackers podcast, among others)
Book notes that are either in OneNote if they’re older or, if in my Kindle, potentially on Readwise/Overdrive
Daily/weekly updates including investment research via Crunchbase, lay of the land from a16z, Futurism interesting stories, StockTwits Daily Rip, Makerpad/Product Hunt updates, as well as Beta List products
Newsletters and Trends – Morgan’s Blogging, Nat Eliason’s Medley and other notes, Justin Gage’s Technicality, Trends report from The Hustle, Polina Marinova’s The Profile
Then there are the finance and investment articles that go to my RSS feed (OfDollarsandData, Ritholz, Datanami, Tomas Tungaz updates, plenty of others
Last but not least – bookmarked websites, Twitter likes/bookmarks that I just don’t get a chance to go back to, GitHub starred pages, anything shared in Slack or LinkedIn groups

How the hell do I organize all of that? Well, we’re trying and I’ll update you on where we land. All I know is that I should curate it down to my favorites or just try to learn less. Who wants to do that, though?

Week of December 9, 2019

Yaron Kniajer, Jared Kash, Cofounders of Sababa Ventures (Wharton XM)
- Discussing how safe and nice Tel-Aviv is
  - Rising of AI and tech in Israel ecosystem
- Bridging the gap between entrepreneurs and investors
- Talkspace – mental health app from Israeli creator
- 18 million in revenue to New York, knowing the market and opening doors
- Host, Randi, is a GP
David Sinclair (@davidasinclair), Prof in Genetics and Aging at HMS (Kevin Rose Show, 10/30/19)
- Cofounder of 7 biotech co’s, co-editor of Aging journal, boardmember and 25+ patents
- Book – Lifespan most recently Book link
- Genes in yeast cells for aging while 29 entering Harvard finding red wine part
  - Media swinging from “wow we’ll live forever” to the opposite
  - Mice had a healthy longevity even if obese on wine part (caloric restriction without)
- Sirtris Pharma – 2004 started and focusing on activators of Sirtuins – GSK purchased in 2008 for $720mln
  - 2010 people at Pfizer and Amgen published saying their research was wrong
  - 1 amino acid and 1 protein in living mouse as not living longer for resveratrol
  - Scientific debate limiting patients, potentially (needs to be taken with fat / drug-like molecules at GSK)
    - Patent life is 20 years and he doesn’t have the extra $20mln to get the clinical trials going again
- For his book, we age similarly to yeast cells aging – loss of information (1 is genetic and other is, fragile, analog)
  - Backup copy of information for aging / cells came in 2018
- Claude Shannon as one of his heroes – backup copy, need an observer and the rest of backup (when he did computer science/internet)
  - Remembering in 1999 that he woke up in middle of night to write out the theory of aging
  - Gene therapy doesn’t work in the eye – compared to a clock for memory of time, cog, removing hands or resetting
- Nanoworld and subatomic in DNA – if secret is there, Methane compared to subatomic
- Going as fast and safely to get it to humans – eye regeneration for a few cases
  - Nerve crush (spinal damage), glycoma in mice and restore vision, 1 year old blind mice with gene therapy can see
- NAD and InsideTracker for genetic results and following the mixture / output
- Nuances to how CGM and monitors react to individual foods (brown rice vs others, for instance)
- NR, NMN and NAD checking for longevity and how to raise NAD
  - All cells need NAD to grow – if you put them up to levels of younger, you likely won’t cause cancer
  - Guesses for couple hundred thousand people on NMN supplements and nobody has died, to date
- Pulsing and hormesis – what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
  - Information on trees where older ones will send a notice to younger ones that a danger is coming
- His father as 80 and healthiest in a while – post-stroke, heart attack and had heart disease
  - Taking metformin, NMN, resveratrol for a bit now
  - 500mg metformin with resveratrol and yogurt (stomach gets upset a bit) in morning – may have some in evening
  - 1g a day of resveratrol – 150mg typical (he mentioned knowing 14 years of research on animals, toxicity and human trials)
    - Min dose from animals at 250mg typically – liver enzymes are fine
Ryan Caldbeck (@ryan_caldbeck), founder & CEO of CircleUp (20min VC 2/11/16)
- Online investing platform that allows to invest in consumer companies
- Previously, worked in consumer product and retail-focused p/e at TSG Consumer Partners and Encore Consumer Capital
  - Hundreds of investment firms that love consumer retail and its returns, love cash-flow characteristics, only after $10-15mln revenue
  - 3.5x average in ~4 years for younger companies – not enough money in that space
- Crowdfunding as group of people coming together to fund something (debt, equity, product, donations)
  - Separate as an investing platform so the investors should thrive
- Title 3 of JOBS Act – if company raises capital there from non-accredited investors, the hoops you have to go through aren’t worth it
  - Less cost to going with accredited investors without benefit – Title 3 will require the yearly book opening
    - Majority of companies don’t need the significant amount of users 100-200 to make a dent in what they’re looking for
  - Would have to prove to a company before taking on the cost – more likely that companies will fail at accredited investors and go to unaccredited
    - Maybe a tech raises up for the inefficiencies to solve this, but not so far
- Lack of institutional capital in the sector of crowdfunding – for Ryan, explosion of institutional on the platform
  - Average in 2012 was $12k individual accredited to 2015 where the check was $100k into one deal and half is institutional
    - Similar to LendingClub growth as individuals to ind, then family offices, small funds and larger funds
- Seed round was with Maveron and Clayton Christenson after ~60 some investors that passed (hard to get them excited)
  - Union Square had said they would never invest in online equity investing platform and changed view for Series A – marketplaces solve need
  - Series B was 30 days from start to invest and series C was easier
- When someone else doesn’t believe in him, he further believes in himself – energizes him (when teammates believe in him and opponents don’t – at his best)
  - Very small details for most meetings that are still vivid for him – uses as fuel
Arielle Zuckerberg (@ariellezuck), Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (20min VC 2/14/16)
- Joined in 2015 and focuses on early stage investment in digital practice
- Started as PM after CS and Philosophy at Claremont McKenna
  - Wildfire Interactive acquired by Google in 2012 where she then worked on social ads
  - then went to small startup called Humin for 2 years and started angel investing
- A lot of investments since you chase after 1 company that likely returns the portfolio
  - How to evaluate the team, market, differentiated product, terms of valuation
- Being a great listener – give them feedback and they would come back every time with a better pitch
  - First few months of venture – personal challenge for thinking of people based on their intellectual capital
    - How can they be helpful? Will this person be helpful toward portfolio? Will this person be a potential founder?
    - Struggles with this as she’s becoming more transactional. Didn’t experience it as an angel investor.
- While interviewing for firms, many people offered to give her introductions (warm, mostly)
  - Small handful of interviews – conversational in nature, questions on background – what motivates her and how she’d fit
  - Taking Tyler’s class gave her energy for VC
- Google, AI and CV – AI as a service – ubiquitous as in the cloud
  - Many industries being productized for first time – likes blockchain and smart contracts
- Goals: Source a deal for Kleiner within a year that will have invested where world is better place/impactful
  - Inspire more women to be in VC and female founders – although talked about finding and talking with many women in VC
- NYE: blog more for 2016, had concrete resolutions for doing a pull-up and moonwalk – did at firm holiday event
- Favorite book: The Symposium by Plato
- Respecting founders who have a belief that others don’t really have – ex: Evan Spiegel as phones being more a camera than anything else
  - John Doerr and Mary Meeker
- Best part of VC – talking to amazing people and hearing other opinions (as youngest of 4 siblings)
  - Introduction of creative conflict, vision for where future is going
- Firm’s recent investment – team execution is crazy, tons of time with customers, great listeners, improved deck 20% each time
Barry McCarthy, CFO of Spotify (former CFO of Netflix), Stacey Cunningham, Pres of NYSE (a16z 12/10/19)
- Direct Listings, Myths and Facts – architecting the direct listing as it currently stands and how they talked to the SEC
- The Street interpreting compared to guidance and what to expect – analysts wanted to BEAT guidance instead of get something close
- Pricing inequities – price discovery in direct listings compared to offerings
  - Large portfolio (AUM) has IPO immaterial – first day pop is meaningless and they have limited ownership in IPO but not direct listing
  - Institutional investors can dump the truck for direct listings for how they want
- Lock-ups are artificial constraints
- DMMs and financial advisors exist anyhow – still need s1 and filing/investor days involve same people
Michael Salfino, Ben Baldwin (Wharton Moneyball 12/11/19)

The Parallel for Company Building (Notes from Dec. 2 – Dec 8, 2019) April 13, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Data Science, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, global, medicine, NLP, questions, social, Uncategorized.
Tags: #business, content, datascience, ideas, Money, questions, research
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Keeping this short because I’m working at putting the idea together. Love the parallel for a gym atmosphere and company building.

I bet it’s already forming in your head. Imagine the big class at a big box gym, the personal ones, classes, aggressive combat, cycling, different personalities in weight lifting, cardio spending and all the pairs of trainer + clients you can imagine. It’s in the works!

I do hope you enjoy the deep dive and notes I took in hearing Buck Woody’s AI podcast. You should also review Louis’s app for Total Brain. Wrap that up with Dustin Dolginow’s review on how to utilize the power of the internet to own the VC and investing interest.

Week of December 2, 2019

Louis Gagnon, CEO, Cofounder of TotalBrain (Work and Life, WhartonXM)
- Talking about each person having different brains, therefore different treatments
- Making sure that the brain is merely a part of you, not all of you – racing
  - In these years, it’s a large amount of stress – good or bad
Buck Woody (@buckwoodymsft), Applied D/S at Microsoft (Data Skeptic 12/3/19)
- Lots of intricacies in bonsai trees
  - Last thing you get to learn is the watering can – easily under/over-water trees
  - Scissors as the primary tool
- ML/AI/BI and advanced data analysis – rigor of right spread, amount, representation, statistics things are the watering can
  - If base data is wrong, the model is pointless
- He works in the industries teaching classes on MS platform for SQL Server (which contains Spark and many other things), data science
  - Simply looking at the data – where did I get this? Say, financial projections: financial data (how do you know it’s here)
  - Predictions as pedantic/boring: preventative/maintenance predictions – wanted to ensure units wouldn’t fail
    - Half the time, predictions worked well, half the time, worked awful
      - How did the data report from the machines? Had to go to manual of machine (there was older, newer) to see data
      - Anomaly was that the older machine was reporting every 60 minutes, not minutes (which the newer was doing)
- Works with many users – fraud and anomaly detection
  - Use case example of gaming company with cheating and making sure the data was good
- Regionalized languages – programming as how you think of your solutions
  - Big things to do: Kubernetes and Containers – be very familiar with environments to make sure infrastructure is done well
- Looking through data science process – who wears what hats, data engineers and DBA having overlapping roles
  - Many he comes across that don’t know that database guys can do much of what they’re looking for
  - Often the requirement, if given to data scientists late, will be multiple projects
- Containers run-time – (docker) vs Docker
  - Text file (yaml) with Python 3.5, MySQL and code as file – compose into an image (gathered up version of those runtimes)
    - Tell Docker to run it – container – description to image to container – not representing memory and disc, just using that on station
    - Docker smart enough to recognize that it will run similar versions
- Kubernetes – KAS
  - Another yaml file and engine, on a node (physical or virtual) with docker runtime, couple of services (networking, part of cluster) with

Master node that makes sure everything is happening – wrangles everything for you in a persistent volume for the pod since storage was an issue

Thinking of SQL as declarative language – select * from mytable isn’t what we do
- Containers are declarative language for computers, essentially
- Kubernetes is the platform or network for a full declarative network
Business intelligence in 90s – specialized people as parts of it with only some people knowing how to use, prechew for users and it took months
- 5-6 years ago, this still remained – data scientist would spend 99% of time in economic data or weather data or whatever model, version or experiment
  - Walk out with tablets, thus save the data – maybe another she was working with, maybe not
- Data engineer is most sought after job title – “everything but the algorithm” at Microsoft (LinkedIn)
  - Link – aka.ms\tdsp, defines out team structure for data science team with guides – devops, mlops, aiops, mlops
  - People are used to BI projects – one cube, answer lots of questions but with a data scientist, if you question “this and this and this..” – separate
    - 2 or 3 different data sets, can’t answer clustering question with regression algo, how many of these vs which things do they belong to
For large orgs: Do you know if you have a DB team? All data in its forms.
- Showed someone SSIS done after a minute after they started pulling up R and his algorithms – “wizardry”
  - Used to work at NASA, talked of a friend scientist who landed a round camera on the moon ahead – had to turn it away from sun because it’d melt film
  - Some of cast of Star Trek would show up all the time at NASA, large glass rooms (lab coat, tie, white shirt)
    - James Doohan, Scotty was gonna show up. Scientists would go to break room and watch Star Trek in 60s (debate whether or not stuff was possible)
      - Mentions automatic door as someone being off camera in the 60s, possible or not on physics
    - Taking notes and turns camera back on – “Fascinating” from Leonard Nimoy on the outside of glass
- He wants to make people know that they have people that can fold into data science team
  - Cultural that DBAs think they’ll need to be data scientists and data scientists that are territorial (don’t want people messing around)
Young: computational basics, logics, data processing
- High level math – stats/linear algebra
- Domain expert: particular vertical like healthcare, finance or patterns available for a width of an application of a tech
- Learning to learn: how to pick up and put down knowledge – pace of learning something (can’t be an expert in the timeframe)
  - Pick language you like and then figure out how you’re learning it – then, do it again for others
- Hours of studying that can be pre-chewed – lack of focused time, spend too much time on all of it
  - Confs where people get away to focus on a topic (until they get on their phone and blow it)
Where’s AI going? He says – going away. “Nobody says they have computers at the company anymore”
- “I” or “e” in front of company and get funding anymore, same with cloud – just ubiquitous, computing/drive
- Predictive/prebuilt AI now – text analysis, image processing, predictions
- Need to know how to trust it or trusting it too much – aka.ms\ai-ethics
- Flash fill, for instance, in Excel – Microsoft Research done in PROSE AI in the cell, disappears into product
Ex: PowerPoint presentation coach with mic on and it will critique you

Dustin Dolginow (@dolginow), GP at Maiden Lane (20min VC 2/10/16)
- Online venture fund using AngelList as its o/s, capital partner to best angels in the world, investments in Getable, PipeDrive, Beepi
  - Also venture partner with Accomplice, was previous operator at Social Swipe allowing merchants to gain value from txn data
- Went to college in East Coast, Wall Street at Lehman Brothers during crash and decided to do a product idea in payments for 1.5 years
  - Product dev, front-end and shifting from finance world – introduced to partner Jeff (running Atlas Ventures, renamed to Accomplice)
- Started taking introductions to companies as Nidhi, Naval and AngelList would be giving them – since 2010 and normal user
  - Atlas lead the AngelList series A and every round since – 2012 moved to SF and make VC legal – 2013 for syndicates start
    - Lead a syndicates fund only in 2013 with Jeff – learn by doing and figure out what it meant – $25mln named for Maiden Lane in SF
      - Irony was AngelList HQ was on it, one of bailout funds for Goldman Sachs real estate was Maiden Lane
  - Figured Syndicates could be impactful for institutional investors, also
- Moved to SF in 2014 to close the fund, April started investing in the fund
  - Native app on AngelList – (like saying Uber is Apple because on Apple) – put in their docs 50% off-A/L, 50% on but realized it was moving quickly
  - AngelList as unbundling the activities of VC – funds are containers for capital / infrastructure
    - AngelList has more flexibility but it’s a small container – box – they’re doing product first with data that it creates
- Working with set of angel investors that take their money and invest on their behalf – share carried interest within GP’s (30% carry, no mgmt fee)
  - 15-20% of carried interest goes to syndicate leads – driving brand, operating within company, adding value, interacting
  - His goal is to shepherd to create resources for community (most syndicate leads have other jobs) – live work loft, for instance
- Community and flexibility is a big part of it – consensus-based decisions, non-consensus (conviction for solo), LPs as direct investments for bigger broader
- Entrepreneurs as understanding users’ needs – great community done by Ryan Hoover at Product Hunt
- Most overhyped – prescription delivery, underhyped – Canada as country, developer tax credits
- Goal for Maiden Lane – kickass set of syndicate leads that get called upon by lane
- Last impression from a book: Development is Freedom by Amartya Sen
- AtVenu – as most recent investment

If You’re Not Sure, Ask (Notes from Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2019) March 26, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, marketing, medicine, social, sports, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, books, content, education, experiences, finance, humanity, ideas, Jobs, life, medicine, questions, research, social, sports, training, video
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Hopefully everyone is staying safe in this current environment of CoVid19. A wild start to the year and March, especially. Seems prescient to identify those of this week of notes, especially with Domm at Fast trying to make things easier/painless in checkouts for ecommerce, Iman at Incredible Health trying to gain power for nurses and the healthcare workers on the front lines, as well as the investment questions we should be asking with Rob Carver and Meb Faber.

Before jumping in, though, I just wanted to reiterate something I’d heard in a few times across forums/channels and communities I participate in – just ask if you have a question or hesitating! It’ll be worth it – or you’ll be in the same position you’re in now. Social interaction and discussion will be key in how we come out better than where we started. I implore you – ASK. Anyone. Hope you enjoy!

Domm (@domm) Holland, founder and CEO of Fast (20min VC 11/15/19)
- Raised seed round from Jan Hammer at Index, Susa, Kleiner Perkins, Global Founders and angels (Inc Harry)
- Director at Tap Tins and CEO/Founder at Tows
- Introduced at 15, started programming and in Australia when it wasn’t cool, building was what he enjoyed
  - Had a large startup in Australia for a bit
  - Wife/him were in the hospital looking after son/daughter and he was home with the wife’s grandmother when she couldn’t order
    - Forgot her password and wouldn’t take credit card because of arbitrary string – pw-less solution, auth as simple solution
    - Put it on ProductHunt and it was #2 for the day
  - Doesn’t make sense that customers can’t move between businesses with their authentication
- Ran out of money in a legal battle with Tows – $17mln that government decided to not pay
- Many people don’t want to solve the problem – they do band-aid fixes, complex solutions
  - Build network of independent contractors of tow trucks
- He just looks at what he’s doing as solving problems, solutions – Stripe gave businesses the infrastructure to process credit card payments
  - Built critical infrastructure that others didn’t have – similar to authentication, Shopify, etc
- Everyone has been building payment, authentication, registration forms all first-party and customer tokens
  - Alternative business models and sharing data conflicts with their independence
- Deciding to be SF-based – he only has certain hours in a day, but limited output and larger market and tech companies
  - People in SF value equity far more since Australia has issues with company stock and issuing options
  - 50, 100, 150 bp in SF to make it worthwhile
- Had done an angel round of $600k Australian, ~$400k to continue product development and areas he didn’t have expertise in
  - Put out job ad for remote role thinking they’d get 1 or 2, had a fantastic applicant from Nigeria for talent
  - Money was so much less than what was budgeted – average earnings, paying 50% above market and fantastic employee
    - So much so, they have 10 employees there – Nigeria with 190 million people, remote and solid advocates
  - Managing engineers in person/remote are similar anyhow – adjusts his time zone to them, checks in to each daily
  - Structured time for functional areas and 15min calls to go over work regularly
- His differentiator is speed, time – act promptly, efficiently and doing things early by operating in that manner
  - Walks 3-4 miles through Tenderloin in SF to make sure he sees inaction as a reminder
- Thirst for knowledge – difficult to not come across new things (Twitter as a tool for exposure to people, tools)
Frank Fiume (@frankfiume), Founder and CEO of i9 Sports (Wharton XM)
- Talking about burnout – body’s anticipation of requiring a form of change
  - Entrepreneur burnout – results not meeting expectations for an extended period of time
- Using behavior tests to filter out the people who may be too similar once you’re looking to hire for expansion
  - He made mistake of hiring people he liked and matched with, as opposed to those that he needed
Meb Faber (@mebfaber), founder of Cambria Investments on The Road Less Traveled (Resolve’s Gestalt University, ep.05 6/27/19)
- Discussing with Adam about his bs meter – how crazy it is to be overweight US equities
- Canada is worse – 86% of advisors
- Global allocation and strategy – always keeping files on board for ETF, not sure when they are needed or will be used
- Launching 2006 with trend following paper and opening ETFs as broadly better managed strategy/fee structure
  - Agnostic – just wants to offer best client experience, strategy
  - Holding for long periods as how the strategy should be assessed, not weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly
    - Managers tough to judge on this long time frame
- Being on call with asset managers where they ask what the best funds are – why? So to avoid them?
- Currently, tax efficient in emerging small/medium cap for long-term 15+ years
- Market cap as terrible way to weight portfolio – as you select highest cap-weighted company, they don’t often stay there
Jon & Justin, cofounders of Transistor.fm (Build Your SaaS – bootstrapping in 2019, 11/26/19)
- Building and looking at Transistor.fm and other podcasts
- Dropping the revenue numbers on Baremetrics – not just competitors, but eventually there won’t be 50% mom growth
Mythology Manager (Marketing Matters)
- Marvel and having a different marketing aspect for big films and otherwise
- Different projects and input for actors/characters
Rob Carver (@investingidiocy), Systematic Money, author (ReSolve’s Gestalt U ep. 03, 5/9/19)
- Discussing different risk metrics – hard to predict or calculate Sharpe ratios so he assumes they’re the same, often
  - Sharpe as primary vs secondary metric – meta-factor
- Construction of portfolio as time frame and strategy – used to start with $100k (first book), most recent book with $500 capital
- Performing out of sample vs in sample – binary strategy vs weighting
- If you don’t select a strategy, you’re biased against it – “Three Judases”
  - Properly keeping strategies in the files/repo to backcheck (if you get rid of some that you’ve used and got out of, others can’t replicate)
  - Proper weighting would be signals that activate / de-activate strategies, maybe keeping the ones above a threshold
- Private equity and private assets discussions – what’s optimum? 1, 2, 10, 50, 100? Take on risks for this, should be rewarded appropriately.
  - Is it 5, 10% of portfolio? Size matters and type of assets. Mentions GE as having a bunch of minor bets on the private side with more liquidity.’
Beth Hendler-Grunt, President and Founder at Next Great Step (Career Change, Wharton XM)
- College attendees going after internships early – not just through career fairs
  - Not everything career-wise is linear, can be creative
- Portfolio & value add – “What happens if you didn’t return tomorrow, next week, etc…?”
Iman Abuzeid (@imanabuzeid), CEO and founder Incredible Health (a16z 11/28/19)
- Nursing Today, From the Bedside and Beyond
- 2018 Biggest industry in terms of number of workers – clinical workers are 60% nurses – 3million of them
  - Regulated in California where the ratio is 5 patients to 1 nurse
  - Beyond 12 hour shift, 2.5x more likely to make medication errors – documentation as well
- Shortage of faculty, nurses and all cities – also pays well, compensation-wise (California $100k, SF $140k, LA $120k)
  - Magnate certified is hospitals with majority of nurses bachelors recipients
  - When overstaffed, higher cost of overtime to contractors and less patients (in a thin margin business of hospitals, ~3%)
- Talent / HR teams as inefficiency across the board – haven’t changed since ’90s
  - Tech tools don’t work for specialization/unique cases – job platforms are just ziprecruiter, indeed, LinkedIn but not matching certs/degrees
  - If you’re trying to fill oncology nurse, CEO and sales – one horizontal platform vs vertical platform
- Most healthcare workers aren’t on LI, search and discovery is hard and fields aren’t specific enough, InMail response is < 10%
  - Narrow vertical, one job description and complexity is enormous – takes level of focus and optimization to add value to healthcare system/nurses
  - Incredible Health: Employers apply to talent, automated screening of certs/licenses/experience/skills with tech, custom matching
- Hospital/health systems are able to fill positions in < 30 days when average is 90+ days – topline benefit
  - Churning nurses costs more on patients, complex environments for matching, high-stakes in retention (moreso than others)
  - 20% turnover with tight labor market – overworked, burnt out, better staffed, commute times, 90% women, higher pay
  - Hired in 11 days – have their act together and higher employee engagement
- Hospital recruiters have a 7 day countdown for interview requests, scarcity for competitive nurses
  - Only platform that nurses get to make their profile and sit back after for interviews

When Innovating Away Staleness (Notes from Nov 18 – Nov 24, 2019) February 25, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Blockchain, Digital, finance, Founders, global, medicine, Politics, Strategy, training, Uncategorized.
Tags: #business, content, experiences, finance, Google, humanity, ideas, life, medicine, Politics, research, social, TV
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Entrenched. The longtime incumbents. When industry becomes too single-minded, others may start to notice. Each of these individuals from the podcast episodes are in very different industries – media/news, investing/venture, monetary policy system, and regulatory updating of provider-side healthcare. All very large, important systems that beget those that have lived the longest.

Each of the guests, however, saw opportunities in how stale an industry had/has become and attempted to take advantage. Whether that’s building something on their own directly (Jon Steinberg with Cheddar News Network) or indirectly (Gil Penchina with Flights.vc), they have a penchant for seeing innovation through. I loved hearing a few of them mention that it’s nuts to have the incumbents stagnate over some of the most advanced couple of decades we’ve ever seen.

I hope you enjoy the notes for how they structured the framework for the innovation, what opportunities they tried or came to realize, and which crazy people do you back.

Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg), COO of Cheddar News Network (Launch Pad, Wharton XM)
- Large appetite for live news and sports, very few people had done any in 20-30 years
- Younger, faster, better as a business network
  - Younger, diverse anchors & audience in their 20s, 30s, 40s vs 60s and older
- First round raised was $3mln, no big iron of typical broadcaster – different look and feel, same structural format for guest formats
- Former president of Buzzfeed (2010-2014), DailyMail after – CNBC and live production as the best production
- Lightspeed Capital friend who wanted to give him a first check – being part of a startup management team that’s successful to go from there
  - His first success was with Buzzfeed – played a role with many others, but combined his luck and effort to get the check
  - Gave up 20% for the $3mil
- Showed up at the WeWork with Peter Gornstein, first partner and Chief Content Officer – looked at each other and “What now?”
  - Bought computers, then what now? Looked for vendors for equipment and build set.
  - Shot a 3min sizzle reel – shot sample video packages.
  - Next, go live from 9-10am one hour a day, basically – then how to ramp it up to 3 hours and more
- Facebook Live launched, then they enabled the API so they could connect professional network equipment to it
- Carriage fees – ESPN gets several dollars for every cable subscriber
  - Cheddar does advertisers and partnerships for their money and business
- Purchasing Ratemyprofessor, MTVU – college market and network
- Competitors are part of the network and counterparties still
- Runs all news and advertising for Altice (after being bought by Viacom)
Gil Penchina (@gilpenchina), Founder at Flight.vc (20min VC 2/7/16)
- Note that this was the first day Harry had been to SF (meeting Jason Lemkin)
- Network of AngelList syndicates that covers a wide range of sectors, SaaS, security, geographies
  - Biggest raise for syndicates to date – PayPal, LinkedIn, AngelList, Indiegogo – nominated for Angel of Year at Crunchys
- One of early engineers at eBay (100 employees to 15000, 8 years)
  - Ran a spin-off of Wikipedia called Wikia – consumer content site, went to Fastly and angel investing
  - Wanted to work with entrepreneurs to fund small checks to other entrepreneurs as a community of helping
    - Didn’t want to do the full-time thing and thought he didn’t want to focus on terms all the time
- At Flight, at time, they have 25 syndicate managers, 100+ volunteers to join the list – 2 groups – 1 analysis/learning companies, other sales/scouts
  - 3000 backers and they ask them to help their companies, small tasks (AngelMob) to improve or give introductions and recruiting
- 5 years time – become a place for consumers to invest and save
  - Expansion fund and new projects – Eric working on traditional venture fund for follow-on in angel investments
- 15 years ago, cost $10-15mln to get a website now and now it’s $10 or free for URLs (Reed’s blitz-scaling)
- Next sector to be disrupted – education (investment seed and B into Allschool)
- Start a syndicate – come up with thesis, going out and finding the deals (1 click to start), getting traction is hard
- Investment ethos – people that are actually crazy
- User of Nuzzel – best content for all of his friends
- Similarity of Happn to “Chance Encounters” from newspaper – hoping someone sees it and reacts
Patrick Harker, President of Philadelphia Fed (Behind the Markets, Wharton XM)
- About 1/5 of jobs are at risk of being automated out – minorities and women in his district
  - Creating and destroying jobs with automation – not necessarily ridding them, but training will be important
  - Philadelphia Works – job training model for America, partnering with Comcast
    - Typically, it’s been “train and pray” – training and upskill, Comcast will reimburse out of the HR budget if successful
- Biggest surprise – outside the lens of monetary policy – breadth of what they do is stunning
  - Largest collection of economic talent for all sorts of issues that aren’t celebrated
Pharma Drones, Veteran Health (16min on the News #14, 11/15/19)
- Venkat Mocherla – market dev on bio team, GP Julie Yoo, Joel de la Garza security operating partner a16z
- Pharmacy-patient relationship is highest volume/frequency interactions with healthcare system, owning node is good
  - Lots of startups on logistics on pharm, last mile and full-stack delivery/pharm, nontraditional care centers
  - Medicines/therapeutics work for patients, compliance is one of the biggest pains
- MediPlus, Whatsapp your prescription and you can get delivery within 24 hours
  - Fastest regulatory arbitrage – where are opportunities – Zipline in Rwanda, for instance
  - Antiquated for brick-and-mortar to innovate, but instead mobile-first and digital distribution
  - Pills, small molecule drugs that are cheaper, chronic that can be easier
- Last mile delivery solution is cost – one-off deliveries to patients to homes has cost issues – more expensive
  - All come to hub because of delivery efficiency
- Apple opened up health records service to vets with iPhones – give them access to their medical information regardless of provider
  - VA is mired in healthcare challenges (came up with EHR)
  - Knock on digital health industry – great for pilots but unable to scale so far, VA and NHS populations are one-go scale
    - Not bastions of innovation but more captive population (1mil to 10-20mil)
  - Last decade, provider-side heads down for data that’s digitized but not interoperability
    - Get at the data is not a given, Apple unleashing data to consumers is great but is there utility in it? (no imaging data, limited)
  - Match data to patient, or doctors, scheduling appointments – technology for technology’s sake isn’t usually great
- Voice commands as being sent by light – specific microphone design that’s vulnerable to the attack
  - Area of research to use frequencies of energy to affect systems – light to mimic sound, for instance
  - Advent of radio has been different research – cathode ray tubes, radio surveillance
- Enabling hardware manufacturers to guard against this – microfilms or filtering fraud and security

Back from Vacation (Notes from Nov 11 to 17, 2019) February 11, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, cannabis, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, gym, Leadership, marketing, NFL, NLP, questions, social, Strategy, training, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, Analysis, cannabis, college, content, education, experiences, finance, freedom, Google, humanity, ideas, investing, life, marketing, Money, NASCAR, NFL, questions, reading, research, social, sports, Strategy, Time, training, Transition, TV, video
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It had been a long while – 9? months since taking more than 1 day off extra and closer to 20 months since I’d had a week off in a row. I visited the Big Island in Hawaii and stayed primarily on the west side of the island. Gorgeous weather and awesome beaches will bring me back, hopefully shortly.

I want to write a bit further about the escape, but I also want to get these notes out, so I’ll write further in later this week – Thursday.

Enjoy these notes on some of the fascinating people of Eniac Ventures, other investors, founder of EasyPoint, ReSolve quant, research professors, former professional football player and a Nascar driver.

Hadley Harris (@Hadley), Founding GP at Eniac Ventures (20min VC 2/3/16)
- First mobile venture, Soundcloud, Airbnb, Vungel
- 2x entrepreneur in mobile – Vlingo (acq by Nuance for $225mln) and Thumb (acq by Wipulse)
  - Was one of first employees and execs running marketing and bd while working with product
- Worked at Samsung and Charles Rivers Ventures
- Studied engi & math as undergrad @ Penn, joined MSFT & Samsung
  - His 2 really good friends at Penn and him came together for Eniac in 2009
  - Mobile – next place for computing – cleantech was hot at that time, as well
- SF was 50%, NY as 25% and the rest was elsewhere – won’t lead but will do a pro rata and be key in fundraising for next
- Living & breathing the co – coming to right valuation, inevitable for down or flat rounds
- 18-24 months from seed to series A or pre-seed to seed – funds becoming more institutionalized
  - Leading rounds for Eniac at $1.2 – $2mln
- Favorite book: Freakanomics, read it in one sitting
- Tools: gmail, relayedIQ for deal tracking, as todo list, also
- Don Valentine – godfather of VC, great investors but great entrepreneurs and fund raisers
- Favorite blog: Nuzzel – curation of reposts
- Underhyped: mobile enterprise; Overhyped industry: big fan and he does work in social, but lot to weed through
- Most recent investment: Phhhoto – knew the founders, they’d known each other for a while, great design and numbers – self-funded
Zach Resnick (@trumpetisawesom), founding EasyPoint (IndieHackers #130, 10/28/19)
- Iterating your way to founder-product fit, currently at 10 people, 5 full-time, $600k ytd with 15% yoy organic growth
- Traveled, worked and lived abroad in Jerusalem before school, infected with wanderlust
  - CC churning and manufactured spending while he was learning at school in Ohio – VISA gift cards to $1k
- Banking often makes more money on the chance that you’ll become a customer for other areas of business (mortgage, checking account, brokerage, etc)
- Started when he was 19 – would give advice to parents/family/friends on the year before getting an hourly rate for paying customer as consultant
  - Enjoyed his help, he liked helping others – he was getting $1k/mo from hourly before going up
  - Consulting clients – he was helping optimize for business or vacation trip for the points
- Started Land Happier to solve a problem of having everything in one place
  - Cultural norms, transportation, 6 other things for information in a fun and compelling app product (MVP on app store)
  - Wasn’t solving a problem that nobody has, but nobody would pay for – product/founder fit wasn’t there, either
- What he wants – enjoys negotiating, strategic thinking, interesting conversations and sales moreso than product focused than customer focused
- While working on Land, he productized his consulting – generally was helping family friends that were parents’ age
  - Amount of effort he was putting in compared to the value wasn’t the same – not high enough
  - Started to focus on small business or medium enterprise owners to put spending on the right cards and get 6 figures on spend return
  - Focused on people he knew through referrals, points optimization plans for small owners – acquisition and spending for more value
- Early stage owners – hey, this isn’t free
- Playing poker for relatively high stakes – teaching important principles, statistics, risk management and psychology
- Consulting to productized consulting service – had a family friend with small business who would see a $50k in increased return on spend
  - He could do a quick analysis and understand business more, try to get a customized points optimization plan for points
  - Small business owners are leaving 1.5%, maybe 2.5% on the table – using points better for things you already want to do
- Providing value but people didn’t know what it is or weren’t hurting – show them math for 5 figures within a year saving
  - Guarantee: if you sign up points optimization plan, if he doesn’t get you double what his fee is within first year, he gives money back and $10k
  - Making people aware of the problem was going to be a lot of work – never really got off the ground for outbound
    - Was just a way to make money, not necessarily grow it really fast – customers’ needs
- Concierge service now (v3 EasyPoint) focusing on business and first-class international long-haul service
  - Over whatsapp and telegram groups – makes a flight request and they get back to them 24/7
  - They use miles and points that they buy from clients and then use those to book for others
  - Brokers buying all kinds of points and miles – so the arbitrage there contained issues with ToS and such
    - They’re buying transferable points like Chase / AMEX directly to frequent flier accounts
- Working for someone else – interned with The Points Guy and when he was looking at doing it, he posted on the Facebook group
  - Cameron, now their COO, was very good – would he want to have his hires over for dinner?
  - Team of 10 now: Cameron manages concierge, growth marketing (5 on team, looking for Asia now)
    - Part-time business development consultants, full-time that have been searching
  - Revenues and loans for growth/cash flow, venture debt and possibly equity raise
- Concierge service with product-market fit and being focused – enterprise value of $100mln probably but not billions
  - Not much needs to be tweaked for core product – fund raise would be for a different product
    - Help consumers decide on if they want to use their points or cash when booking – trying to automate this for concierge/back-end
    - Chrome extension and booking engine to use or not – this may be billion dollar opportunity
Andrew Butler, ReSolve’s Head of Quant Research (Gestalt University, 10/2/19)
- Machine learning in markets: Silver bullet or Pandora’s box
  - Unsupervised, supervised and reinforcement learning differences in application or finance
- Student of mathematics, physics in undergrad, keen on not memorizing a lot of stuff – enjoyed the applied side
  - Oil reservoir simulators that modeled tidal flow in Bay of Fundy, wind turbines in giant field for optimization
  - Next step was working on a sub problem of simulators – complex, computationally expensive and trying to optimize NPV in 60d oil field
    - Navigating the nonlinear, nonconvex solutions – how to make a reasonable model approximation by sampling sparse reps of simulator
- How would simulator/emulator apply to financial world in momentum and moving averages
  - Sample distribution would fit well to out-of-sample distributions in physical world but finance wouldn’t – nonstationary
  - Caused him to use simpler models, momentum models (and transformations) and ensembles of simple factor models
    - Mean-variance optimization, error maximizing, in-sample won’t perform well out of sample
- Wanted formal training in financial engineering, so went and got a MFE
- Practitioner compared to theorist – after a conference talk, his construct was mean-variance was same as regression
  - Subspace reduction and regularization as identical terms for mean-variance
- Machine Learning as 3 subspaces
  - Unsupervised learning -> clustering and dimensionality reduction
    - Targeted marketing, customer segmentation and in finance: signal processing, optimization or portfolio construction
    - Trying to uncover relationships/groupings/clusters contained within a dataset
  - If total error is dominated by bias, it’s likely overly simplistic – X as model complexity and Y as Total Error (Bias / Variance)
    - Increase complexity, bias term can decrease, increasing the variance (instability/overfitting)
Kelly Peeler (@kellypeeler), founder / CEO NextGenVest (20min VC FF#034, 2/5/16)
- College Money mentor, empowering students to live full lives, history of financial crisis for motivation to start
  - Went over to Iraq, started and enabled some companies to build there in 2012
- Went to JPMC after graduating to make some money before starting NGV for students
- Financial organization to financial efficiency – going from Mint (organizing money for a user’s financial lives)
  - Now people need efficiency – time priority, optimizing time through automation and personalization
    - Leverage trust to improve time in the background (automation and not wanting to have to look)
- High school trust and students have nobody they can trust for guidance – 8% trust banks and financial institutions
  - If you can build a product/service, on your way to building trust
    - Save users time, money, customized experience
- Serving their customers with SMS and Snapchat – smarter push notifications for the right service in the right way
  - Couldn’t customize communication inside an app, so they did channels that they chose
- NGV clubs at high schools across country – new high schools brought in, engagement and grassroots
- First product that they brought on was for the financial literacy test that 17 states need
- Favorite book: The Thank You Economy – best people outhustle to get more customers
- As visual person, can focus on 1-3 things at a time – preps in the evening, large index cards
- Adam Nash at Wealthfront – build trust with dynamics of product and the culture of company
- Spent too much time at focusing her weaknesses but has tried to get better on that side
Sam Yagan (@samyagan), Starting OkCupid, Sparknotes (Wharton XM, Marketing Matters)
- Turning down consulting job for OkCupid start – told he was crazy but wanted to take the chance
  - Free model and how do you value customers but competitors were Match and eHarmony
  - Had to get enough people on all sides of the market and then could use the data to help
- Internet wasn’t designed to take an expert’s ideas and just use those – bigger than that
  - “You know what you want.” We’ll pull it out and figure it out.
  - Google comparison – index all the pages and figure those out to place on first page
  - Creating a platform to ask all the questions and focus on them
- Sold Sparknotes in 11 months, took OKCupid 8 years (sold to Match, was there for a year)
  - Got the job running the company for another 3.5 years as Match CEO and created Tinder
Rob Gronkowski (@robgronkowski), All-Pro tight end (The Corp, 10/1/19)
- A-Rod investing into Rob’s brother’s, Chris, company Ice Shaker
  - Were able to put money in, along with Mark Cuban, when they were on Shark Tank (all brothers)
  - Rob, upon retiring, bought Arod out of his shares in the business with Chris
- Fitplan – Arod gave Rob a discount on the shares in Ice Shaker and he just wanted Rob to look through his company
  - Rob invested with Arod – parents were in business (gym equipment for retail/commercial for 28+ years)
- Kraft being an owner for the team and being around the game – interested in everything
  - Rare to see owners in the locker room and talking with players – many players say they’ve never seen others
  - Brady, Kraft and Belichick as being the greatest people and diagnosing problems/plays and adjusting
- Rob wants to travel – done a lot in the US
  - Traveling a week from that day to Israel with CEO Barry of CBDMedic there
- Being reckless as single Gronk in the NFL (loves Camille now, though)
Horst Simon (@hdsimon), Chief Research Officer at LBNL (Curious Investor 9/3/19)
- Difference between ML and programming – validity of an email, for instance
  - Computer looks for “@” and domain name, iterative of if-then’s, marking valid or invalid
  - ML – give details of valid and invalid email addresses and have the computer figure it out with a statistical model for rules
    - Relationship between information
  - ML more as being able to see if something is a cat in a picture – hard to program that
- Helped establish the Berkeley supercomputing center – big role all across the world now to complement theory by simulations
- More data than ever before, 90% of digital data created in last 2 years – more in 2018 than all of human history
  - Finance can’t generate more data like autonomous cars, for instance (100 cars means 100 more data points)
  - Markets/economics are dynamic – return predictions of signal:noise approaches zero
    - Driven by economic features of markets – competitive, profit-seeking traders that act on it
  - HFT as real barriers to entry so they’re less efficient and more predictable, potentially
  - Quantitative traders don’t use raw data – they use transformations such as log of equity, cross-sectional rank of book to market ratio
    - Neural network tries to find what the best transformations are (X -> Y and explore all the connections)
- Bonds example: predict if issuer will default or not with firm information using random forest
Rajiv Shah (@rajcs4), Data Scientist @ Data Robot, Adjunct Prof UChicago (DataSkeptic, 10/22/19)
- Started engineering, studied philosophy and law, PhD in Comms before doing research as academic
  - Worked at State Farm and Caterpillar before going to Data Robot
- Deep learning applications in motion data like NBA player data, motion tracking arms and legs (PoseNET, for instance)
  - Nature paper published that used deep learning to study after-shock patterns for earthquakes
- Going through paper – simple starting point or baseline model was skipped – how much value is really added, then?
  - Looking at the 6-layer problem – approach wasn’t unexpected when using keras to add layers
  - Results generated: AUC of 0.85 compared to naïve benchmark of simple, physical model – AUC of 0.58
  - When he reproduced it, test set results were higher than training set – yellow or red flag for model
- Group partitioning – 130 earthquakes happening right after each other, near each other and related
  - Make sure the information for an earthquake/customer doesn’t get split between training / test sites to avoid leakage
  - Basic grounding of fundamentals for setting up initial training data, partition based on time to avoid that, as well
- As community, ensure that there are best practices and guidelines – reproducibility as a large problem lately
  - How to police boundaries for the general field – influence of institutions in publishing (for this, Harvard/Google/Nature mag researchers)
  - Good from them: the data and model for the code was freely available and he could do it on his laptop / notebooks
  - Academics from the earthquake field reached out to him with some qualms and he’s partnered with them for a blog on efforts
- Interpretability focus trade-off with accuracy – that he’ll speak on at Open DS Conf
  - Lots of tools for explaining models with transparency now, though
Julia Landauer (@julialandauer), NASCAR driver (Stanford Pathfinders, Wharton XM)
- Being on Survivor (suggested by a friend while Soph in college), racecar driver
  - Picking Stanford because of so many people that were awesome / ambitious
  - Mentioning Andrew Luck saying that this was why he chose it – people wouldn’t particularly care
- Driving at such a young age and in Manhattan – not getting a license there until 18 on campus
- Having to pitch and learn how to pitch at a young age for sponsorships, running a team and the cost, even at minors – $500k+
- Some 12 female drivers and being competitive

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If You’re Not Sure, Ask (Notes from Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2019) March 26, 2020

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When Innovating Away Staleness (Notes from Nov 18 – Nov 24, 2019) February 25, 2020

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Back from Vacation (Notes from Nov 11 to 17, 2019) February 11, 2020

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