My college friends and I have an iMessage group chat that has been active for 10 years or so. I’ve seen how good GPT is at analyzing text and wanted to apply it to our conversations. It was easier than I thought it would be, and you can follow my process at the end of […]
Tech & VC
Text Analysis of Howard Lindzon’s Blog
After analyzing Fred Wilson’s blog posts, I got connected with Howard Lindzon and did the same thing for his blog. I wasn’t as familiar with Lindzon’s writing and it’s been fun to dig into it — where Wilson is measured and understated, Lindzon shoots from the hip and is irreverent. I most enjoyed reading some […]
A Text Analysis of Fred Wilson’s AVC
I’ve been reading Fred Wilson’s blog AVC most days for 4 or 5 years now. I admire the way he writes: simple sentences that have a clear point of view. He doesn’t hide behind complexity or jargon, and he doesn’t hedge every opinion for fear of being wrong. I’ve tried with mixed success to incorporate […]
How the Spotify Deal Changed Joe Rogan’s Reach
Spotify bought the rights to Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2020 for $100 million, and full episodes became exclusively available on Spotify on September 1, 2020. I don’t listen to the podcast but have had the feeling that I hear about Rogan and his show less than I used to, and I wanted to know what […]
What does the messiness in M&A integration actually look like?
I recently finished the Disney CEO Bob Iger’s book which was pretty good. The most interesting parts of the book were his stories about Disney’s big acquisitions. Disney swallowed up Pixar, Lucas Films, and Marvel Studios under his leadership. It even came close to buying Twitter, until Iger got cold feet and worried about the […]
DMing your way into an analytics job
I often see messages from people asking for help getting a job in data. Usually the message reads something like this: “Hi, I just graduated from the masters in data science program at ________ and I noticed there’s an open data science role at ________. Could you help me out with a referral? These messages […]
What does it take to get your VCs to come to the closing dinner?
I read this tweet a year and a half ago and have remembered it because I found it to be a terrifically concise summary of the venture capital model: I sold my first startup for $50 million after 13 months and made my investors 5x in a year None of them showed up to the […]
Game Theory, Blockchain Tech and Predictive Modeling at Numerai
Numerai is a hedge fund that crowdsources its model-building through data science competitions. It does this by publishing a dataset with blinded and encrypted variables so that data scientists can build predictive models without having full access to Numerai’s proprietary data. Competitors can stake Numeraire, a token built on Ethereum, to signal confidence in their […]
Analyzing Twitter recommendation threads in R
There are a lot of high-quality recommendations floating around the internet. But these recommendations are mostly unstructured and can be difficult to internalize. One of my favorite applications of data analysis is structuring, aggregating and visualizing recommendations. I have gotten a lot of personal value out of it (every book from the Twenty Minute VC […]
Predictions for 2019
I have seen lots of predictions about 2019 and I’ve enjoyed reading them. I’m not convinced that there’s much value in making macro predictions but it seems like fun and will be interesting to look back on in a year so I will make some of my own. I would love to hear feedback on […]