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 […]
Author: Joe Hovde
Exploring Trends in the Coffee Industry through Text Analysis
I spend a lot of time in coffee shops and this has led me to want to know more about coffee and the industry around it. To this end, I analyzed text from posts to reddit’s coffee forum and looked for trends, following the same process I outlined in this post on nutrition trends. I […]
Buy the (avocado) dip: Analyzing nutritional buzzwords on Reddit
Big CPG companies are struggling to move quickly enough to meet changing tastes. Kraft Heinz’s recent write-downs are a particularly salient example of this. One way incumbents have sought to keep up is by acquiring small brands that have a more direct connection with consumers and are perceived as healthier, fresher, or more authentic. Prominent […]
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 […]
Visualizing the Strange World of Corporate Social Media Accounts
I have watched with morbid fascination as huge brands have taken to tweeting in a strange sort of inverse-corporate style that mimics popular twitter accounts. .@NASA wyd — MoonPie (@MoonPie) May 12, 2019 As many people have noted, it is rather surreal to see the corporate account of Moon Pie exchange existentialist tweets with Clorox. […]
The Behavioral Advantages behind TurboTax
A perfect storm of behavioral factors gives TurboTax enormous pricing power. Each year as I do my taxes I am surprised at how eager I am to pay TurboTax anywhere from $59 to $199 to help me file my taxes. A combination of the U.S. tax process in general and TurboTax’s design in particular makes […]
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 […]
The Data Behind my Habit Formation
Edit: If you are spending more time at home due to the pandemic, it is a good time to build new habits. You can control your environment and the triggers that help establish habits much easier now than you can when your routine is more varied. I believe that getting good at habit formation is […]
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 […]
Why Won’t I Buy a Beer on an Airplane?
I was thinking about buying a beer on a flight the other day. While I was pondering buying it or sticking to ginger ale, I noticed that I felt guilty about spending the money. It felt like a superfluous expense. I started to wonder why that was, especially when I often will have a drink […]