I am sharing data on my email open rates because 1) I always appreciate seeing data from other blogs and websites; the desire to benchmark oneself is hard to suppress and 2) if you are reading this, there is a decent chance you contributed to the data! I have been reading a book about copywriting, […]
Author: Joe Hovde
Quantifying the Poker Boom
Since reading Maria Konnikova’s terrific new book The Biggest Bluff, I have been on a poker kick. She describes her journey to the World Series of Poker Main Event, poker’s biggest stage, and what it is like to be there. This got me interested in the tournament and its history. I knew poker got incredibly […]
Drinking, Cursing, and Cardigans: Taylor Swift Lyrics Over Time
Edit 12/12/2020: Ms. Swift has been much more productive than I have this year and released another album, so this is updated with Evermore lyrics Several years ago, I listened to Taylor Swift’s Reputation album and noticed lots of references to alcohol. I was in my early 20s and it reminded me of the self-conscious […]
The New York Times’ coverage of the Coronavirus
I used the New York Times API to see how it has covered the Coronavirus since the crisis began. My feeling was that for about a month, from mid-March to mid-April, it was all anyone could talk or think about. And since then, it still dominates the public consciousness but people are, understandably, tired of […]
Which companies have the most likable CEOs?
Glassdoor asks employees whether they’d recommend a company to a friend and whether they approve of the CEO. For the most part, you would expect those two numbers to match closely. And for the most part they do, but there are some interesting ways in which they don’t. I looked at data from Glassdoor for […]
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 […]
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 […]