Data + Opportunities for Masses (Notes March 4 - March 10, 2019)

This week was all about different types of people chasing and building what they wanted to build. What drives people - what are they drawn to? Passion, energy and asking the questions to further the quenching of thirst for the next step. Reading the notes I had for this had me down a rabbit hole for each one - thus the delay.Interestingly enough, these founders, presidents, authors and data scientists / explorers are in different industries. We had digital tech and marketing, strategy, data science as it applied to healthcare, NFLPA / financial literacy, and education of cs and tech stacks through ISA's.Believe that you can learn from others to further what you do to progress forward.Steve Mast, President and CIO at Delvinia (Measured Thoughts, Wharton XM)

• Using Methodify for geolocation data / surveys
• Digital tech to help marketers, researchers and leaders collect, visualize and enable data
• Educated as an architect, then video game designer and producer in the 1990s
• Joined Delvinia in 2000 to build interactive design and digital marketing
• Talked about doing events where they get volunteers to sign up for brand / marketing analysis
• Ask 2-3 questions that are pointed, geo-enabled for brand / important points at the event
• Makes sure not to have personal identifiers
• Joseph Jaffe (@jaffejuice), author Built to Suck (Wharton XM)
• Admiral, co-founder at HMS Beagle, strategy consulting for surviving
• Talked about how Harley Davidson is in every marketing book but what are they doing now? Floundering
• Nike ads - never talked about the product (shoes), but call to action - Just Do It
• Nike as providing the tools for which you act
• Used their stores as ex of environments for their product - having treadmills Each employee was a runner, wearing Nike and touting the products, experts
• Remembers asking his class if they knew the first bank to implement ATMs
• Didn't provide the answer - jumped into 4 P's - one student asked what the answer was Answer was that it didn't matter because every single bank mentioned had ATMs
• Only thing that mattered - first-mover's "advantage" if you can keep it
• "What are you doing now?"
• Chris Albon (@chrisalbon), Getting First Data Science Job (DataFramed #55)

• Data Scientist at Devoted Health, helping to fix healthcare system
• Co-host of podcast Partially Derivative, since stopped, and had a kid / moved
• Humanitarian non-profits, working on team for building companies with a soul
• Devoted - health insurance company started by Todd (CTO of US) & Ed Park (CEO of health company)
• Creating company that you'd want family members be a part of
• Make healthcare that works (primarily senior citizens, Medicare)
• His background is from quantitative political science - politics and civil wars
• Perspective of research, experimental, statistics - PhD with these fellows
• Meeting friends with a ton of amazing, applied projects (LinkedIn, etc…)
• He needed to be applied vs research in order to get out of academia - joint Kenyan nonprofits (election monitoring and disaster relief)
• Real data or fake reports, safety, ethic and morals come up - threat models aren't the same
• First hire at Brick (free wifi to Kenyan homeless, etc…) Using established tools to provide others data / analysis - for a team to not know that going in, it was impressive (wizardry)
• As a team, you can hire and absorb senior data scientists
• People who got first time jobs at Facebook or something, got to see scale and experience that they can move on easily
• At a Facebook/Google, end up doing heavy data analyses for the massive scale and is a big role Hard, analytical challenges
• Smaller companies may ask someone to do a 'full stack' / general data scientist that has to build everything on their own
• Early on in hiring process - ex with Master's in ML, and that's what you want to do
• Generalist builders at Devoted, but not strictly ML or other thing
• Heavy AI or ML would be theory-based, dissertation level technical discussion (obvious focus)
• Doing data science generally - many other problems - Bayesian analysis, RF, etc… Far more jobs for those that are generalists at companies for business data - predicting drones watering crops, customers churn, illnesses
• With different backgrounds, should figure out how to feature yourself & experience Side projects, blog posts, portfolio, visualizations in a way that's easy - testing, GitHub, versioning
• Talked about his first meeting at Devoted Health - 4 data scientists in the room with a doctor, discussing the coding of health / diagnosis Said he was fascinated in the meeting as he wanted to know that side, new business
• He genuinely enjoys new techniques, analysis that he doesn't know and learning about it - passionate about what they are and learning Not hiring for junior - it's because you will want to grow into senior
• RF > SVM since it works out of the box, but said SVM is an awesome mathematical tool Used it as a teaching point and visual - but in production, he'd never seen it
• Eric Winston (@ericwinston), President of NFLPA (Wharton XM, Leadership in Action)
• Talked about how important relationships and the soft skills were
• Financial literacy as a passion of his - talked about how little players know going in, especially after college College finance doesn't teach it, either
• Austen Allred, Founder/CEO at Lambda School (20min VC 3/8/19, FF)

• Bedrock, GGV, GV, Stripe and Ashton Kutcher as investors - $48M so far
• Prior, Senior Manager for Growth at LendUp and co-founded Grasswire
• Income inequality, financial health thoughts - nothing was moving incomes
• Was in a small town in middle of nowhere, Utah
• Had to live in his car in SV for a while and figured out how to schedule - during summer, would get hurt obviously
• Raised $500k initially, couple months of cash left, due diligence - investor decided to not continuing Dec 23 (daughter was born soon after)
• Never wanted to be in that position again - thought it would've been VC but it was more about a successful business
• At YC, wasn’t focused on demo day - modeled 2 scenarios: 1 with VC money vs otherwise going wrong and seeing no VC money didn't work
• About the right time to raise: $1 today would be $3 or $4 later, still had much of their series A - getting dozens of VC emails and say no
• No goal to raise B at that point, walked through the numbers with Jeff (one of investors) over dinner
• So Good They Can't Ignore You (Steve Martin quote, but Cal Newport book)
• Looking at product-market fit - people would pay whatever to get to the job / signal
• Incentives aligning, job and person - $1000 to start and pay after getting a job: Got into YC and thought no upfront deposit, etc…
• List of 7k people, trying to refine and make sustainable
• Training people online was tough, free upfront / no SITG - no Bay Area / NY, online engineering students
• Iterating on all facets of business so quickly: had to do it, quickly and concurrently
• Each 5 weeks do a project, roll people together and do an app - if they can't, roll it back
• "Insane" - but more people just can't fathom DOING, the ACTION
• Before running the experiment, they determined the metrics for success and failure (if it doesn't happen, fail)
• Career coaches / meetups / staff bonuses for people trying to get people hired - success of those 8 trials
• Wright Brothers biography book and Les Miserables (humanity)
• Changing SV - fundamental human problems, he wants them to build more, try more
• 500k students in the year for 5 years goal