Category: Data Driven Culture

How Social Entrepreneurs Search

Posted on by Christopher Berry

This story begins in a lecture room on an upper floor at Temple University in Philly on a pleasant summer day in 2018. John Hauser is delivering a cracking talk on recommendation engines. He launches into an aside about how the best real estate agents on earth facilitate their consumers’ own discovery of their own preferences. He’s challenging conventional doctrine. The grizzled grizzlies fold their arms and lean back in their chairs. The students from KU lean forward. I catch Luo’s eye and exchange smiles. We’re beaming. I got my popcorn ready. This is gonna be good. He tells a story about how an excellent real estate agent will listen patiently as you state preferences, and then they go onto[…]

Something fundamental has gone wrong with the decision-making process

Posted on by Christopher Berry

“[A]n unrecorded decision may well be, indeed should be, considered as a sure sign that something fundamental has gone wrong with the decision-making process, that one should look for the presence of schemers who can impose projects on those who should know better; that one should also look for powerful external pressures reverberating through the decision-making process — pressures that cannot be resisted and lead to decisions for which there is no real acceptance of responsibility (and are therefore unrecorded). All of this serves to underline a point that is not stressed enough in the political science literature: decision-making is fundamentally a process for assuming responsibility for a proposed action.” Allison, Graham., Zelikow, Philip. (1999) Essence of Decision. 2nd Edition.[…]

Startup Philosophy in the Tight Money Era

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Ultimately, how you choose to lead your startup in the post-2022 Tight Money Era depends on what lessons you’re taking away from the 2018-2022 Loose Money Era, and where you’re at on your own leadership journey. In this post, I’ll describe where my stance is at the end of 2022 with respect to a systemized study of new venturing knowledge. How We Got Here: The Loose Money Era Money was cheap between 2018 and 2022 [1]. Stupidly cheap. You know how I know money was cheap? Check the links: Intensely. Stupidly. Insanely. Idiotic. Terribly. Sweatily. Moronicly. Cheap. Cheap money enables radical conservation of thought. (I’m picking on scooters because it’s physically obvious, but there’s plenty of incredibly silly things going[…]

The meaning of skate to where the puck is going, not where it as been

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Walter Gretzky is credited with the quote: “Go to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” Walter used socratic questioning to teach his son, Wayne, hockey strategy. Here’s the full context from Wayne’s perspective: Him: “Where do you skate?” Me: “To where the puck is going, not where it’s been.” Him: “Where’s the last place a guy looks before he passes it?” Me: “The guy he’s passing to.” Him: “Which means…” Me: “Get over there and intercept it.” Him: “If you get cut off, what are you gonna do?” Me: “Peel.” Him: “Which way?” Me: “Away from the guy, not towards him.” (Gretzy, Reilly, Gretzky: An Autobiography p. 88) Puck On To win a game of ice[…]

Decision Forests

Posted on by Christopher Berry

If you need a tool to break down complex scenarios, this approach, a tool using decision forests, might be right for you. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to use the gentler, forward, variant of dancing in a decision forest. This is a post is intended for a curious audience. Decision You’re an extraordinary assembly of chemical gradients. At any given moment you have the opportunity to make millions of decisions. The crudest segmentation, the roughest way I can impose order on all of this complexity is divide them up in two types of decisions: to act, or to not act. Further, when you decide to act, there are two broad types of actions: explore and exploit.[…]

Deep Learning: Evolution or Revolution?

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Is what is happening in analytics, in industry, an evolution or a revolution? What is Analytics is the science of data analysis. Those who practice analytics self-identify as analyst, digital analyst, marketing scientist, data engineer, researcher, among many others. Tukey (1962, The Future of Data Analysis, The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, (33), 1) called them all practitioners. The goal of the practitioner depends on their context. That context largely, but not always, depends on the state of knowledge, state of the culture, or sometimes, normatively, the state of maturity, of the group they belong to. Large organizations can have a large amount of difference within them. It’s not uncommon for an operations department to be extremely mature and for its[…]

The Technology of Productive Meetings

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Can meetings be more productive? The BBC’s Sean Coughlan wrote a piece entitled “Pointless work meetings really a form of therapy” and it struck a chord. I shared that out on Friday, November 15, 2019. It’s a short press summary of what Patrik Hall co-authored in a book. The press doesn’t say what that book is. So I wrote Patrik. The book is called Mötesboken : tolkningar av arbetslivets sammanträden och rosévinsmingel. His co-author, Malin Akerstrom, wrote a related paper – The Merry Go Round of Meetings: Embracing Meetings in a Swedish Youth Care Project. It is worth a read. I have a few thoughts. There are (at least) two forms of technology: physical technology and social technology. Physical technology[…]

The CEO-CMO Relationship

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Suppose the following scenario: Series A or B; A data science firm (narrow machine intelligence, applied machine intelligence, general machine intelligence, predictive or prescriptive analytics, software or hardware); Technical CEO / Co-Founder; Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) just hired; What might the CEO-CMO relationship look like? The relationship could be great. If there’s one stereotype about data science CEO’s, it’s that they like incentives to be aligned. The CMO would likely be brought on to focus on growth. If revenue grows, valuation grows, and collective comp would grow. There might be points of friction. From the CMO’s Perspective: Why is the CEO constantly at me about metrics all the time? Why is the CEO always on about non-working dollars? (Why don’t[…]

The Value We Place On Certainty

Posted on by Christopher Berry

It seems like a lot of people value certainty. People buy a lot of products and stories for certainty. Insurance. Investment advice. Forecasts. Indulgences.Many entrepreneurs, in particular those in data science, sell certainty. What else is an F1 score other than a measure of certainty on some level? Given some inputs, our machine transforms them some way, which produces some statement about the past, present, or future, with some quantifiable amount of certainty, so that you can do something with confidence (or feel more secure). We sell certainty. And yet isn’t it curious about how much insecurity we’re creating while we do so? It has always been easier to sample data from the past, pull a heuristic from it, and[…]

Thoughts on A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Experimentation

Posted on by Christopher Berry

What a fantastic read from Camuffo, Cordova and Gambardella! If you haven’t read A Scientific Approach to Entrepreneurial Experimentation, you’re missing out. It’s a great read. And not only because it reinforces my own preexisting biases, but also because there are challenging bits in there. The core finding is “We find that entrepreneurs that behave like scientists perform better, pivot to a greater extent to a new idea, and do not dropout less than the control group in the early stages of the startup.” The authors focus on a key behaviour that scientists exhibit. A scientist has two types of skepticism – skepticism that something is true, and skepticism that something is not true. Those represent two types of error, helpfully[…]