Business Ideas

September has come and gone. Autumn is in full swing now and everyone is prepping for the winter. September was a busy month for me, both personally and professionally. I started traveling more again and wrote up a storm on my Medium account. I finally hit a nerve over there and have been experiencing viral follower growth as well as decent earnings. These earnings aren’t big enough to replace my day job earnings, more like extra money for beer. The subjects of my viral articles are climate change and the stock market. I’ve been pretty heavy on the climate change ones because gloom and doom (fear) seem to drive a lot of traffic. ...

I’m going to start this post with a big helping of gratitude. I’m so grateful to the 1000’s of readers that helped me get into the field of Data Science and Machine Learning. I was a part-time blogger that turned my passion into a full-time gig in the AI Startup world. This post is my way of paying it forward to you. Read below if you want to learn how to make money blogging. ...

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything related to Real Estate (RE), especially about flipping houses. I heard on Bloomberg yesterday that the real estate flippers are exiting the market as fast as they can because the real estate market is starting to slow down. That’s interesting news because of my personal history with RE. I have been a real estate investor that wanted to be a flipper but got caught in 2007 slowdown. Instead of flipping, I became a landlord which has worked out OK over the years. ...

I watched Mike Gualtieri’s keynote presentation from H2O World San Francisco (2019) and found it to be very insightful from a non-technical MBA type of way. The gist of the presentation is to really look at all the business connections to doing data science. It’s not just about the problem at hand but rather setting yourself up for success, and as he puts it, not getting fired! ...

This is my third startup. Or maybe my fourth, I’m not sure but it gets hazy after a while. What I do know is that if I ever do another startup, I’ll use open source to make it happen. Let me explain with a bit of back history. My most recent startup was a consulting business that I started in mid 2017. I had just resigned from another startup in the machine learning space and with their software I did Data Science and Engineering consulting for a handful of clients. As luck would have it an opportunity at H2O.ai came a long and I closed down my consultancy to come on board there. There was another, rather short lived startup during that time centered around autonomous drones that never quite got off the ground. Pun intended. ...

While VC’s are a necessary part of growing a startup, they can kill it too. I’ve seen this happen too many times where the VC’s kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They’re so driven by financial goals that they interfere with great startups that just need a bit more time to ‘gel.’ A recent study commissioned by Eric Paley at Founder Collective found that by pressuring companies to scale prematurely, venture capitalists are indirectly responsible for more startup deaths than founder infighting, technical debt and slow customer adoption — combined. via Techcrunch ...

One of the big corporate strategy things I worked on was developing and putting into production a PQL model. It was essentially a propensity to buy model that analyzed usage patterns on the RapidMiner software platform and bucketed new downloaders into those that were likely to buy or not buy. It was incredibly successful and helped the sales team focus on thier leads better. My former colleague Tom shares his thoughts on it since it’s been in production for over a year now. Here are my interesting tid bits. ...

An important lesson I’ve learned while working at a Startup is to do more of what works and jettison what doesn’t work, quickly. That’s the way to success, the rest is just noise and a waste of time. This lesson can be applied to everything in life. Data is your friend We generate data all the time, whether it’s captured in a database or spreadsheet, just by being alive you throw of data points. The trick is to take notice of it, capture it, and then do something with it. It’s the “do something with it” that matters to your success or not. Your success can be anything that is of value to you. Time, money, weight loss, stock trading, whatever. You just need to start capturing data, evaluate it, and take action on it. ...

ICYMI the Startup markets are getting hotter in the Data Science space. Every time I turn around, some small company got millions of dollars in startup funding. It used to be a company with an algorithm or data science library but now it’s Data Science platforms. These platforms are suddenly all the rage and many new entrants are racing to gain market and mind share. The above image from FundersandFounders.com really captures a successful startup from inception to IPO. Most interesting for me is how the ownership “pie” is cut over time. If you’re the Founder, you first start out with a 50/50 share with your Co-Founder. Then you get some Seed money, say from an Angel Investor like Howard, which takes a small % of ownership. ...

I’ve been following Howard and Fred on and off over the years. They’re old Web 2.0 veterans like me and have kept a blog going for over 10 years. It’s always nice to see continuity and recently I found a great interview of Fred at MIT on Howard’s blog. It’s just under an hour and gives advice to students interested in the Venture Capitalist (VC) field. CheerleadersWhat caught my ear (and Howard’s too) was how his wife (Gotham Girl) is his biggest cheerleader. What does he exactly mean by that? She was the one that supported and believed in him to go out into Venture Capitalism. ...