On the walk in, I thought of Livy, of networks, and of hierarchies. I thought of Samuel Doe, the Liberian that brought an end to the brutal True Whig Party and brought in his own brutal regime, and of Emperor Bokassa, who once spent a third of his nations budget on his coronation. They each grew up physically, yet never had a chance to develop fully as whole people. And because they were leaders, the societies they led never got the chance to develop either. Are systems really that sensitive to leadership? Can it really be that institutions are that sensitive to the development of their leaders? The thought rocked me for a few minutes, and then subsided into an[…]

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[…]

What do you think causes the demand curve? Mechanically, it’s pretty easy to describe the laws of demand. The way pretty lines shift to the right or the left from shocks. It’s possible to deduce the real, rough, shape of the demand curve for a product (It just takes a lot of courage!). We can import all the knowledge about demand, segmentation and price discrimination. We can describe a demand curve just fine. Why does it exist? What causes it to exist? If intelligence didn’t exist, demand wouldn’t exist. It’s fun to think of a machine generating it’s own preferences, independent any human input. Most of human trainers of such machines seem to keep them on a short leash. Monkeys,[…]