I don't think any company is more data driven than any other. After they're successful, companies all need some minimum of measurement. Some say they're data driven but internally data is usually a mess. The right question is, are there any companies where data is not a mess? I'm guessing not.
Do data-driven companies win?
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: Do data-driven companies win?
#12I worked at a self-described "data-driven" company, and the analogy senior leadership liked to make was that the company was like a machine learning algorithm, using data (particularly A/B tests) to do "gradient descent" of the product into its optimal form. My first take-away was that using data to make decisions is tremendously, tremendously powerful. A/B tests, in particular, can help determine causality and drive…
100% agree and I think the same issues apply. For our search algorithms we learned how to handle local minima etc.. I just wonder if those solutions apply to data driven companies since the iteration speed and failure cost is so much higher. I'm afraid good intuition will outperform this on the long run.
Re: Do data-driven companies win?
#13I find his rankings of which companies to invest in hilarious. It's like, take the attributes that you think will make a good solid company - experience in the industry, strong analytical skills, good operational skills. You know, the things we know for a fact are going to make a good solid successful company. Ok, take them, and throw them away. We're not interested in them. We're interested in variance.
I think fundamentally this suffers from the problem lots of VCs have right now. Cheap money meant that the correct investment strategy was to just pile money into high risk bets. I think this calculation looks very different without free money.
Re: Do data-driven companies win?
#14I see too many "data driven companies" that are not data driven, but selectivly use data to do what the executive wants to be done. On top of that I see companies with employees who didn't understand college mathematics but now want to be data driven - E.g. basing major decisions on 10 customer feedback data points. Or who don't know the difference between median and average.
More like data driving companies, am I right?
Re: Do data-driven companies win?
#15Look at the 13Fs for last quarter, find the funds that are still up, ask them if they made trades based on technicals and data or purely on gut feeling that it’s time to buy lean hog futures again because they’ve been through this before. Careful with the crypto bros they are looking at the sidewalk on 5th ave from their penthouses.
Data driven companies tend to use the data to quickly fill in dark spots, collect that income and tap the source dry, and then bureaucracy and nepotism set in and the script is flipped. Data is used to explain away why we lost our shirt and how it’s not our fault.
The VC is looking for the moon and trying to argue that more data would somehow make the VC feel less like it’s Las Vegas. Sorry it’s all Vegas unless you want to spread and settle for making few percent by investing in all 5 companies and not trying to guess the pack leader.
Re: Do data-driven companies win?
#16I liked this article and agree with the point - when it comes to innovation, new products, and new markets, instinct and experience could probably help more than data.
Using data for decision making is more relevant for more mature processes where the data exists to learn from. Being data driven is especially important for data intensive sectors where the complexity of issues cannot be fathomed just by being brilliant, it's here you need to be able to analyse the intricacies using the data to find possible answers.
I just published a blog in response to this article explaining my thoughts on it - https://terminusdb.com/blog/some-data-driven-companies-actua...
Re: Do data-driven companies win?
#17Data-driven progress is largely for optimizing choices, not discovering them. Being data-driven can be just as dangerous intentionally ignoring data. Companies “win” by focusing on what matters, with the right people, at the right time.
Re: Do data-driven companies win?
#18I don't think any company is more data driven than any other. After they're successful, companies all need some minimum of measurement. Some say they're data driven but internally data is usually a mess. The right question is, are there any companies where data is not a mess? I'm guessing not.
>The right question is, are there any companies where data is not a mess? I'm guessing not.
I've been in a company that claimed to be "data driven". There was plenty of data that wasn't a mess - and we used it to make a lot of decisions. But, of course, we discovered new uses for our data - and that had to be cleaned.
The distinction is that all data starts messy, but you clean some, then discover new dirt. So you clean that, then discover some more. Some companies have more clean data than others.
Re: Do data-driven companies win?
#19I worked at a self-described "data-driven" company, and the analogy senior leadership liked to make was that the company was like a machine learning algorithm, using data (particularly A/B tests) to do "gradient descent" of the product into its optimal form. My first take-away was that using data to make decisions is tremendously, tremendously powerful. A/B tests, in particular, can help determine causality and drive…
This idea is sometimes called the McNamara fallacy:
Re: Do data-driven companies win?
#20I worked at a self-described "data-driven" company, and the analogy senior leadership liked to make was that the company was like a machine learning algorithm, using data (particularly A/B tests) to do "gradient descent" of the product into its optimal form. My first take-away was that using data to make decisions is tremendously, tremendously powerful. A/B tests, in particular, can help determine causality and drive…
Agreed.
Data is useful for proving my decisions once I have made them, so what's most useful is having short feedback loops so can I catch bad decisions quickly, or reinforce good decisions.