Yesterday was my 56th birthday – I know, I know, I don't look a day over 55. Regardless, time marches on, and I become increasingly grateful for the friends and family who are journeying through time with me.
We didn't make it to the Jersey Shore this year or have genuine Philly Cheesesteaks, but we did eat amazing food, tell old stories, and spend quality time together. There is a lot to be said for family and tradition.
When I was a kid, I couldn't imagine being where I am today … nor could I imagine the path that got me here. Looking back, it all seems to make sense (even though it felt pretty random while making my way through it).
I feel lucky to have been in the right place at the right time, so consistently, and to find the gift in most situations (even when it seemed so well hidden).
I'm grateful for a lot today, and as much as I love innovation, sometimes things are perfect just the way they are.
Hope you took time this weekend to let someone know they're important to you. If not, now is a good time for that too!
A staggering 90% of all the world’s data (2.5 quintillion bytes per day) has been created in the past two years alone … and its value is rapidly rising.
Data is today’s “wild west” and the battlefield of today’s tech titans. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft all have an unprecedented amount of data (and power).
Rapid growth means little time to create adequate rules. Everyone’s jumping to own more data than the next and to protect their own data from prying eyes.
I see it in trading, but it’s pervasive in every industry and in our personal lives.
Having basic data and basic analytics used to be enough, but the game is changing. Traders used to focus on price data, but now you’re seeing an influx of firms using alternative data sets to find an edge. If you’re using the same data sources as your competitors and competing on the same set of beliefs, it’s hard to find a sustainable edge. Understanding the game they’re playing, and their rules are important, but that’s table stakes.
Figuring out where you can find extra insight, or where you can make the invisible visible, creates a moat between you and your competition, and it lets you play your own game.
I shot a video where I talk high-level about Data as fuel for your business. Check it out.
It is interesting to think about what’s driving the new world (of trading, of technology, of AI, etc.) and that often involves identifying what drove the old world. History has a way of repeating itself.
Before e-mails, fax machines were amazing. Before cars, you were really happy with a horse and buggy.
It’s in these comparisons that I think we can help explain the importance of data in today’s new world economics.
Petroleum has played a pivotal role in human advancement since the industrial revolution; it fueled (and still fuels) our creativity, technology advancements, and a variety of derivative products. There are direct competitors to fossil fuels that are gaining steam, but I think it’s more interesting to compare petroleum to data due to their parallels in effect on innovation.
The process of pumping crude oil out of the ground and transforming it into a finished product is far from simple, but anyone can understand the process at a high-level. You have to locate a reservoir, drill, capture the resource, and then refine it to the desired product – heating oil, gasoline, asphalt, plastics, etc.
The same is true for data.
You've got to figure out what data you might have, how it might be useful, you have to figure out how to refine it, clean it, fix it, curate it, transform it into something useful, and then how to deliver it to the people that need it in their business. And even if you've done this, you then have to make people aware that it's there, that it's changing, or how they might use it. For people who do it well, it's an incredible edge. – Howard Getson
Data can be seen as the fuel to the information economy and oil to the industrial economy. The amount of power someone has can be correlated to their control of and access to these resources … and, leaking of these resources can lead to extreme consequences.
Why Data Is Better Than Oil
The analogy works, but it’s just that, an analogy, and the more you analyze it, the more it falls apart. Unlike the finite resource that is oil, data is all around us and increasing at an exponential rate, so the game is a little different:
Data is – ultimately – a renewable resource. It’s durable, it’s reusable, and it’s being produced faster than we can process it.
Because it’s not a scarce resource, there’s no urge to hoard it – you can use it, share it, transform it, infinitely knowing that it won’t diminish. Data is more useful the more you use it.
As the world’s oil reserves dwindle, and renewable resources grow in popularity and effectiveness, the relative value of oil drops. It’s unlikely that will happen to data.
Also, while data transport is important, it’s not expensive the way oil is. It can be transported and replicated at light speed.
Using alternative data gives traders an advantage, but it doesn’t always have to be confidential or hard to find information. Traders now have access to vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. An important source that many overlook is the data produced through their own process or the metadata from their own trades or transactions.
In the very near future, I expect these systems to be able to go out and search for different sources of information. It's almost like the algorithm becomes an omnivore. Instead of simply looking at market data or transactional data, or even metadata, it starts to look for connections or feedback loops that are profitable in sources of data that the human would never have thought of. – Howard Getson
In a word of caution, there are two common mistakes people make when making data-driven decisions. First, people often end up slaves to the data, losing focus on the bigger picture. Second, even the most insightful data can’t predict black swans. It’s important to exercise caution.
The future of data is bright, but it’s also littered with potential challenges. Privacy concerns and misuse of data have been hot button topics, as have fake news and the ability of systems to generate misleading data. In addition, as we gain access to more data, our ability to separate signal from noise becomes more important.
The question becomes, how do you capitalize on data, without becoming a victim to it?
Dave Asprey is perhaps the most well-known biohacker (he's even referenced in Merriam-Webster's definition of biohacker) and the founder of Bulletproof. For those that don't know, a biohacker is someone who uses drugs and technology to make their body/mind function better.
Dave and I shot a video where he discusses life and provides an interesting take on algorithms.
It's not surprising that biohacking has become as popular as it has. In a society that encourages (maybe even necessitates) an impossible balance between work, responsibilities, and self-care – it makes sense to want to increase efficiency.
Biohacking helps you do more with less. Biohacking is popular because you're trying to get peak performance via the path of less resistance.
Having trouble with sleep, but don't want to stop using your phone before bed? Wear blue-light blocking glasses.
While biohacking started as tricks like that – nootropics to help your mind, light and sound machines to decrease stress – it's becoming increasingly tech-centric and augmentation based.
Several months ago, I shared Gartner's hype cycle for 2018. Do-It-Yourself Biohacking was one of 5 encompassing trends for the year.
The future is bringing implants to extend humans past their perceived limits and increase our understanding of our bodies; biochips with the potential to detect diseases, synthetic muscles, and neural implants. – Howard Getson
It's estimated that over 100,000 people already have various types of implants. In Sweden, thousands of Swedes are inserting chips under their skin to speed up their daily routines. They use chips to open locked doors, to store contact information, and to get on to the train. Currently, chips are limited to simple tasks like unlocking doors, holding personal data, and tracking simple to record data.
Longterm, it's likely you'll see it moving toward exoskeletons, AR/XR experiences, and unsurprisingly to sex toys. It's also being used to create artificial organs and counteract memory loss. The two companies that are leading this movement are Neuralink, Biohax International and Digiwell. While it's currently being adopted primarily by fast-movers and technocrats, it's pragmatic to think there will be more widely-adopted versions of this as technology gets standardized and protections are put in place.
For all the excitement, it's necessary to remain skeptical and patient. DIY biohacking raises various ethical issues, especially around data protection and cybersecurity. As a reminder, when it comes to cybersecurity, you "the user" are the biggest weakness.
There's no stopping this train, but there is time to make sure it stays on tracks!
Fake news was scary enough … but now it is going to a new level. Technology is going to make it harder to find the “signal” in the “noise”.
Here is a preview of tech solutions (which already exist) that are likely to create a new set of problems and challenges for us in the future.
Replica is a company whose goal is to replicate celebrity voices. They see this as enabling creative applications of their voices without the commitment of the celebrity – of course the owner of the voice that's being replicated would control when/where it could be used.
Combine that ability to simulate voices with deepfake technology (which can alter video in many ways, including to look like the mouth in the video is is saying the words that were simulated) and the potential for confusion or deception skyrockets.
My guess is that you will hear a lot more about this soon because of upcoming elections. It will also become increasingly relevant in everyday life, business, trading, and legal situations.
A picture used to be worth a thousand words, but this may change that equation forever.
On Tuesday, for less than an hour, early in the workday, it felt like the internet was down for many. The cause? Cloudflare went down. Cloudflare offers web services to over 16 million websites. That includes sites like HubSpot, Medium, UpWork, 9gag, Discord, Sirius XM, Shopify, Coinbase, Canva, Soundcloud, Buzzfeed, and Capitalogix.
That means when Cloudflare went down, so did a non-trivial portion of the internet. W3techs reports approximately 10% of the internet was affected by Cloudflare being down.
There was a massive spike in CPU utilization. At the time, it looked like a DDOS attack. People were speculating that it was a Chinese attack trying to mess with the Hong Kong protests.
Turns out, it was bad code – specifically, a single misconfigured rule within their firewall services. They did a global rollout of the code, and so it affected everyone.
This shows the importance of staged rollouts – testing your releases live with test groups before being released globally.
The reality is, using a CDN is still helpful, Cloudflare's downtime doesn't mean you shouldn't use them.
It does mean we should be thinking about what failsafes are needed to keep the internet infrastructure working in the event of attacks or failures.
Attacks are becoming more common, and as we now expect constant improvements/releases to software, we can expect more company errors as well. Facebook had similar issues on Wednesday.
Think of how much relies on the internet as a backbone. It's crazy to think about the impact sustained downtime would have; billions of dollars in business not happening, banking systems down, etc. Realistically, if the entire internet goes down we likely have bigger issues to worry about, but this event shows that large swaths of the internet could be affected at once.
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” – Thomas Edison
It doesn't make sense to challenge a bigger and better-funded competitor in an area where they have an asymmetric advantage. In other words, don't compete with giants at their own game.
Choose to play a game you expect to win.
Playing a different game is a theme at Capitalogix. We believe that you control the game you're playing, that you control the rules, how you keep score, and even how you evaluate success. These things inform where you spend time, where you invest money, and even what looks like an opportunity to you.
Wouldn't you rather compete in areas where you can create a unique sustainable competitive advantage? Personally, I want to invest in extending an edge that lets us win.
Why?
Mediocrity Is Expensive!
What you lack in size or computer power, you can make up for in creativity, agility, and innovation.
Capitalogix sought to create a niche in the investment industry, not through computing power, but through unique approaches to age-old problems. We use AI and data science to enhance decision-making.
We have an incredibly narrow and consistent focus. Within that area, we are willing to take on problems others avoid and pursue goals that others say are impossible.
Our niche limits risk and lets us fail faster … and learn faster. This allows us to take confident action while others are tentative.
Most big companies – and most of our competitors – are afraid to be wrong. They have to protect their infrastructure, cash-cows, and short-term performance metrics. It makes sense (from their perspective) that playing it safe means that you're secure in your position. – but that's not how it works.
You can't challenge the status quo when you are the status quo.
10x Improvement Is Often Easier To Achieve Than 10%
Incremental change is hard – it's finding new ways to do the same thing, and you often end up competing in very red oceans – saturated markets where you're competing on price. Moonshots sound harder, but you end up with your own niche and the constraints of a new idea force creativity and energy. If you're going after a goal that no one has accomplished before, it's impossible to be in a red ocean, and it's easier to mobilize a team around something exciting and new than decreasing some arbitrary metric 2%.
There are a couple of important lessons to keep in mind when pursuing the unknown.
Forget what you know – self-reported "experts" are limited by their world view. If you're trying to get a different result, you won't do it by playing by the same rules your predecessors followed. Heuristics are great for making life easier – but they're very limiting when trying to create something new.
Attack the hardest problems first – your biggest problems are your biggest opportunities. If you don't deal with the big problems now, you'll never get around to it, and you'll waste time, energy, and potentially realize you have to pivot much too late.
Be comfortable being uncomfortable – Most people find failure taboo, and they're deathly afraid of it. Tony Robbins talks about our tendency to avoid pain more actively than we pursue pleasure, and it's true in business. But failure is a part of business. The people I consider most successful got there through incredible pain tolerance and increasingly intense problems that they continued to conquer.
Have a short memory for pain - Focus on the gain, not the pain. People often focus on not enough money, not enough time, not enough. That scarcity mindset is dangerous and can lead to getting lost in pain and fear. Learning to acknowledge the pain/fear and move forward from a place of abundance and opportunity helps create opportunities.
As well, a clear identity is important. You have to understand what you're pursuing, and how you want to attack the problem. At Capitalogix, we've gotten very in tune with our goals.
We invent techniques that identify and adapt to what happens in markets. We apply the lessons learned from past experiences, data science breakthroughs, and hard work to eliminate the fear, greed, and discretionary mistakes that are the downfall of most traders and decision-makers.
Small businesses don't have a monopoly on these mindsets and these opportunities, but companies like Y Combinator, X, or HeroX are few and far between.
Those businesses that have the scale and these approaches are great to model, and there's enough innovation out there for both of you.
Most people don't spend money on freemium games. These games rely on a small subset of "whales" to survive – players that spend absurd amounts of money on their games. Gacha games let players pay to "roll the dice" to unlock rare characters and collectibles similar to a "Loot Box" mechanic.
Now, the US is trying to make this mechanic illegal for taking advantage of children with their "pay-to-win" mechanics.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
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