In Case You Missed It: Jan 2024 Recap
Synthetic Data In A Nutshell; What You Must Know About Real-Time Data; How Unlearning Helps To Build $7B Data & AI Companies
This is the Three Data Point Thursday, making your business smarter with data & AI.
This special in-between issue serves as a recap of the last editions and more of my writing. It features a few quotes from each piece so you can get a feel for them and quickly jump around the Three Data Point Thursday universe.
Enjoy!
Synthetic Data In A Nutshell (ThDPTh)
Synthetic data is…. fake. That’s it. It's made-up stuff, not worth a penny. And yet, it looks like this is when synthetic data is at the breach of going from “theoretically useful” to practical reality.
How Airbnb Turned Itself Into A Data-Driven Company Through Business Intelligence (medium)
Since my article on Airbnb was well received, I updated it and gave it another spin on medium; definitely check it out if you haven’t yet read it!
Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, CapitalOne, and Google are all data businesses. They bring value to their customers with the help of data, lots of value, and lots of data.
While I still believe there is only one good choice to start your journey to becoming a data business, that’s by building smart products; many companies want to start in a different place: by improving decision-making.
Just like Nightingale, they want to turn raw data into meaningful actions with a measurable impact.
The (Not So Subtle) Art of Not Giving A Fuck About Data (medium)
The same goes for my data-skeptical article calling for a more moderate approach to data, be sure to check out the updated version!
Over a decade, I’ve cared deeply about data projects, decision-makers, and machine-learning algorithms. Sometimes, I’ve decided to say fuck it; I didn’t give a fuck about best practices, projects, or people. These decisions made all the difference.
What You Must Know About Real-Time Data (ThDPTh)
Rather, it was two things: The actions Target took, and the time, the almost real-time; for the father, it was more like pre-time, actions.
And this is exactly what everyone gets wrong about real-time data: There is next to NO value in having real-time data, data that is collected in real-time and available for analysis in real-time.
Almost all of the value is in fast actions. Real-time actions can be completely removed from real-time data. For Target fast actions mean:
Acting before anyone else does (the father)
Acting at just the right moment for this particular person (time personalization)
How Unlearning Helps To Build $7B Data & AI Companies (ThDPTh)
As Barry O’Reilly alludes to in his book “Unlearning,” the data space is a space that necessitates this skill because of its exponentially growing nature. So it is in this space, the data space, that this practice will be one of the key leadership skills.
Key idea: If you’re a data leader and you don’t have a continuous practice of unlearning, you’re living in the past. If you constantly unlearn, you’re able to move 10x faster than your competitors.
Until next week,
Sven