Climbing the Next Mountain

"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves." - Edmund Hillary

When I joined Bloomberg in May 2017, I was coming off running a couple of startups with some modest successes and a lot of challenges. Building new products is very very hard. I did learn a lot on my journeys and I was determined to apply tough earned lessons to my next adventure. My goal at Bloomberg was to accomplish something tangible and innovative while learning as much as I could about alternative data. I think with a good conscience I can say I am leaving Bloomberg today better than the way I found it.

Working at a large mature market leader is both humbling and exciting. Figuring out how to get things done and where to put energy is an overwhelming challenge. I received good guidance from our Enterprise CDO and helped launch our new intraday data license product. This opportunity took me on a global tour across North America, Europe, and Asia. A great opportunity to get to know clients across asset management and investment banking. Watching clients “plug-in” new products I was exposed to the range of technology sophistication and knowhow in the industry. It is super broad, varying from businesses that can handle very high speed complex data to others living in spreadsheets with systems built decades ago. Although everyone has different objectives and pain points, what is clear is that everyone acknowledges the sea change in how information is bought, stored, parsed, accessed, and ultimately applied to foster business insights and generate trading ideas.

Ultimately I was a critical component to the strategy and execution of dozen of partnerships in alternative data which customers have been browsing, buying, and using in their investment processes. I may have met with or spoken to 300 data companies! Living at the fulcrum of a changing industry sitting in between content creators, software, and data users was truly an exceptional education. Now that I have had time to reflect and analyze the most significant areas of transformation, I am ready for a new challenge. While it is fair to say the Cloud vendors and software makers are advancing the tempo in the adoption of machine learning and manipulation of data, what might be even more critical is reshaping the data content itself for usability.

The net worth of U.S. households has risen to an all-time high of $113 trillion dollars. Households are investing in equities and buying a lot of stuff. I like moving to industries undergoing massive change and thus have gravitated towards consumer and retail data. Consumer and retail is evolving quickly with new tech oriented brands, fast fashion trends, customizable apparel, and experience stores that carry no inventory. Further with data availability to marketers and the habitual use of social media, customers are bombarded by tailored ads. The digital age is pushing the reengineering of retail.

With all of these trends and an industry in evolution there is a great need for information to help investors understand the systemic changes in market architecture. There are several high quality data vendors in the credit cards and web scraping businesses that are answering questions using transactions and point of sale data. This is a good start but is a laggard. Some of the key questions that I have heard from investors in this industry are regarding average selling price changes, efficacy of new product launches, inventory dynamics, markdown trends, and season on season changes that lead to top and bottom line drivers of a stock price. Having ground truth and near real time monitors of pricing changes by product and market place dynamics is needed to enhance the investment process. In addition to monitoring granular point of sale data in order to build near term and longer term forecasts it is critical to consider how customers engage at a more emotional level with brands and products.

I will soon be joining a company within consumer intelligence that offers this "upstream" data that provides leading indications on the health of these businesses. I will be leading a relatively new alternative data initiative, and will share details soon. I am ready to climb the next mountain. Thanks as always for your support!

Vita pulchrum est.