Right Now
I help boards and executives at growth-stage technology companies continue (or resume) rapid acceleration by advising them on improving their leadership capabilities, operations, and technology. While I specialize in executive advising on leadership and process, I can also dive into deep technical problems with Data Science or Software Engineering departments. Feel free to contact me directly to learn more.
I have a few tech projects in progress that will undoubtedly become blog posts. I’m working on an e-book about leadership in organizations, as well as a field manual for triaging performance and architecture in growth-stage startups. I sometimes write code for open-source projects like TinySite and CompressTest. I also work on ApplyByAPI, a tool that helps companies focus on quality over quantity in their tech hiring process.
Recent Publications
What Mobile Advertising Needs
The advertising world is both feeding, and being fed a lot of hype about the current state and potential of mobile advertising. It’s no doubt that this form of marketing is unique in many ways, and offers opportunities not available via other forms of advertising. As an example, on mobile you can take advantage of information like a relatively precise knowledge of the location of the individual. Now, it is debatable whether such granular knowledge of a person’s location is a good, bad, or neutral thing, but the fact remains that this piece of information is something that simply has not been available to advertisers until recently. Additionally, advertising on mobile is almost guaranteed to be seen by the user due to both the nature of interaction with the device and additionally due to smaller screen sizes. Lastly, the time spent interacting with mobile devices is far greater than time spent with print media, so the percentage of advertising budgets spent on mobile should be proportionally higher, right? ... read moreDon't Ship What Doesn't Work
If involved in workflow engineering, technology-related or otherwise, do everyone a favor and don’t pass something to the next stage if the previous stage isn’t done properly. Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario and the Legend of Zelda knows this. Take his words to heart: A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time. –Shigeru Miyamoto If you pass a project on to the next stage of the workflow when it isn’t perfect, eventually it will have to regress back and be repaired. Just save everyone the effort and make it correct right now. ... read moreThe Dismal Jobs Report, Economic Recovery, and Normalcy Bias
Well everyone is reacting with shock and amazement at the negative June jobs report, which showed that contrary to the 125,000 jobs that even the most pessimistic economists expected to be added to the economy, the actual number was in fact about 18,000. This isn’t surprising, as this recovery will take a long time. In fact, it will take longer than most people expect and that is due in part to something called Normalcy Bias. ... read moreUncorrelated Does NOT Imply Independent
This is just an aside to describe a misconception that we have seen some money managers make when describing their strategies or portfolios. When you are discussing the correlation of your portfolio to another portfolio or the market in general, the fact that your portfolio may be fairly uncorrelated does not have anything to do with the independence of your portfolio from a reference portfolio or the market in general. In fact, even if the portfolio you have developed is completely uncorrelated, it still probably isn’t independent. The Risk Fundamentals (link removed due to being broken as of 2018-06-13) website commits this error fairly egregiously: ... read more