What I’m Interested In
🧭 Exploring
I’m currently exploring ideas in the AI/ML space, especially around data, data tools and data business models. Some things I’m looking at:
💎 Proprietary, latent, golden and small data assets; and how to build, connect and capture value from those assets.
🛠 Data infrastructure, especially tools that help generative models become first-class consumers as well as producers of data.
🤝 Trust hierarchies and the confidence chain: signatures, provenance, identity, curation, quality.
🤖 The compute explosion, software-in-the-loop, ubiquitous agents, matching versus ranking, productivity versus distribution.
🔑 New areas of abundance and scarcity, especially energy, hardware, and “atoms not bits”.
If you’re working on any of these, I’d love to hear from you.
💻 Professional
My professional interests lie at the intersection of data, markets, and technology.
📀 Data: As a species, we are defined by our ability to manipulate information: language, writing, software. It’s not a coincidence that the word we associate most strongly with human evolutionary advantage — intelligence — means both raw data, and the capacity to act on it.
🏪 Markets: Markets are the most effective and resilient mechanism we have found to solve a hard problem: how should society allocate resources in the face of incomplete information and uncertain outcomes?
📡 Technology: Writing, agriculture, government, cities, money, industry: these and other technologies have impacted humanity in profound (and still evolving) ways. We’re living through another technological revolution right now: software. And we’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can achieve.
If you’re also interested in these themes, I strongly recommend subscribing to my newsletter, Pivotal.
⚖️ Ethical
While I believe in the ability of markets, data and technology to make the world a better place, I’m also keenly aware of their limitations.
😑 Data can be noisy, messy or incomplete; more dangerously, it can be misleading, biased or falsified. Not all questions can be answered with data. High-quality decision-making under uncertainty with imperfect information is hard, and therefore valuable.
🏴☠️ Markets can be imperfect, incomplete, non-competitive, regulated, corrupt, captured, rigged or otherwise flawed. Flawed markets lead to information errors, poor incentives and inequitable outcomes.
💣 Technology is vulnerable to incompetence, malice, misuse, indifference, bias and unforeseen consequences.
The optimist (and ex trader) in me says that every inefficiency is an opportunity; the humanist in me cares for the individuals affected by these inefficiencies. Using data-markets-technology to make the world a truly better place is not easy. But what better way to spend one’s life?
❤️ Personal
I have a number of hobbies and interests that keep me pleasantly busy:
📚 I’m endlessly curious and an unapologetic bibliophile
📷 I like to take photographs
✈️ I like to travel, both physically and in spirit
🎲 I like to play Euro-style board games
🎨 I haunt galleries and museums whenever I can
🍱 I like to cook, and also to eat well
🎶 I like to discover new music of almost every genre
🏅 I over-analyze sports, using data of course
🎾 I play semi-competitive tennis (NTRP 4-5)
🔠 I used to play tournament Scrabble, but haven’t for a while
🌸 I used to curate a rather popular poetry newsletter
🏋🏾 I work out, sleep well, and practise happiness
📋 I’m a prolific list-maker, curator and reviewer
✒️ I like to write, as this website makes abundantly clear 🙂