My Work
💻 Interests
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 ways. We’re living through another technological revolution right now: software. And we’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can achieve.
📃 Career
🖋️ I write Pivotal, a highly-regarded newsletter on data, investing, and startups, with over 5000 subscribers. Click on the link to learn more, hear what people have to say about it, and subscribe.
🌱 I’m an active, engaged, and successful angel investor in early-stage technology startups. I’ve invested directly in over 40 companies over the last 12+ years; I’m also an LP in multiple VC funds. My investing page has more details, including performance statistics.
🔮 I serve on a private company boards, advise a small and select group of startups, and consult for an even smaller group of larger organizations.
🚀 Previously, I co-founded Quandl, a SaaS-enabled B2B marketplace for data. We pioneered the category of alternative data for finance, changing the industry along the way. Quandl was acquired by Nasdaq in 2018 in a successful and substantial exit.
📈 I was an early employee at Simplex Asset Management, one of Asia’s oldest and largest quant hedge funds. I built one of the bond market’s first algorithmic trading systems, and headed US investing and operations for Simplex before retiring in 2007.
🎓 I studied Engineering Physics at IIT Bombay, India’s top technology school. While there, I helped set up India’s first campus data network, and won a bunch of awards, mostly for extra-curriculars and leadership.
🗞 Media
My work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Economist, CNBC, Bloomberg, Forbes, Business Insider, Quartz, the Globe and Mail (Canada) and many others. You can see a full list of articles here.
🎯 Board Roles
I have served on and continue to serve on private company boards.
Typically, these roles leverage my experience as a successful generalist founder; my deep knowledge of data businesses; my expertise in capital markets; or some combination thereof.
I’m available for additional board roles if the fit is right.
💡 Startup Advisory
I help founders execute better through relevant, concrete, actionable advice, delivered with alignment and empathy.
I’m deeply familiar with both the low-level tactical problems and daily grind of running a startup with all its attendant uncertainty and scarcity; and the high-level challenges and imperatives of building a business that matters over the long term.
I’m especially strong on growth strategy; building a world-class team and culture; fund-raising; narrative creation and positioning; and personal development. My goal is to help you understand what excellence looks like in all of these.
Read my founder testimonials and learn more on my advisory page.
🧭 Consulting
I am an expert consultant on the topic of data, especially as it pertains to capital markets and financial services. My clients are typically institutional investors: hedge funds, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, venture capital firms and private equity firms.
Topics I regularly advise on include:
💱 Data advantages and using data to generate alpha
👩💻 Designing, building and scaling effective data organizations
🏗️ Modern data infrastructure and technical approaches
🤖 LLMs and the ML-AI-Data stack
🏭 Managing data teams, processes, platforms and operations
🚚 Specific datasets, commercials, usage and opportunities
☑️ Expert evaluations and diligence on data-related ventures
🏛️ Best practices in quantitative and quantamental investing
🛰️ Alternative data and untapped sources of edge
🛠 Transitioning from qualitative to quantitative methods
⛷ Staying agile at scale via people, processes and technology
🔢 Data and API business models and the data ecosystem
Read more on my consulting page.
🎤 Speaking
I’m an experienced public speaker; my talks range from high-level keynotes for generalist audiences, to extremely concrete, actionable seminars on specific topics in data, markets and technology.
Recent seminar venues include asset managers Winton, OTPP, CPPIB, UBS and Franklin Templeton; conferences include Strata, AI Trading, Princeton Quant, and Montgomery; and tech events include Toronto City Hall, TechTO, SaaStock, and the Toronto Stock Exchange.
You can see a full list of talks here.
⚖️ Ethics
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?
🧭 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.
❤️ 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) (trending lower)
🔠 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 🙂
📡 Philosophy
The Greek philosopher Anaximenes asked: “Why should I study the stars, when there is suffering and misery here on Earth?”.
Today, we know the answer. The best way to alleviate suffering and misery is through progress. Scientific progress to expand the productive frontier; economic progress to balance equity and efficiency; and societal progress to enable not just surviving but thriving. Studying the stars and investing in the future: that’s, ultimately, what I’m interested in.