There are often close relationships between top level business metrics. For instance, it’s well known that retention has a super strong impact on the valuation of a subscription business. Or that the % of occupied seats is super important for an airline. A fun little toy model that I can up with generates a curious relationship between conversion rates and revenue.
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A funny thing about being a foreigner is how you realize people take broken things for granted. I’m going to go out on a limb here claiming that the US has a pretty dumb banking system. I could talk about it all day, but right now I want to focus on a very particular piece of it: how to verify your identity online.
Read more…Just for fun, I generated these graphs of the number of letters in the word for each number. I really spent about 10 minutes on this (ok…possibly also another 40 minutes tweaking the plots):
Here’s a dumb extremely accurate rule I’m postulating* for software engineering projects: you need at least 3 examples before you solve the right problem.
This is what I’ve noticed:
(Note that #1 and #2 are actually pretty different implications. But let’s get back to that later.)
Read more…I just bought Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future and discovered that it mentions my blog – in particular the post When machine learning matters.
Ok, I lied a little bit. I didn’t discover it serendipitously. Someone actually emailed me saying I was mentioned, and so I ordered the book for same-day delivery. But I was seriously planning to read the book anyway – having read both The Second Machine Age and Rage Against the Machine – they are great books and I’m not being biased.
Read more…There’s about 765 million blog posts about the diversity “memo” that leaked out of Google a couple of weeks ago. I think the case for any biological difference is pretty weak, and it bothers me when people refer to an “interest gap” as anything else than caused by the environment. Maybe because I have a daughter, maybe because I have too many female friends who told me stories how they were held back or discriminated against.
Read more…I just spent a few days in Italy, on the Ligurian coast. Even though we were on the west side of Italy, the Mediterranean sea was to the east, because the house was situated on a long bay. But zooming in even more, there were parts of the coast that were even more twisted – to the point where it had turned a full 360 degress so you ended up having the sea to the west again.
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I’ve written before about the importance of iterating quickly but I didn’t necessarily talk about some concrete things you can do. When I’ve built up the tech team at Better, I’ve intentionally optimized for fast iteration speed above almost everything else. What are some ways we did that?
Read more…Remember when everyone had a really ugly blog with a blogroll? Anyway, just think the word is funny.
I follow a few hundred blogs using Feedly and Reeder and have been reading a few hundred thousand blog posts over the last 10 years. Here’s some stuff I think everyone should follow. Not going to share a million blogs, just a few top ones. That way you don’t have to think about it, just subscribe to all of it:
Read more…How hard can it be to compute conversion rate? Take the total number of users that converted and divide them with the total number of users. Done. Except… it’s a lot more complicated when you have any sort of significant time lag.
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