What We’re Reading
A few good pieces the Collab team came across this week …
Tourism
Distribution
“It is a red flag for me if the founders have 20 slides in their deck on their product and are not getting into issues like distribution, team or other parts of the business. There have been very few products that cause people to beat a path to the door of the business on their own [like Google or Facebook]. Successful companies almost always have operators running them who know how to market, sell, manage an income statement and hire.”
Big data
How Google Ventures makes VC investments:
Staffers plug in all sorts of deal details into “The Machine” — which is programmed with all sorts of market data, and returns traffic signal-like outputs. Green means go. Red means stop. Yellow means proceed with caution, but sources say it’s usually the practical equivalent of red.
Generations
Significance
Strong evidence of a tradeable signal requires more than “running a five dimensional optimisation back over the data” and getting a strong result, Harding says.
“People always say to me: ‘This is what works.’ I say: ‘Worked’.
“‘Works’ implies a property of a population. ‘Worked’ implies it is the property of a sample. ‘Works’ implies this is a fundamental underlying property of nature. ‘Worked’ implies it might have been significant or might simply have been a random feature of the data.”
Evolution
Have a good weekend.