Two years ago, I printed up Chubb’s 10k and started reading. As I read Chubb’s financials, industry reports, Warren Buffet’s letters, and various blogs I came to realize that the insurance industry was both far more complex and rife with opportunity than I’d assumed. While I’ve always been attracted to fractured and regulated markets, nothing quite mimics insurance in its scope, nuance, and size. I wasn’t the only person thinking about this, as the number of recent insurance tech companies indicates.
Jun 29, 2017Lots of VCs talk about being founder friendly. I’ve noticed that founders often misunderstand how that actually works. What “founder friendly” does and doesn’t mean is important to understand.
Jun 12, 2017This is the second edition of Paths, a series outlining emerging technologies with clear steps on how to get started in each field. In this post, we’ll explore why it’s an exciting time to get into VR now–both for consumers and developers. Then, we’ll discuss how a wide range of interdisciplinary fields have pushed the technology forward. And last, we’ll identify concrete ways in which you can get started.
May 3, 2017The tragedy of data science is that 79% of an analyst’s time goes to data preparation. Data preparation is not only tedious, it steals time from analysis. Data packages make for fast, reproducible analysis by simplifying data prep, eliminating parsing, and versioning data. In round numbers, data packages speed both I/O and data preparation by a factor of 10.
Apr 25, 2017Experts are generally right until they’re wrong. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get fooled into thinking that experts are always right. This is especially true when it comes to trying new things in existing fields. We are biased into believing that knowing a lot about something confers an ability to predict the future.
Apr 24, 2017You have likely seen Christopher Hesse’s demo of image-to-image translation (a Tensorflow port of pix2pix by Isola et al.). You might even be thinking that you want to try using your own set of images to see what kinds of crazy things this model will start pumping out. Pachyderm has created a totally reusable and generic pipeline that takes care of all the training, pre-processing, etc. for you, so you can jump right into the fun parts.
Apr 14, 2017We partnered up with China Tech Insights, a research group within Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) to understand how WeChat drives its 889 Million monthly active users to use the app an average of 50+ minutes, and 9 to 11 separate times, per day. This post dives into the growth strategy that led to key WeChat milestones, lessons learned and gives insight into the method behind the madness as WeChat scaled from 0 to 800M+ MAUs in less than 6 years.
Apr 12, 2017