AI 💥 Startups https://www.drjasondavis.com/ 2018-11-28T00:00:00Z Jason Davis https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2018/11/28/hiring-your-first-data-scientist 2018-11-28T00:00:00Z 2018-11-28T00:00:00Z

You’ve scaled your business to the point where you have product-market fit. Your leadership team has good intuition about the market, product, and opportunities in front of you. Yet the opportunities are too vast. You’re not able to assimilate and make sense of all the data required to understand tradeoffs, measure ROI, or make decisions that feel well informed. Perhaps it’s time to hire your first data scientist.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2017/3/22/the-ins-outs-of-data-data-transfer 2017-03-22T00:00:00Z 2017-03-22T00:00:00Z

In the world of big-data, data transfer is a much ignored topic. So much of the big data ecosystem assumes that your data is just "there" while in reality, your data is actually coming from somewhere.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2015/11/21/simon-data-is-hiring 2015-11-21T00:00:00Z 2015-11-21T00:00:00Z

Simon is building big data, predictive, and real-time systems. Are you a software engineer aspiring to dig deeper in data? A data engineer looking to expand horizons into data science or full stack software? Or are you just a general badass with proficiency across web programming, data programming, and deep data analysis?

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2015/3/22/etsys-ipo-weather-report-the-data-behind-the-crafts 2015-04-16T00:00:00Z 2015-04-16T00:00:00Z

Etsy IPO'd today and the company is an incredible story of empowering over a million small business men and women to sell unique and one of a kind goods online. In aggregate, these entrepreneurs sold over $1.93 billion in goods last year, as revealed by Etsy's S1 filing. And while it took Etsy 10 years to get there, its growth is nevertheless astonishing. When Etsy acquired my startup Adtuitive in late 2009, the marketplace sold about $180 million in total goods that year. When I left after three awesome years there, the marketplace was doing an annual run rate of over $1 billion.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2015/4/9/product-data-and-your-startup 2015-04-11T00:00:00Z 2015-04-11T00:00:00Z

You've spec'd out, wire-framed, and maybe even implemented a simple version of your website or mobile app. Maybe you even have a launch plan in place. You know that data and KPIs are a thing, but you don't know where to start?

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2015/3/7/if-only-i-had-built-slack-plus-the-three-keys-to-startup-success 2015-03-08T00:00:00Z 2015-03-08T00:00:00Z

Etsy has always been a heavy user of IRC for internal company communication. Everyone has an IRC chat account, and certainly when I was there, it was a pervasive and effective communication channel for them. After Etsy's S-1 filing last week, a few alums created a slack channel to discuss the pending IPO and also to reminisce over the good ol' days at Etsy.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2015/2/28/the-hard-thing-about-startups 2015-02-28T00:00:00Z 2015-02-28T00:00:00Z

My good friend Ori Allon recently published a an overview of the fund raising strategy employed by his previous startups and now at his current upstart Compass. Ori's first two startups were acquired by Google and by Twitter. So needless to say, very few entrepreneurs find themselves having the luxury of starting out with an $8 million seed round as he and Robert did at Compass.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2015/01/25/last-minute-eatin-at-michelin-restaurants 2015-01-26T00:00:00Z 2015-01-26T00:00:00Z

When Daniel lost it's third Michelin star, the NYC restaurant world was up in arms. One of only ten restaurants in the country with an esteemed three star rating, the Michelin overlords had apparently decided that the USA would suffer through 2015 with only nine three star establishments. For the unacquainted, the heralded guide was first published by Andrew Michelin himself way back in the year 1900. Designed to help motorists find their way around the French countryside and to the best in fine linen dining, the guide has maintained itself today as the gold standard in upmarket restaurant reviews.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2013/10/01/your-first-ab-tests-a-step-by-step-guide 2013-10-01T00:00:00Z 2013-10-01T00:00:00Z

Your A/B testing system is hot off the press, you've integrated with Optimizely, Google's Content Experiments, or maybe deployed some code of your own. You open your eyes, look around, and see a whole new world of experimental opportunities. But suddenly, you start asking more questions and forming more hypotheses than one could possibly answer in a lifetime. Should you start testing 41 shades of background hues to see what's most attention grabbing? Maybe start by testing a rewrite of every piece of copy on your site? Or maybe you should start A/B/C/D testing your web fonts?

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2013/09/24/a-last-minute-infographic-last-minute-eatin-featured-in-the-nytimes 2013-09-24T00:00:00Z 2013-09-24T00:00:00Z

Last Minute Eatin' has been running for over two months now and has tweeted over 1,500 tables since launch. LME knows exactly when and where tables are open, and you can now visualize these openings with the Last Minute Eatin' Explorer. Every day at midnight, LME checks availability for almost 1,000 restaurants on OpenTable, and the infographic shows which restaurants and neighborhoods have prime time (between 7 and 10pm) tables available. Read more about LME data and how it works.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2013/09/23/a-mixpanel-data-exporter 2013-09-23T00:00:00Z 2013-09-23T00:00:00Z

Mixpanel is a great analytics tool for small to medium sized web and mobile shops. And not surprisingly, their analytics product has pretty good adoption (over 1,400 companies using it, according to their homepage). One things I've noticed, however, is that as some of these shops grow in size, they slowly start to ask more than Mixpanel can answer. Their data science team may want to do some in-depth analysis over customer lifetime value. Their product team wants to do some deeper funnel analysis comparing variants in a recent A/B test. Or their search team wants to do some click-depth inference on long-tailed queries.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2013/09/12/eight-ways-youve-misconfigured-your-ab-test 2013-09-12T00:00:00Z 2013-09-12T00:00:00Z

You've read about the virtues of A/B testing feature releases. You love iterating quickly, testing quickly, and continually learning in a data-driven fashion. You appreciate the importance of keeping an eye on the statistics behind your testing, and perhaps you even use a tool or two to make sure your results are statistically valid. But, you ran a test last week, the results have been coming in for some time now, but, the data just doesn't look quite right.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2013/08/05/the-life-of-a-last-minute-new-york-city-restaurant-reservation 2013-08-05T00:00:00Z 2013-08-05T00:00:00Z

There's been a lot of hoopla recently about so-called high frequency restaurant reservation trading. Are computers stealing my reservations? Will I ever get into Per Se again? It's Saturday night, I have a hot date but no table, am I screwed? Last Wednesday, I launched Last Minute Eatin', a same day reservation service that tweets New York's hottest tables. While the service has only been running publicly for a couple of days now, I've been running it silently for quite some time, and it's been monitoring thousands of restaurants for several months now.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2013/07/31/last-minute-eatin-launches-gets-you-the-hottest-table-in-town 2013-07-31T00:00:00Z 2013-07-31T00:00:00Z

Do you love eating out but hate making plans? There’s nothing worse than trying to find a great table when you need it most, only to find that all your favorite places are completely booked. New York City can be expensive, but the thought of eating bad food at a second or third tier restaurant is unpalatable. Last Minute Eatin’ is an experiment in immediate gratification and schedule free living. When same day restaurant openings come up, they get tweeted from @LastMinuteEatin along with a link to make your reservation on OpenTable. Last Minute Eatin’ continuously monitors thousands of reservation openings and cancellations every day, so if you see a table tweeted, rest assured it’s one of the hottest tables in the city for your last minute plans.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2013/07/08/coding-in-the-rain 2013-07-08T00:00:00Z 2013-07-08T00:00:00Z

It's been rainy here in NYC as of late. Just about the only thing worse than 90 degree city heat is 90 degree city heat with intense thunderstorms roaring through. So I find myself indoors when it rains, crunching data, writing code, checking into GitHub. Of course I'm not unique here. There are thousands of other GitHub coders in New York and millions of contributors worldwide. The data scientist inside of me asks questions. Is it possible to measure these effects? And if so, exactly how much more do people code when it's rainy?

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2013/05/19/a-corollary-to-experimentcalculator-com-with-examples 2013-05-19T00:00:00Z 2013-05-19T00:00:00Z

Dan McKinley recently put together a very useful tool in estimating how long to run your A/B tests. The obvious corollary here being, “your experiments will take much longer than you think”. Let’s dive into some real-world numbers.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2012/12/09/restart 2012-12-09T00:00:00Z 2012-12-09T00:00:00Z

Etsy acquired my startup Adtuitive in 2009. At the time, we had a pretty cool product that automated online advertising for small retailers, and we were operating at a modest scale of 200 million ads a month. Deciding to sell the company was tough, but the last three years at Etsy were awesome. I had the privilege of working with very talented folks across a full stack of things, from Hadoop infrastructure to search ranking to search UI. And of course, search ads. During this time period, I saw Etsy grow from $180 million in 2009 sales, to over $80 million last October alone. My team grew from Adtuitive’s engineering team of only 4 to almost 30 in total.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2012/08/26/nyc-dining-the-cost-of-a-b 2012-08-26T00:00:00Z 2012-08-26T00:00:00Z

If you eat out in New York City, the image above should evoke some sort of visceral reaction. In July of 2010, the NYC Department of Health began rating each of the 24,000 restaurants throughout the five boroughs of the city. Each restaurant is given a grade of "A", "B", or "C" based on violations ranging from improper food temperature to sewage problems to the presence of vermin. You can browse the complete list here. Fast forward 2 years, and the new system seems to be a win for consumers - Mayor Bloomberg credits the program to a 14% reduction in Salmonella, the lowest rate in 20 years. And according to this press release, NYC restaurant revenue is also up 9.3% since grading began. But still many restauranteurs disagree, expressing anger over these health inspections. Restaurants complain about the complexity in understanding the grading system, fighting with the city over infraction points, and spending additional money to maintain their facilities to meet the city's guidelines.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2012/05/13/an-insiders-guide-to-facebooks-ipo 2012-05-13T00:00:00Z 2012-05-13T00:00:00Z

The Wall Street Journal recently had a piece on investing in the Facebook IPO. They admit, “most retail investors will be shut out of the offering and won't get the IPO price, meaning they likely will have to pay more in the days that follow if they want an early piece of the action”. To see what’s going on here, let’s take a closer look at what happens on the day of the IPO. In pricing the IPO, there are two prices to consider: the offer price, and the open price. The offer price is set by the company and underwriters. This is the stock price that the company receives in its IPO sale. The open price is set by the publicly traded market on the day the company goes public.

https://www.drjasondavis.com/blog/2012/04/21/3-day-startup-nyc-day-1-mentoring 2012-04-21T00:00:00Z 2012-04-21T00:00:00Z

I love innovation. I love working with smart people. And I love working with limited resources around extremely tight deadlines. 3 Day Startup: 30 bright entrepreneurs. Ideas flow Friday night, business plan and product demo need to happen by Sunday night. The program started out of UT Austin, and I attended as a participant at their first event. I actually pitched the idea that the group ended up building that weekend, which ended up spinning out into a company now called Moodfish. Nik has since taken Moodfish 1000x further, well beyond the simple idea I had. 3DS has grown tremendously since and is now a worldwide operation. They've held events in Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, France, Portugal, Israel, Chile, and China.