4 posts tagged “marketoutsider”

When you are working in a startup of two, you are doing everything: the coding, the business work, the planning-- and all of it sits there on your TODO list with a status of overdue.  Everything has to be done, even (especially?) the stuff that you don't want to do.  A few weeks ago that begrudging task was scoring training data.  (Supervised Data Mining techniques require you to mark up some data with what you expect it to score; it then uses some of this data to learn how to score, and some to evaluate how well it preforms.)

At MarketOutsider we're bootstrapping as leanly as possible.  That means, unlike many companies that might outsource a somewhat menial task like this, I got to spend over a week doing it.  Every day, as I'd score data, I'd hear my other tasks calling to me, but I managed to stay focused on the scoring. 

In the end, I feel doing it myself provided some value, and I'm glad that we didn't out-source.  Beyond the costs of outsourcing and having to train someone and rely on their ability to do it correctly, I also reaped the following benefits:

• I have a much better understanding of the data we're scoring
• I have a list of potential over and under-fitting errors to expect
• I was able to get a better idea of how our customers will use our product
• I was able to identify bugs and flaws in other systems that led up to this system
• and others...

The O'Reilly Money:Tech conference was great.

I met a lot of great people, including some potential leads.

I learned a lot about the financial markets and how they work.

I met a few of our competitors, including some that were at about the same stage as us.

I got some insight that I think will really help us separate our company from the pack of other companies doing similar work to us.

New York City was great, I need to go back again when I can spend more time seeing everything in the city, and I can bring the wife and kids, too.

Next week I'm heading to New York to attend the O'Reilly Money:Tech conference.  I've never been to New York before, so this could be interesting.  It would be nice to visit under the circumstance where I'd be able to see the city and enjoy myself, but there should be plenty of time for that later. 

The conference is all about harnessing the web to provide insight into the financial markets, which, conveniently is what my company is all about.  If you want to get on the list to find out more, go ahead and visit the site and sign up. 

Times are interesting to be starting a company that focuses on the financial markets.  I'm hoping that rubbing elbows with some financial types in New York will give me an idea about how they are taking the recent market activity.  Luckily, not only is there market activity even during recessions, but we are building a platform that can be taken beyond just the financial vertical. 

Things have been pretty quiet on this site recently.  Not so for the rest of my life! 

Here are the two main news items of interest in my life right now:

We're expecting our third child (sometime in June)

I'm starting my own company, moving to full-time in January.

I'll elaborate later, if I ever get time!