YouSaid · the spoken record

Auren Hoffman

lines on the record: 81
first: 2023-03-14
most recent: 2023-03-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know. I saw this person and didn't want to be like them. You could see, okay, they were a few years older than me, and I could see how I could easily end up being like this person. That's the path I'm on. And then it's like, okay, well, are you sure you want to be that? And I could see how there is some allure there. They may have money or they may have stature or et cetera. So you could have some sort of allure. Maybe it was just lucky or maybe just I tripped one day, but I think there's definitely many scenarios where I replayed my life where I wouldn't have made that decision.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very easy to get caught up with people, even if you're old like me, it's easy, but when you're younger and you're more impressionable, it's very easy to get caught up with charismatic people and to kind of fall into their orbits. I think all of us at one point or another have got caught up in something. And sometimes it's good. We get caught up in something that's bigger than ourselves.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I love that question. I think the question is amazing. And I was thinking about this. Sometimes the best example is actually a counter example here. So when I was a teenager, I kind of fell under the influence of a really bad person. And I got caught up in their orbit. And this person was like super highly unethical, but also alluring, especially for a teenager. And it took me a couple years and I finally broke away and realized I didn't want to end up like this person. And to this day, I actually often think about this person as what not to become. So in some way, I think the kindest thing someone has done for me, it's the lesson that the least kindest person I've ever met gave me.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their passion, I find when you meet someone who's really good at their craft, even if it's just completely random type of thing, like they're a great tour guide for the Louvre or something. And there's millions of tour guides, but there's just so good and you just get so excited by seeing someone be great at their craft.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that people are generally good. There's a small number of really bad apples out there, but I think people are very good and they want to be inspired. I want to be inspired. They want to be able to do the right thing. They want to find people who can help them do that. And we sometimes live in a world where there's just somewhat lack of inspiration. This ask not what your country, that doesn't exist as much. Maybe it never existed, but it doesn't seem to exist as much for my generation, your generation. if we could get just inspired a little bit more. And sometimes when you meet these people and you interview so many people and you interview these people who are so passionate about what they do and you could hear it coming through on the microphone over the podcast about their passion, that is why people listen to your podcast is because of that reason. Everyone wants to get inspired by the, even if they're doing something completely different, they're like, I'm investing in a random hedge fund or something like that. It's still cool to hear.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing might be, because these are people that may have had thousands of years to reflect on things, is just like how a society surprised you in those 2,000 years. What has changed out there? What are you disappointed with? Because obviously there's a lot to be disappointed with. But also, what are you enthused about with our society? What has been a positive surprise that has happened? And I'd be really interested in how they think about it. And I can imagine that their answers would just blow us away.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny because your classic question, the kindest thing, maybe not be good for them. That might be the one you don't want to ask them.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the most impactful people in the world are religious leaders. So if I could bring in somebody like Jesus and Muhammad and have some sort of conversation with these folks and really try to get to their core and understand these things, and this would be incredible. I think actually very soon maybe someone's going to build an AI, maybe not with the religious leaders, but with other types of people. You could have dinner with Cleopatra and with Julius Caesar. I just think that would be so cool and so interesting. And of course, you might want to have dinner with a dead relative and really try to understand them or maybe you never reconsolved with your father or something like Field of Dreams. And then you could have dinner with your dad. So I think all these things are going to be really exciting to do in the future.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's also important that they're off the record. If they're off the record, people have the ability to play with ideas a bit. And in this world that we live in where everything's on Twitter, it's very unsafe to play with an idea. And you want to be able to say, look, this is a safe space and we're going to assume positive intent. One can play with an idea here. And we're here to help you make your idea better, but not necessarily judge you personally.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing is just letting people know ahead of time who's coming, letting everyone know okay, here's who's coming, here's a little bit about each person who's coming to the dinner, Patrick O'Shaughnessy is coming. He's this amazing podcast. If you didn't listen to this podcast, you definitely should. And then after people go to the dinner, the next day, send them everyone's contact information. So many times you went to dinner like, oh, that person across the table, they said so many interesting things. First of all, I kind of even forgot their name. I don't even remember that person's name. Now at least have their email so I can reach out to them and oh, wow, that was so interesting. And I'm going to be in New York later. Let's have a chat about it, et cetera.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Myself, I've got an early flight tomorrow, so be respectful of everyone's time and let people get out there when they need to.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very hard to be a good moderator, and people who are most interesting are often not the best moderators. So they have to be able to get everything flowing. They have to make sure that everyone's contributing. They have to be able to cut people off because of someone's going on. Then that's no fun for everybody else. They have to make sure that's interesting. Hopefully they can interject some humor into it because if everyone's laughing, that's usually a good dinner this well and they can keep everything going. And then I also think all dinner parties should end early. Keep people wanting from it. So if you start a dinner party at seven, everyone looks like it's seated by 7.30. Get everyone out of there by 9.30. If people want to linger on and talk till the wee hours of the morning, great, but people have other things to do. They have to wake up. They've got their crazy workouts at 5 a.m. or something like that. So give people excuse to go. Worst student approach is like people like glance, they slowly kind of, you're still trying to go, but people, I have to excuse.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need a moderator, the better the moderator for the dinner, the more people you could have. But I think it would be really hard to have more than, even with the best moderator, let's say maybe the maximum is 14 and maybe the ideal number is 8.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So just assigning someone you're sitting here, it's really easy. We're going to have one conversation. Then it's just going to be so much better. These like cocktail things that are out there, cocktail parties are just the death for introverts. I personally can't stand them. So having some sort of way where like you can allow that introvert to thrive is really appealing.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my opinion, is the food. Nobody remembers the food in the end. They remember a lot of other things. They remember the quality of the conversation, what happened to the conversation, et cetera. But the food isn't as important. And then, of course, you want to have some sort of good conversation about something. So letting people know ahead of time, we're not just having a dinner party. We're going to talk about these things so people can start to prep their mind. Not everyone's so good about coming up with brilliant things to say on the spot. So at least on the drive over, they can start thinking about, oh, this is the type of thing I'm going to talk about at this dinner. And it could be a very, very narrow topic like we're going to get into this really, really interesting piece of the supply chain of semiconductors. Or it could be a very, very broad topic like, what's the meaning of life or something? All those things can be incredible.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I love dinner parties. I'm passionate about dinner parties. It's really outside of work and family. It's probably what I'm most passionate about. I think there's a small number of things that you can do to just have a way better dinner party. The first one is that they should appeal to introverts and extroverts. Sometimes you have these things that just appeal to one or the other, often just to extroverts. So having things that appeal much more to introverts are good. Having one conversation is always better than having multiple conversations. So if you're just talking to your neighbor, it's not that interesting, which means that you need some sort of place with good acoustics where you can have one conversation. It's hard to do that in like the middle of a restaurant to have dinner parties. And even some of the private rooms or restaurants are really, really loud. So you might need to have them at your home. And even if you have a tiny home, it's still fine. You can just get a bunch of people around the table. It could be a little card table. And the one thing that is probably the least important thing in dinner parties.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think of okay, well, some of these joint keys are really created top down. So if you think of the meter, the meter, which is probably one of the most successful join keys of all time, that was decreed by Napoleon that we were going to use this measure. Sometimes it's helpful to be the emperor of all of Europe to decree your join key, but sometimes join keys also can come bottom up as well.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start to think about food products. Like my hamburger and yours has two patties, it becomes really, really hard to even think, how do I even do that? So if you can create some sort of, and sometimes there's some taxonomy involved, but some way to create these join keys in places where these join keys don't exist, then you really truly could unlock the power of your data.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You mentioned earlier is really just understanding these join keys. And the join keys can make data really more valuable. Data is essentially more valuable the more it can be join to. So the more you can join it. And some join keys are proprietary. So like Dun and Bradstreet has these proprietary join keys, but sometimes join keys are open and they're open to anyone to use. Again, like the dollar or Unix time or some other type of thing in our industry, there's something called place key that is really great for joining data about addresses and stuff like that. And then it can be open for any single person to use. If there isn't join keys in your industry or your particular thing that you're looking at, then thinking about creating one and thinking about open sourcing it could be really, really valuable. So one of the biggest problems, if you think of the four nouns, the last noun is data about products. It's really hard to join products. For books, there's like an ISBN number, but for most cases, it's very, very hard.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be focused on upselling them, and so their revenues will go down a lot of the tough. So they're just never going to be able to go do that. So you have to think about it intentionally before you start and at least have some sort of sense. I'm going to bake a data co-op into my business, even though I'm an application right now.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To really be passionate about data to do a data business, and there's just so many more examples of these application businesses that have been so successful. So it's a lot easier to become application. The problem is once you start an application business, it is hard to start a data business because unless you've really been thinking about it all the way through, like Salesforce has an amazing amount of data that everyone inputted into Salesforce. So I would love to have some sort of data co-op that comes back. How do I benchmark versus everybody else or update my contacts? I have contacts about the CIO of General Electric. Well, somebody else has that. It could update all that stuff. That would be great. The problem is every single one of their contracts that they have says that they won't do this. So if they wanted to rechange that, they would have to go back to their original agreements, legal agreements with every single one of their customers. And of course, if they went to their salespeople and customer success people and said, hey, change this thing. Well, if they did that, that means they might.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely can work both ways. It's much easier to start an application business today than to start a data business. I'm running a data business. I would not wish this often on some of my worst enemy. It is a tough slog out there. It's literally you get no ice cream and you're just eating broccoli all the time.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most common way, I think, by far is to try to be in more than one of the four quadrants at once. It's like I'm a data business and I'm an application business. Start an application business is super hard. Starting religion versus truth business, all these things are super, super hard. So you just add to your chance of failure by trying to do more at once. Yeah, when you get to 300 million revenue, great. Add one of these other lines in there. But until that point in time, you really want to be very, very, very focused on one thing.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zero product velocity. So, how quickly is your product changing over time? And usually that's a good barometer for the fact that it's getting better. If your velocity is 10 times faster than the incumbent, even though you might be very, very small compared to them today, you can just start playing it out where at some point you can really start being competitive with them.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one thing is just transparency is really important. I think it's becoming more important in everything that we do. So not just in data, but in anything around business, just how do you be more transparent with your customers? If you're a coffee company, you have to be today way more transparent about your supply chain than you did before. You have to be more transparent about your labor rules. So I think transparency is becoming really important. And in data, it becomes more important because it's very hard to verify every single fact. And so they want to be able to understand, okay, what is going on, what's happening, and then how is that changing over time? Are you getting better at what you do or you're not getting better? There's a lot of companies that are out there, especially some of these companies that have been around for 40 plus years that really have just taken their customers for granted and they're not getting any better. They're not really focusing on. And so the ways that small companies can compete in any scenario is velocity.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good question because every few months something gets across my desk if somebody's starting a new Bloomberg competitor or a Bloomberg for this or this other types of things. But in some ways, if you think of them, they're kind of like Netflix or something where they have these very, very high fixed costs every time they want to get a new data set. They might spend millions of dollars for this new data set. And then everyone gets that data already part of the bundle. So it's already there. So it becomes really, really hard. for you specifically who uses Bloomberg, you might use very, very, very different data sets. There might be like one or two that are really common amongst everybody, but then you might use very, very different data sets than somebody else who's using the same terminal, even who's on the same floor as you and the same financial institution. So it's very hard. Everyone has a different use case for Bloomberg and just like in Netflix, just what you're watching on Netflix might be very different than what I watch on Netflix, but we're still both using Netflix.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certainly in that data truth quadrant, we just have the fewest number of companies being started. I think there's a good reasons because the market is not as good in that quadrant. It's very hard to understand. There's not as much venture capital money there. And there's not a lot of outcomes outside of Zoom info that we can point to that have had massive numbers of success that are out there. The other company that we all might want to study a bit more that you mentioned earlier is Bloomberg. Bloomberg's just an incredible company and they're weirdly getting even more incredible over time. They're really at that point where you could fire the top 20 people and this still would be amazing.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The experient FICO or Aquifax FICO type of thing would be really, really interesting for people to understand. Most people have a sense of how these impact their lives. And they're both incredible businesses. They're actually very different businesses. They're symbiotic. They rely on one another, but they're incredible different businesses. And I think just some sort of case study of understanding that. Now, in the U.S., we have three major credit bureaus. We have Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. In most countries, you have either one, which is like a super monopoly or you've got two, which is some sort of duopoly. U.S. is actually the rare case where you really get to three. It's very hard to see a scenario where we'd have more than three in any place because it's very, very hard to collect that data. And then, of course, the FICOs of the world in some countries, you may have 20 versions of that, but because FICO is so dominant in the US and also overseas, it's becoming the more global standard as well.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Innovator and that innovator sits on the pedestal for a reason, and you're here to support that innovator. And that means you have to maybe take a little bit of your ego out of it. You have to have some more humility in what you do because you're really just in a supporting role for eventually this innovation happening.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, data businesses are weird and they take someone who is a little bit different to run the data business than maybe I think some of these typical businesses. Often when you see a slide when someone's raising venture capital, there'll be some sort of thing where they're at the center and there's all these spokes of other people that are surrounding them. That is not a data business. The data business is usually like one of those guys on the side and the customer is at the center. And then there's all these other things, including your business, but often many other data businesses that are feeding into that customer. So you have to be okay with kind of being on the side. One of the things we like to say internally is like, we're archivists. We didn't write the Constitution. You've got Madison and Hamilton. They're on the pedestal. They're the innovator. Where are the archivists maintaining the Constitution? Nobody knows the names of those people. They're still really important. You have to tell everybody what you're doing is really important, but there still is the true.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That and then you're like, okay, in this environment that we're in right now, you know of a high cost of capital, maybe I don't want to invest millions of dollars for this particular thing. Or maybe this is something I can do for hundreds of thousands of dollars and I can get it to market relatively quickly and I can very, very quickly recruit my costs. So those are the types of things that you're constantly evaluating.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's not that different from our product roadmap. So you ask your customers what do you want? Do you want more rows? Do you want more columns? Which rows do you want? I care about power plants at Vietnam. Okay, interesting. I'm going to go ask a few other customers before I go invest in that, if that's valuable. And it's like, okay, what columns I care about? Well, I care about the admissions from those power plants. Oh, that's interesting. I don't have that column. That's interesting. Turns out lots of people care about climate change. Maybe I'll go create that column. That's a very interesting thing that's out there. People are going to have very different types of things and you want to be able to rank it. And of course, you're ranking, okay, first of all, you're looking around for a competition. So are there a lot of other people providing this or is it more of a greenfield if other people are providing it? Is the data good? Is it valuable? My customers are asking me for this for a reason. Maybe they can't get it or they don't think it's good that's out there. How easy is it for me to do this? Is this going to take me millions of dollars of investment? In many cases, the ass do take.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business is delivering that to your customer? How do you have that delivery experience being incredible, including the documentation and everything else that needs to happen on that front? The number of sources of data is very important. First of all, it's more valuable to you as a data business if you have data coming in from hundreds of thousands. I mean, we have sources that come in which are over 90% of the data that comes in from these sources is bad. Like the data is wrong. Maybe it used to be right, but it could be like very, very old. But there's still some nugget in there somewhere that's valuable. So how do you be able to sort through the band to get through the good and be able to take that out? Because that one nugget could add a lot of value to some of your customers.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think of data, there's often like three steps to any type of data business. There's the first step where you're kind of in jest, where you're getting a whole bunch of data from lots and lots of places. And it could be you're only buying it from one, but usually you have thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of sources that you're getting data from. The second, and we can walk through all that ingest phase, then the second phase is actually reducing that data to actually making it good. So that's where your machine learning might come in. That's where you're really trying to understand you have two conflicting things. One says this McDonald's is open at 7 a.m. The other one says it's open at 8 a.m. They can't both be true on this Tuesday. So you have to make some sort of choice. And it might be neither of them are true, but those two data points help inform you understand what's true. And you may have holes in your data and you could also use machine learning. Machine learning is really good to fill in small amounts of holes and data as well so they can fill in some of those holes. And then the last step in any data.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As well. And this is why some of these data businesses become winner take most because the cost per data element keeps dropping over time. So it becomes really, really hard for new people to compete against them.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More frequent it changes, the more valuable the data is. So if there's some sort of temporal component to the data and sometimes there's a price related thing as well, then that can be really interesting as well. So if I just want to tell you the facts around the war of 1812, okay, well, those facts aren't really changing that much anymore 200 years later. So maybe that data isn't as valuable and it becomes really part of the common world. And that does happen even with companies that are selling data, like their data becomes less and less valuable on a per data element basis. So your customer might still be spending more money with you every month or every quarter every year, but they're getting a lot more value from it. So you think of data as much more like the AWS business where the spend might be going up, but the amount of compute that they're getting, the amount of storage, all these other things are also going up pretty dramatic.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can be. If you're selling to enterprises, it's a little bit easier because you don't have a ton of customers usually, and they're usually very good about those types of things, and they're often buying data from many different folks. So they have internal controls to be able to do that. But most data companies will salt their data. So they essentially will have some fake data that they deliver to their customers. So think of it as some sort of like watermark that's in your data. And if they start to see that data out in the world, they'll have a sense of what happened. Because also that customer could have had a breach. Maybe they had a security breach or there could be other types of things that happen. So back in the day, if you think of map makers a few hundred years ago, they would put fake cities on their maps. So if somebody copied their map, they'd go, oh, I know you copied my map. It can show you that it copied that city doesn't exist. Of course, sometimes these fiction become truth and there are actually cities who”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think for us, we're in somewhat of an unfortunate situation that we have to sell to many, many different types of industries because there's no one industry that dominates. But the biggest industry for us is local search. So I want to search for cafes near me or something like that, or anybody who's putting something on a map would do a ton of stuff in logistics because we do a lot of things about warehouses and power plants and those types of things. So anyone who's moving things around, if you're trucking, delivery. And then of course retail site selection and then there could be an advertising use case out of home. Advertising is big. And then even people who are just trying to understand the macro economy, how are the store hours changing? Are restaurants closing or are they opening? Those types of things become really valuable as well.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 meters away from one another. So really understanding just the number of places. And that's the first way to think about data is there's rows and columns. So you want to get as many rows as possible. And then the columns are the different attributes about a place. And today we cover a little over 100, let's say, attributes about a place. That's interesting. That's a start. But there's probably 10,000 relevant attributes. We maybe cover 1% of the total attributes one could cover. So can you cover as many rows and as many columns as possible? And then you could become much more a go-to shot where people can go to you to get the data that they need.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Satecraft has really boring data about physical places. So if you want to know about Italian restaurants near me, that's the type of data that Safegraph has. We'll have like the store hours of the restaurant and the shape or the square meters of the restaurant and the categories and other types of things about that place. And we cover lots of different places around the world today. We cover a little bit more than 40 million places around the world. And then we want to update. We want to make sure we can update those places the least every month and make sure we have accurate data about those physical places. But there are roughly the same number of places as people worldwide. And if you start including things like trees, which I do as places, okay, well, now we have way more places than people worldwide. So 40 million is just not enough. I'd love to cover every single place in the world, including underground places and lots of other interesting places and one lamppost is potentially more valuable than another lamppost if you want to put a cell tower on it.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lincoln is a data co op, essentially. The reason why I submit my data to LinkedIn is because everyone else is submitting their data and I can get this really valuable thing that comes through. It just happens to become more of a B2C version, but of course they can mine it for B2B use cases as well. And LinkedIn and Zoom info in some ways are in the same business, but in some ways they don't compete at all because LinkedIn can't really be just like a data sailing business that's a little bit too crass and people might lose their trust in LinkedIn. So they just have to build tools on top of LinkedIn like advertising, recruiting, selling, other types of tools on top of LinkedIn to use the application. Whereas you zoom in and always say, hey, I'm just giving you the data. Here's a bunch of leads for you. Go crazy. You can contact them on LinkedIn if you want, but you can also contact them via email. You can call them. You can send them a letter. You can contact them on Twitter, however you want to. In some ways, the same business. They have almost the same type of data.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All happening at the same time. And it's really, really, really exciting. And I think we're going to see a world very, very quickly where anyone can query medical data without ever knowing who the data is about. Or we could make all the IRS data available for querying and for understanding without being able to see the underlying data or even joining medical data and IRS data together without anyone actually being able to see that underlying data. All those things are going to be possible very, very soon. And then we're going to be able to answer just incredible, interesting questions about humanity. Like today, we don't even really know that chocolate cake is bad for you. We just don't know anything and we just don't have the data. Very soon we should be able to answer interesting questions about relationships and love and all these other things once we start conjoining this data together.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The privacy technology has just progressed so much over the last decade. And if you remember just 20 years ago or even more than 20 years ago, AOL, they released all their search history to academia. And they tried to anonymize the people who are doing the searches, but very, very quickly people were able to de-anonymize some of the folks doing searches. I think someone even searched for how do I kill my wife and these other kind of like crazy searches that were out there. And obviously that becomes a real problem if you could like de-anonymize someone's medical history or something like that. Today we've really come way, way, way further on the privacy technology and we can create either synthetic data on top of the data. You can start joining data sets without seeing underlying data. There's all these really, really cool things, some of which take a very, very high compute. So some of them are more feasible than the others.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On top of data. So originally, I wanted to do something in the medical data world. And that just didn't seem feasible when we started SafeGraph. Today, that might be actually a very, very feasible thing to do.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once you'll figure out, okay, I want to be a data business, then you want to figure out which noun of the data do I want to be? And you can build a data business on any of the four nouns. They both have their pros and cons. So we chose data about physical places as one of the four nouns that we care about. And if you're a map nerd and if you care about those types of things, then it's kind of a fun thing to do. I don't think there's any one noun that's better than the other. You have to choose the noun that you are most passionate about. And if you have some sort of take on it, what you want to do. If you're having nouns about people, okay, well, people are the most valuable noun to have data on, but there's also a lot of privacy things that you have to figure out. So like, how am I going to have data about people while still also protecting their privacy? And I think today it's much easier to do that than when we started SafeGraph even six years ago. Because today you have things like comorphic encryption. You have better understanding of differential privacy. There's a lot of ways to create synthetic data.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The underlying data, and if data really is the most important thing, if it really is fueling all this innovation, then you're just going to see scenarios where we're just going to have a lot less innovation that's happening and you are going to see the rents for those innovations generally accrue to those small number of companies that have access to the data. And of course, that's not a world anyone wants. Not even the people at those companies want that. So the way against that is to have really much more open access to data so that anyone can get access to that data. And then really it's about being an innovator and not just the fact that, okay, I had to do some sort of BD deal to get access to this type of data.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of second time founders do this. They did the first business and it was great and made some money, et cetera. And now, okay, I want to actually have an impact on the world. And sometimes they'll have a problem they're particular about, but it doesn't mean that their particular capabilities line up to solve that problem. So you might be passionate about climate change or nuclear proliferation or too much war that's happening or not enough energy abundance. There could be all these things that you're passionate about, but it doesn't mean that you have the ability to have an impact on there. So you also, I think, need to look yourself in the eyes and say, okay, what can I really help on? And one of the problems that we saw happening was just the fact that a lot of data was becoming siloed in a very, very small number of organizations, Google, Apple, Tencent, a few other organizations were really hoovering up this incredible amount of data and they weren't letting anyone else have access.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google's in everything business. So Google competes with everyone about everything. So if you don't compete with Google today, you really just don't exist. Google is everywhere. But in the end, they really want everything on their platform and they want everyone using them.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For everybody. Not everybody wants to go into some big enterprise and spend a lot of time with them and listen to them and hear them out. And they're often these enterprises maybe at various different points in their own journey of their own data maturity and they're using different things. So you built this great integration with Snowflake. Great. Not everyone uses Snowflake for everything and somebody might be using some secure FTP or something you still might need to build something if you want to get this organization as a client to help you there.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing is it's just really hard to sell. So selling data is really, really difficult and you need a different salesperson often that are selling typical SaaS out there. Your sales cycles could end up being longer, which is never fun. You sometimes don't even know how your product's being used because you might be giving them data and then it's like, okay, well, so now I need to invest in customer success a little bit so I can like talk to that customer a few times, at least once or twice a quarter, say like, hey, what are you doing? Because you might not really have a good sense, even with an API, okay, but the Himmler API, but like, how's that valuable to them? I see that they're increasing their usage. I need to understand their workflow. I need to get in there. Maybe if I just added this one other field that could double the amount of value that they're getting. So all these things I think are really, really hard and they often require really talking to your customer and really understanding what the customer wants. And that's not.”
2023-03-14 · Invest Like the Best · Auren Hoffman - A Deep Dive on Data - [Invest Like the Best, EP.320] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source