mswen

Agreed! I have often done more sophisticated analysis and then stepped back and concluded that a simpler analysis was actually better for the business. It moved the business into a better place for informed decisions and gave them simple (analysis backed) rules of thumbs that every manager/director/ VP could understand and use by just checking a couple numbers and doing a simple easily remembered bit of math.

Understandable models with clear intervention points are what most businesses seem to need once you get to digging around in their operations, customer and sales data.

Of the many projects mentioned in the article I find the automation of contract analysis most interesting. Seems like a rich area for application of a whole variety of NLP techniques.

I would be curious if the current state is to essentially read the contract and mark up or label all the critical bits of the contract and then pass it to a human for final review and approval. Or, are they processing it using bank business rules and logic and automating approval without a human in the loop?

Anybody out there on HN who can speak in more technical depth about the contract analysis projects without giving away any trade secrets? I could imagine applying some old school controlled vocabularies and automated indexing as well as more statistical techniques such as topic modelling and Named Entity Recognition.

Generally when people use their total pre-tax income when answering annual income in surveys. That pay might include a base pay plus bonuses. I suspect that most people include bonuses when reporting compensation. However, I suspect that many do not include things like stock options or grants when reporting total annual income.

The separate question of whether you are being taken advantage of is very contextual. Relevant questions include:

Is my salary not improving even though my skills and domain knowledge are dramatically different?

How does my salary compare to other developers at other companies in my city/state/region with similar skills, experience and responsibilities?

How does my salary compare to other developers and/or other roles within my own company - is their evidence that it is unfair?

Compensation information at the appropriate level of specificity [role, training, skills, domain knowledge, location, industry and company size] is rarely available at all to individuals at least at a reasonable cost. Sometimes it is available through HR benchmarking companies that sell the information to employers.

This information asymmetry tends to give negotiating advantage to the employer.

It is often used when you have an abundance of measured variables that you are using for input that you suspect might be highly correlated. For example in a study of self-reported lifestyle behaviors you might have questions about frequency of participation in: jogging, walking, running, weight lifting, cycling, aerobics classes, yoga, Crossfit, martial arts, climbing, tennis, softball, volleyball, golf, Ultimate Frisbee, and many more.

In your effort to predict whether a person will follow dietary guidelines for healthy eating you could just assign each activity as its own input to the model. Or, you could apply PCA (and something like varimax factor rotation) and what you might find is that these activities seem to reflect three somewhat separable latent variables that is: physical fitness, competitive athletics and friendship/team based social activity dimension. You now potentially have reduced 50 individual activity measures into 3 dimensions.

Next you would think more deeply about the specific items and combine them in into 3 scales and use the scales as a reduced dimensional input into the predictive model.

5 to 7 cups of black coffee a day sometimes with a shot of espresso. Research on health and coffee is mixed though I think the overall current conclusion is that the benefits outweigh the risks. However, I admit to being biased because I really enjoy coffee.

Almost no alcohol - 1 every few weeks or months depending on circumstances. Party/reception or business dinner at high-end restaurant. And, then it is just one drink.

I am not against alcohol but very cautious around it. I have lost a friend to a drunk driver and had family members lose custody of their kids because abuse of alcohol ruined their ability to drive, work and function as responsible adults.

On the other hand I know plenty of people who drink alcohol much more regularly than I without any notable effect.

I find your post fascinating! Can you give us a list of specific skills that were most critical to the jobs of these people you managed?

I have a 16 year old son who already has 4 years experience with combat robotics team, 2 years experience with VEX robotics competition and will attend community college his final 2 years of high school. He will most likely graduate with a 2 year Associates degree at the same time as he graduates from high school.

On the practical side he is somewhere between beginner and intermediate in skill with SolidWorks, has done a bit of CNC machining, a little welding and electrical wiring. And, they get a good amount of experience troubleshooting and repairing under time pressure during competitions.

I am always on the lookout for career paths forward for my kids. Would love to hear a bit more about the skills and work of this team.

Thanks

Very much this. And, that they have very high-end technicians that are cleared for top secret/classified data centers.

Around 2010 I became acquainted with a married couple in their mid to late 60s who were serial entrepreneurs together. They had built and grown a library management software company in the 1980-2000 era. When they sold that company off they could have retired but at some point they started a company that combined web scraping and semantic enhancement sold enhanced organized data to various companies to incorporate into their own corporate and customer databases.

They were two of the smartest people that I have met in my business ventures. What I loved is that they each recognized and honored their partner's strengths. Peter was very strong technically and Kate was the business strategist, sales, marketing and deal maker. And, to my eyes they seemed deeply in love and still enjoyed spending time together.

We almost found a way to do business together but they were at a different phase in life. They were getting ready to sell their second business and were psychologically getting ready to move money into more stable investments rather than another start-up.

As Peter and Kate demonstrated it can work wonderfully to mix business and personal relationships. However, most people find that the combination is just too stressful. I love my wife but have no sense that we could be a Peter and Kate.

My advice is that if you do work together you need to make sure that each partner brings something to the business that is vital, is in their competency zone and that they enjoy doing.

Thank you for posting this abstract. I agree they were using a very different definition of HIIT when I read the PR article. By most standards this looks like a medium intensity cardio 3 times a week with a low intensity 45 minute walk/run twice a week.

For many years I fixed myself a 2 egg cheese omelet, 1 strip of bacon and black coffee. For the past 4 years I have switched to fasting about 15 to 18 hours a day. The easiest way for me implement this was to eliminate breakfast. Once in awhile if I am missing the taste of my omelet I make it for lunch or dinner.

We don't know enough about your circumstances to advise specifically but here are some of the factors I would consider.

Are you more concerned about short-term income or long-term earning potential? freelance if short-term income is priority.

Where are you at on your competence curve? If you are early the rate of learning and improvement is usually pretty steep. This means investing some time in learning will rapidly improve your skills. Once you are more mature in your core skills the curve usually flattens out and the value of each increment of learning is less.

How good are you with client/customer relations? Marketing and selling yourself? If those areas are currently lacking you should do freelancing as much for the opportunity to learn these people and business skills as for the the opportunity to make money. In the long run good customer service, negotiating and selling are master skills that will greatly enhance your career.

I do 'data science' for smaller businesses that would not have the resources, or really the need for a full-time in-house analytics person like me. But, one client does about 8 to 10 hours a week, another does some projects periodically, and I just added a third that I think will end up being something like a day a week.

From my perspective it spreads my risk and from their perspective it means they get access to higher-end analytical help in a more flexible package that meets their needs. Their trade-off is higher rates per hour and my trade-off is a little more variance in income.

No, do not get a second PhD. Your opportunity cost is too high. In particular since you are doing computational physics your computational modeling, statistical analysis and understanding of high performance computing should exceed the average AI founder. Second, you will already be capable of self-study of AI type academic publications and you want to be focused on translating those into real life applications not writing grant proposals and other graduate level academic stuff.

By the time you finish a second PhD you might be well along the pathway to business success, or you might fail. But I am convinced that adding a second PhD won't noticeably reduce your risk of failure.

I am almost certain that given the technical capabilities you have already developed that the risk factors in starting a business are product-to-market fit, timing, poor PR, marketing and sales or bad co-founders. By the way I have experience with all of those risk factors - they are real and technical skills or even a second PhD will not make them go away.

5 to 7 standard size cup/mugs per day. I drink it black, no sugar or creamer. I used to worry about the health effects. But studies like this [1] suggest that it their might increased health benefits up to about 5 cups a day. So I have decided to enjoy my coffee and just keep an eye on it to not interfere with sleep.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/182/12/1010/2195423/Ass...

One of two ways. First, they are just trying to be polite and tell you no without making it "no this sucks." Or, they could be genuinely interested in an alternate form.

Your job at this point is to probe further to understand. See if they will share what an alternate form would look like. Now you may find that it is so far afield of what you have currently developed that you are not interested in adapting. On the other hand you may discover a critical customer requirement that you would face over and over as you talk to prospects.

I think of my time as a finite resource that requires allocation. I have big buckets into which I divide these roughly like the following.

Professional Work

> Short-term revenue (freelance/consulting) hourly/day rate

> Long-term deferred at-risk revenue (my own product-like projects and equity based compensation arrangements)

> Charity (this could include favors to friends, work donated or deeply discounted to a non profit org that you support and open source contributions) in this category you are working for intangibles like the common good, reputation and the satisfaction of having contributed to something bigger than your own direct interests.

Personal Life

> Interpersonal relationships (family, friends, neighbors etc.)

> Faith community or causes that you support (direct participation - may have little or nothing to do with your professional skills)

> Personal development - exercise, learning etc.

> Leisure/Entertainment

When friends approach you with their great idea - you can explain you only have so much time and it is not prudent to put too much of it in the deferred at-risk revenue bucket. If they are willing to move it to the short-term revenue bucket you can consider them as a client but your at-risk bucket is already full. If you feel like they are a good enough friend that you might just do it as a favor then do it as an investment in your friendship but limit your time to something comparable to helping your friend build a new deck on his house ...the kind of time investment that is appropriate among friends. However, if you do this as a favor be clear about what you are doing, where the limit is and that you are not committing to long-term support.

Hope this is helpful in some way.

Agreed on more substantive detail needed. I was surprised at the lack of mention of many of the basic techniques and domains that a person interested in should consider learning about.

The following are all germane but not mentioned: text analysis/mining, controlled vocabularies, indexing, taxonomies, ontology, semantic web, latent semantic analysis, latent dirichlet allocation, corpus analysis, document similarity analysis, tf-idf, ngrams, and skip grams just to mention a few.

In general the article is a good idea but their needs to be more of a description of the domain landscape and then "paths" plotted through that landscape that lead to interesting and useful competency.

First of all your assessment that you are getting the same 1 year of experience over and over is almost certainly correct. How could it be otherwise when the work is so easy relative to your skills and capacity that you say that you are actually doing productive work only about 1/4 the time? If that doesn't change then your job will not be a significant source of fulfillment and growth in your life.

If you were like my oldest daughter that would be fine because she works an entry level day job as a QA tester and documentation writer for a small engineering department but her real passion is writing fiction. She writes every evening and on weekends and has complete drafts of 2 full length novels and half a dozen more in the various stages of completion (and she just turned 23 - can you tell I am a proud dad?). But my point is if your passion after work is intellectually challenging then a day job that doesn't really challenge you intellectually is probably fine. Do good enough work that you are perceived within that context as someone who is competent and productive - even if you are bored. And, reserve your intellectual energy for the side project or creative outlet of your choosing.

However, if your day job represents your intended focus and the place you want to achieve then you absolutely must do something about the situation.

You can more actively pursue challenges at work and spend time self-training in skills that will help expand your scope of responsibility at work and prepare you for any changes that might come your way. Alternatively, you can look for a different place to work, which you have already started doing. The one caution I have is be careful or you could easily end up in a situation that is just as bad but on a whole different dimension. You could easily be facing the other scenario where there is way more on the wish list of things to get done than there are persons to get them done. You could join a team and find yourself working 70 hour weeks and barely having time for lunch or breaks.

A thoughtful introspective acknowledgement of the combination of factors outside of the founder's own efforts that provide the environment for start-up success.

When we tell our own narrative it is easy to be blind to environmental success factors because we grew up among them and they were always there. As natural as air to breath almost.

commenting works better for me as well

Given how much work and communication about work is technologically enabled today there shouldn't be a higher risk of being treated as disposable, but despite working remote for many years for a larger corporation it did feel like I might have gone on the chopping block somewhat sooner when the recession hit. Though in the end it might not have mattered because the recently appointed president of the company took the recession as an opportunity to replace most of the founding leadership team of our business unit with people of his own choosing.

In addition to the points that this author makes connecting risk profiles to work options available to potential technical co-founders, let me add an orthogonal issue that impedes people from signing on to the high risk proposition of building the 'great idea' that someone else has generated.

For someone with a technical background it feels really hard to judge whether the other person, the one with the business vision has the combination of sales, marketing skills together with hustle and perseverance to really pull off the customer acquisition side of the equation.

This is the technical co-founder's fear that he/she will build something really great that meets the vision but the whole business development side of the equation will suffer. In various corporate settings I have met too many sales people who talked a good game but ultimately had more excuses than results. In a start-up I don't have the luxury of a sales team that is big enough to take up the slack and gradually weed out the people who cannot deliver.

I did a market research project for Honeywell back around 1997 on the use of predictive maintenance for industrial and office tower HVAC systems. I was tasked with doing focus groups and interviews with persons in charge of factories and office tower facility managers to understand the economic impact of HVAC downtime. Even at that time some factories that went out of spec on temperature and humidity could cause production lines to be shut down and each hour of downtime cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity and costs in shutting down and restarting process manufacturing equipment.

The connection to this story is that one of the techniques they had developed was vibration and audio analysis of large electric motors and other equipment I believe to determine when a motor or part was starting to go out of spec.

I sometimes wonder about systematically mining R&D ideas that where leading edge but discarded as too expensive or impractical for one reason or another from 15 to 20 years ago.

I do roughly a 16:8 split most days 16 hours fasting and 8 hours feeding window. Generally stop eating sometime between 6:30 PM and 8 PM in the evening and don't eat again until noon or later the following day. So some days the fast gets as long as 18 or 19 hours.

I do intellectual work both fasted and during the feeding window. After doing this for 3 years or so it feels completely normal. It is also very possible to exercise intensely (weight lifting and running) after fasting 15 or 16 hours.

I believe that this approach helps me maintain the body weight and fitness levels that I desire without being particularly difficult to do.

Explaining some of my life choices:

I have tended to have about a 4 year attention span.

At least 2 former vocations (paid work) have moved into the avocation bucket (un-paid, still do some of it for love of the "work").

Along the way I have secured skills for some pretty well paid hourly consulting. I can make the equivalent of a mediocre FT salary working about 8 to 12 hours weekly.

I try to divide up the remainder of my time between, helping out elderly family members, spending time with my wife and kids and do most of the cooking, spend time on avocations mentioned above and building more product oriented software. I have the thought that I might turn one of those products into a real business that might eventually do better than hourly consulting.

One of the challenges is questioning one's previous decisions and wondering if I should put a lot more time and energy into building up the consulting side. There are many times that more money now would be nice!

Some friends, even one's with a lot more money than I, envy my lifestyle balance while I sometimes envy their greater financial success.

I guess in the end I mostly agree with Sivers but there are days you wonder.

Are you thinking only B2C or B2B as well? Also "user" sounds more substantial than what you describe in your last point which is really a lead with expressed interest that has agreed to be contacted again. A lead isn't exactly a user.

Having clarified that distinction between user and lead what you seem to be thinking of offering is $20 per opted-in targeted lead along with design and copy editing services to make pre-launch start-up look more professional.

The pricing seems fine if you have a portfolio that shows that you can actually do the design and copy editing. I feel like the 100 users or your money back is gimmicky.

Maybe a fixed pricing something like the following:

Logo, color palette and font selections - $300

Create landingpage - $300

Writing and copy editing for landing page, automated response email $400

Targeted opt-in leads $10 per lead

This still gets you to the $2000 if you succeed at the lead generation.

Inconel please continue to comment whenever you think you have something to contribute to the conversation. I also appreciated hearing your perspective. Your writing is fine! No need to feel self conscious.

No Advice but a few diagnostic questions:

What is not happening that "should" be happening?

What is happening that "should not" be happening?

What is the specific source of your discontent?

How do you reconcile that with your assessment that things are going very well and the MD is great?

How can you shield the really great of today from potential down-side risk while disrupting the status quo in an effort to take the business to the next level?

Are you getting bored?

Would it be feasible to take yourself completely out of this business (absent owner or sell) and then start another business?

Interesting article about the feasibility of extending gig economy to the c-suite.

I ran across someone on LinkedIn the other day who was labeling himself a Fractional CFO. That caught my attention. He seems to work PT for more than one smallish company that isn't quite big enough to need a full time CFO.

Clearly you have built something that has some product market fit. Hope you find your path through the next few months without falling hard into burnout.