Who Am I?
My story begins in the opulent ‘burbs,
Where affluence soothes what ambition disturbs…
Where pretzels are softened and cheesesteaks are ample,
Where Flyers don’t fly but green Eagles can trample.
In a home where mathematics and sports were religion,
As a sibling-less child, I’d skirt supervision,
Retire to pen inexpressable rhymes,
A weird adolescent in digital times…
With teachers for parents, not doctors nor lawyers,
And classmates with money from richer employers
Contrarian embers had started to smolder,
A teen with straight A’s, but a chip on his shoulder
I soon was off to college where such deviance appalls,
In a world where status rises as the ivy climbs the walls,
My quantitative skillset grew, my worldview stayed inchoate.
I sensed that I was out of step and feared my peers would know it.
So fortunate was I to find a forum for digression…
Where satirical derision penned in verse became obsession.
The writers, all lascivious and lewd and entertaining
Through the parity of parody, my sanity sustaining,
The throes of thesis thoughts produced a tool with which to gamble,
A data science narrative with baseball as preamble,
But soon alas, as all good things, the grand finale came,
I hoped for academia and scholarly acclaim.
To Wall Street or consultancy, my classmates forged ahead,
So ever the contrarian, I headed west instead.
Hydrology, hypoxia, and algorithmic tools,
I published, humor perished, followed peer reviewers’ rules…
And yet scholastic destinies emerge as years elapse,
A hedge-fund startup offer I could not refuse, perhaps?
From Champaign to Manhattan…
and I watched the world collapse.
No sooner had I reached New York, when what should I behold?
A front-row seat to witness a financial farce unfold!
The subprime subterfuge, just subpar luck we all were sold…
Just heterogeneity, the laity were told!
And yet amidst calamity, a clarity ensued,
Our algorithms battle-proofed the modest gains accrued!
We hadn’t heard the herd whose horrid modeling of risk
Ensured a detonation, and a reckoning so brisk.
But even in success, one fails, in noting other cost,
The capital, preserved as opportunity was lost,
The emperor, still naked, the hypocrisy, still loathed,
A quick midwestern encore thus, to live near my betrothed.
A graduate student again, I became, with papers to publish and courses to proctor,
Credentials accreted, a title conferrred, but I still wasn’t that kind of doctor.
I sent my “Dear John” to my friends at John Deere, having thus done my part, I departed the plain,
Long days and few dollars are how we grow scholars, and thus came the end in Champaign.
A pre-career postdoc apprentice back east,
One foot in as a scholar, apostate and priest,
Hydrologic, climatic, and often edaphic,
I schemed in a lab and the beltway in traffic
With funding from NASA, a mission called SMAP,
Placed sensors in space and all over the map!
But grant termination before an election
Accelerates exits - scholastic defection
While wife’s windy city had beckoned her back,
I packed up my parcels to trod a new track
Advanced analytics, this scholar’s foundation,
Now offered a pathway to gainful vocation.
Consulting, computing, financial summations,
All vectors of value for large corporations.
I managed to manage, to query and teach,
To help corporate pros implement what I preach,
But twisting statistics to Twain is “damned lies,”
Hence to foil the foolers, I’d proselytize
Massaging the madness of muckety mucks
Begetting (well, hopefully) buckets of bucks
My interests meandered, or so I was gleaning,
As myriad methods for means still miss meaning.
And so alas, an avocation spawns a novel tale,
The tools for proper problem-solving proffered here at scale,
Ex-goverment, turned corporate tool, an erstwhile academic
With nascent aspirations, a polemic post-pandemic
If logic is your lexicon, please step inside to learn,
And may you leave enlightened hence, whenever we adjourn.
So, who am I? (Apart from a contrarian kid turned cynical ex-corporate guy who apparently writes his bio in rhyme?)
Among the advantages of a contrarian disposition is an allergy to groupthink. This is useful when, in an academic or professional setting, the prevailing wisdom is well-established, heads are nodding reflexively, and the outcome of the conversation seems pre-ordained. It can also be professionally ruinous if one has less patience with the political realities that result from traditional incentive structures.
The attributes that allowed me to assemble a model to wager on baseball games in 2005 using indicators most overlooked or a risk model that preserved a nascent hedge fund’s capital during the subprime collapse in 2008 were not programming or even mathematical aptitudes. The type of kid who writes the essay section of a standardized test in verse becomes the adult who tells the guy managing a nine-figure P&L that he should probably just ditch one of his largest clients.
Billy Joel, in a stroke of lyrical brilliance, described an “angry young man with his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand.” In some sense, though I lacked the courage of the 60s radicals of whom he wrote, the frustration with orthodoxies fits. After spending the first twenty years of adulthood in academic research and corporate analytics at employers from NYC professional services firms to California tech companies, it is remarkable the extent to which similar patterns of thought emerge in extremely dissimilar venues.
Whether the topic was baseball, finance, hydrology, consulting, precision agriculture, or tech, the same frustrating discourse would unfold. For better and for worse, my inclination has been to articulate my true sentiments. The responses have been mixed, but intellectual candor has become a throughline that has optimized my ability to sleep soundly, if not my personal fortune.
I do not promise the answers to any future mathematical or strategic quandary. I offer whatever wisdom lurks in whimsy, but more importantly, I hope, clarity of thought. Certain patterns of inquiry and action are frighteningly common, and if nothing else, an unusual array of experiences coupled with an independent streak has left me with a few stories to share, a few cautionary tales to tell, and a few principles that typically lead to better decisions.
Would you rather hire another army of powerpoint-slide-wielding, well-credentialed consultants to articulate the expected catechism, or would you prefer someone who has risked their own capital, sought data with a shovel rather than a dashboard (though I’m no stranger to the latter), and prefers satirical rhyme to the copacetic blather of most meetings?
Corporate life is little more than a sequence of investments. Time. Capital. People. Don’t such decisions demand more than simply better dashboards, but better thoughts?