Luigi Patruno

Want to run A/B tests at your company? I've spent the last 16 months building an experimentation program - the processes, infra, and teams to run large scale online experiments.

@girdley Hmm the book description I found doesn’t really fit my memory. I appreciate your help though! If you have a web copy of an email you sent in the last 2 months with book recs, can you share? If not, no worries and thanks again!

@MLinProduction Was that On the Road?

@girdley in one of your “top book” emails you mentioned a book about people whose minds work very quickly and tire others out. I can’t find that email! Mind sharing the book title?

@tsludwig I love it, too. His SOM case studies are incredible - very helpful to a new searcher like myself.

@MLinProduction AJ is a sharp guy and we’ve had lots of conversations over many years about topics like this, so I’d expect our views to overlap on a lot of things. I love how much writing he’s done over the past few years

To buy a small business, you have to be an optimist. This is a huge benefit, but it can also create critical blind spots for an acquisition entrepreneur. The best outcome is a successful run of growth and increased profitability - that's what we all believe will happen when we set out. Failures are also relatively unambiguous in terms of their (lack of) desirability. One of the less covered outcomes, though, is a 'zombie' deal - where things go just well enough to avoid bankruptcy or a total wipeout of equity, but where they haven't gone well by any objective measure. If you've raised capital and bought a company with no debt or used conventional financing with no PG (as many traditional search funds do), you preserve options. Your ego may take a hit, but you can always sell the business for a loss. Most experienced investors will accept this and often go on to back the same CEO again, if that's the path the CEO chooses to follow. In other situations, such as in a self-funded search using SBA financing, the options are more limited. Until the debt is repaid, unless you are willing to accept the risk of a workout with the bank, personal bankruptcy, or you can afford to pay off the bank (with or without investor support), you may end up stuck and required to work until the company if freed from its debt obligation. I've seen CEOs, either through necessity or personal feelings of obligation, or both, choose to grind it out in these scenarios. It always takes a tremendous toll on them and their personal lives. It becomes hard not to become resentful and the opportunity cost of sacrificing prime earning years to claw one's way out of a tough situation is enormous. I encourage anyone considering acquiring a small company to think about this scenario because it could, and does, happen. Choose your business wisely; choose your investors wisely; choose your lender wisely. And really think hard about how much stress and sacrifice you're willing to subject yourself to -- potentially for years.

I had a great time chatting with @edweber1 (SrDir. Data at Stitch Fix) about leading data science teams to maximize business impact! Let us know what you think : ) youtube.com/watch?v=kcT6Xj…

I had a great time talking about Lessons on Data Teams Leadership in AI with @Dpbrinkm at the @mlopscommunity Podcast. You can check out the whole conversation at go.mlops.community/U60jRe.

Thanks for having me on (again)!

Curious if there are any online “start a business” courses that aren’t actually scams/just selling dreams. I’m trying to steel man the case for these courses. Happy to hear from students who’ve taken such a course, course creators, anyone else.

@JoeCassandra Totally agree twitter.com/MLinProduction…

You have no choice but figure out to make more $$ Fastest place is at your job Go in tomorrow, tell your boss, "I see XYZ opportunity, I want to lead it to make the biz & myself more $$." If they blow you off & discourage your from trying to grow, they've done you a favor... You've now gotten a glimpse into the next 10 yrs of your job i.e. doing the same stuff forever w/ 3% raises. Maybe they throw in some BS "job title promotion" which will help you with your next job, b/c they're ok w/ you leaving. If this is the case, save 10 years and find something else ASAP. Sure, side hustles are great... But the lowest hanging fruit is figuring how to make more money for your boss, while taking stuff off their plate. That's valuable. If your strategy to make more at your job is just "work harder and hope they notice" , you're not going anywhere. Your boss isn't up late thinking about how to promote you. You have to take the lead. When I worked in a CPA firm, I wasn't a great accountant. But I felt I could help bring in more clients. I built them a strategy on what I could do, spent a weekend building the firm a whole new website... Pretty bold stuff On Monday, they told me if I did something like that again, "you're fired" I'm literally here taking initiative to help the firm grow... but that was my glimpse into the future. I was obviously not an important piece for them (again, I wasn't a great accountant, so can't blame them). But it showed that over the next 10 yrs, I'd likely be in the same spot, toiling away, making 3% raises on top of my $42k/yr salary. So I quit and now probably make more than most of the partners there who have toiled for 30+ years. You need to figure out where you stand to see where you can make a move. The days of 'quiet quitting" and coasting through your job are over esp if you're serious about making more money. Start tomorrow. See where you stand.

@fortelabs Always be taking action. Always be learning along the way. Taking action also happens to be the best way to learn.

In a world of endless content, advice, and options... How do you know when it’s time to stop taking in new information and start putting them to use?

@findingmerit @ColinKeeley The Keeley article definitely says that one of Vista's strategies is cost cutting.

@MLinProduction @ColinKeeley It is one data point but i interviewed a company he has taken private. Not surprisingly they pay well below market avg

Source @ColinKeeley

@findingmerit @ColinKeeley Interesting. Admittedly all I know about him came from the article I shared.

@MLinProduction @ColinKeeley Yes he is a shady character. axios.com/2022/12/02/rob… Supposedly he came from hardship but the moment made money stopped paying his fair share. Who would trust this guy’s character. So instead he uses these gimmicks

@findingmerit @ColinKeeley Who does? Robert smith?

@MLinProduction @ColinKeeley It is a marketing gimmick. He wants to raise from woke capital allocators who never thinks about hard work but always think about equality. Deciding enployee’s place in org structure based on an aptitude test but not the value person added is such a BS.

@valeness84 @gbrew5555 @sahil_vi @TaraViswanathan Why not?

@MLinProduction @gbrew5555 @sahil_vi @TaraViswanathan No it wouldn't

Was talking to my cousin in high school about ChatGPT. Apparently they now must submit homework via Google Docs so the teacher can view the history to see if they really wrote it or not. 🤯

@elonmusk learn some muay thai and you’ll be fine

@Shpigford Just started using @instapaper few weeks ago. I love it

What’s your “save for later” tool of choice? Articles, videos, podcasts, tweet threads, etc.

@valeness84 @gbrew5555 @sahil_vi @TaraViswanathan Gdocs can train a classifier/anomaly detector to see if it was written at a “human” pace or not would be interesting

@gbrew5555 @sahil_vi @TaraViswanathan Hopefully the teacher will see how dumb and useless it is when they are forced to draw that line.

Data science ~= better business decision making It’s just another tool in your arsenal. But it’s a superpower. Use it to you to optimize every biz function and build better and new products. E.g (small) better lead target leads in marketing or (big) acquire entire companies

Love @ColinKeeley s content. Highly recommend