I was reading through old emails while backing up my Gmail inbox with Gmvault, an open source command-line tool. Among other interesting trips to memory lane, one message was about the first startup user study I was involved with. It was for a life-coaching startup that eventually failed. In retrospect, it’s interesting to reflect on what went wrong and how…
Remora’s curse takes place when startup attaches itself to a large platform in the attempt to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of getting users. The large platform then exercises its greater power to void the investments made by the startup into the platform, essentially causing more or less deadly delays and needs for re-design. The idea originates from Don Dodge who…
Introduction One important thing in machine learning is feature engineering (selection & extraction). This means choosing the right variables that improve the model’s performance, while discarding those reducing it. The more impact your variables have on the performance metric, the better. Because the real world is complex, you may start with dozens or even hundreds of variables (=features), but in…
