Rishi Taparia - Issue #107
Happy Daylight Savings time! For my fellow parents of infants and toddlers, bless you as you attempt to adjust your child’s sleep schedule. This week we look at how Stitch Fix uses data to deliver a great fit, the rise of Jim Simons and the best investment fund of all time, how Napoleon should actually be remembered, Cookie Monster’s birthday and more. Enjoy!
Stitch Fix Is Diving Deep Into Data for a More Tailored Experience It Hopes Can Stand Up to Amazon
Stitch Fix keeps doing amazing things with data. We’ve talked before about their “Tinder for clothes” approach, trying to create style maps for customers that span over 3 million men, women and children across two continents. As the company continues to scale their fixes, they are now looking to help customers “shop their look”, suggesting add ons and accessories they can buy between fixes. They key: doing it with data, and finding more ways to gather data. As an example, the company introduced the Style Shuffle, “a feature added last year that shows customers prospective products one at a time and lets them vote on each”. This one ‘product’ has provided an additional 3 billion additional data points to use! As a subscriber, I look forward to seeing fixes getting better and better.
The Making of the World’s Greatest Investor
Jim Simons was a middle-aged mathematician in a strip mall who knew little about finance. He had to overcome his own doubts to turn Wall Street on its head. This excerpt from an upcoming book about Simons is a tremendous read about the “overnight” success (see: 40+ years) of Medallion, arguably the most successful investment firm of all time. We are often tempted to believe a company’s journey, whether a startup, fund or otherwise, follows the post-hoc narrative. The reality is businesses don’t just go up and to the right from day one. It’s important (more so, in my view) to recognize the failure as much as the success.
How to Think Without Googling
Both our attention and our memory have been affected by how much we use the Internet. There is a fomo associated with information today. With more access to ‘answers’ than ever, we’ve seemingly lost the basic ability to find focus, switching between browser tabs, devices and tasks “as often as every 19 seconds, with 75% of on-screen content viewed for less than a minute.” It’s now so easy to just 'Google it’ that friendly arguments and trivia questions among friends that used to fill hours of conversation - list the NBA champions going back to 1987 or how much money it would take get naming rights to a building - now simply end with the answer. How boring is that, right?
Like sugar or cocaine for other parts of the brain, the internet is an unnaturally powerful stimulus for attention. It offers an unprecedented amount of information near-constantly, placing a ton of demand on a system designed to function in the small-to-medium social networks of the natural world. Information has historically saved humans from poison plants, freezing to death, natural disasters, and wedding speech faux pas (among other things), so it’s perfectly natural for your brain to want to suck down as much juicy, compelling information as possible.
This article does a nice job illustrating the challenges with internet addiction, reasons and types of memory impacted, and solutions to improve our synthesis of informatoin. Tl;dr - slow down, take your time and don’t forget to smell the roses.
The Best Books on Napoleon
Historian and biographer Andrew Roberts knows a thing or two about history. He’s written or edited nineteen books among the most famous being one on Napoleon and one on Churchill. The reason that is important - Roberts has a bone to pick about the perception of Napoleon in today’s world. He argues that Napoleon’s peacetime achievements alone were enough to earn him his place among history’s greatest leaders. He was a modernizer, a reformer, a bringer of order. He eradicated the worst legacies of the French revolution while keeping the best. He was a military genius on land, albeit “rubbish at sea”. He rebuilt Paris. Nor was he small, as “he was the average height of a Frenchman of the day - five feet, six inches.” This interview with Roberts is a terrific look at Bonaparte and his life as a peacekeeper instead of instigator.
It's Cookie Monster's Birthday! Here are the most powerful lessons he's taught us
Cookie Monster turned a young 50 this week. He first made his debut on the world famous Sesame Street on November 2nd, 1969. Cookie Monster isn’t as popular as his furry red friend Elmo or his 6 foot pigeon friend Big Bird, but he’s done his fair share for the place where the air is sweet. I for one am glad CNN has taken the time to recognize the beloved blue Sesame Street character for all he has offered kids around the world. Happy birthday Cookie Monster!
Last week my son took his first steps. Based on the click through rate of the video, you guys enjoyed it! Well this week things escalated rather quickly.
Oh boy!
Quote I’m thinking about: “The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved—whether by their superiors or by a client—supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times.” - Daniel Kahneman