The Thrill of the Hunt

The Initial Data Offering (IDO) community is a place for data enthusiasts to discover new datasets daily.

The mission is to build a community of data enthusiasts and curate high-quality, unique datasets for businesses, researchers, and organizations worldwide.

The thrill of the hunt. The competition. The excitement. When I think back to my early days of WorldQuant, before data was called alternative data, I remember the thrill of the hunt for new datasets. The excitement of traveling around the world, attending esoteric conferences, meetups, and random banking events to find new sources of data. Competing with my team and knowing we were competing against other hedge funds, the few that saw data as the untapped opportunity in quant trading.

Before we had Neudata, Battlefin, EagleAlpha, and the dozens of data marketplaces, we had Google searches, our networks, and the events hosted around the world. And now we have InitialDataOffering. We would travel to China, the UK, Amsterdam, Russia, Thailand, and throughout the United States to meet companies that had access to unique data and content sets. I remember the excitement of the data & research teams when we found a unique dataset with deep history, global company coverage, and hundreds of data points. Figuring out how to quickly get the data into production.

I remember the hunt so well. The negotiation. How much do we pay? What legal terms do we need? Is there a compliance risk? Does this vendor have other datasets to sell us? Eventually, we’d ask if it made sense to maybe invest in this company privately. The excitement of waiting to see how the backtest of the data performed. How good was the data once it started trading out of sample? Watching the dataset like typical investors watch their stocks every day on their watchlist to see what is performing each day. Where were we making money? Was it fundamental data? Was the weather data making money today? Did the new web-scraped dataset start performing?

Then there was the renewal. Did we make money last year? Was it worth it? Was the vendor a pain to work with? Did they send us any cool swag like a Patagonia vest 🙂 or a bottle of wine? If it broke even, we’d like to let it ride for another year. Was the data delivery consistent? Did they have outages? Did they lose us money? Did we like talking to the account rep? Are they trying to up the price on us? Is the price increase fair?

The hunt was what I remember enjoying the most. Waking up in the middle of the night with an idea. Maybe we could get the data we need from XYZ type of vendor. Maybe that company we met from Amsterdam for breakfast in the UK during the Goldman conference has the data we need or could build it. I reflect on the hunt today as I see people posting about attending the NYC Battlefin.

The hunt in venture capital is similar. But rather than hunting for something specific, it is more likely to come inbound, at least for us at Social Leverage. To be honest I like it better this way. We don’t force it. We have ideas, themes, and interests, but we are patient and when we see the right company, founder, and vision, we move quickly.

Enjoy the hunt!