Invest Like The Best
Episode 151 Making Decisions with Data
Invest Like The Best

Episode 151: Making Decisions with Data

Invest Like The Best

Episode 151

Making Decisions with Data

Jeff Ma has spent his career in and around the fields of analytics and data science. We cover how analytics are being used in sports and gambling, how data science can be used for evaluating human capital, and the issues he faced during his time at Twitter.

[00:01:20] – (First Question) – How quantitative analytics have evolved in sports and how they’re being used

[00:04:26] – Best role of humans in the analysis process

[00:08:38] – Sports that are most interesting to observe through analytics

[00:10:26] – How does luck play into sports analysis

[00:11:54] – Team analytics vs better analytics

[00:12:38] – Concentration of success among sports betters and their moats

[00:14:58] – Favorite lessons learned from professional gamblers

[00:16:45] – How analytics got introduced into gambling

[00:19:21] – Understanding one’s own biases

[00:24:04] – How he became VP of analytics at Twitter

[00:28:37] – Primary lessons from the work evaluating human capital and talent with analytics

[00:31:40] – How to model people for success when hiring

[00:33:29] – How to hire the right data scientists’ team

[00:37:54] – Most interesting problems they tackled at Twitter

[00:42:31] – Responsibility of social platforms to police itself

[00:45:34] – Areas that would interest him in the future as an investor

[00:49:24] – Kindest thing anyone has done for Jeff

[00:51:50] – Values instilled in him by his parents

Making Decisions with Data

Introduction

Patrick
My guest this week is Jeff Ma. Jeff was on the famous MIT Blackjack team from the book Bringing Down the House, but spent his career in and around the fields of analytics and data science. He's studied sports betting and analytics, built companies for analyzing human capital, and ran the data science and analytics group at Twitter. You can find links to his book and podcast in the show notes. Our discussion today is on a number of fascinating ways that data is being used to make decisions in the worlds of sports and in business. Please enjoy.

Sports Analytics

Patrick
So, like a Billy Beane Moneyball-type story or from a money-making standpoint, the horse racing in Hong Kong-type story, typically always come back to quantitatively analytics. So, tell me a bit about how you think the state of the art is today. A lot of people know Moneyball, but what has evolved the most? How have analytics and the sophistication of the users of those types of systems evolved?

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