Programmatic Data Analytics

I’ve been learning how to do perform data science and analysis using various programming tools, such as Python, NumPY, Pandas, and others. Though through most of my career, I’ve mainly used Excel/Sheets to do most of my analysis, there are some limitations that maybe learning these tools can provide other advantages.

Because of its programmatic nature, it’s so much easier to manipulate data and perform calculations at scale. Excel/Sheets is primarily interface driven. So if you’re trying to operate on thousands of records, it won’t be efficient. On the other hand, I notice that I like to visualize data, maybe because that’s all I’ve ever known. I like to look at my data set to get a sense of patterns, data types, and outliers before I perform any action. Using the programmatic method, it’s still possible to do so, but just takes a different approach on “getting a basic sense of your data”.

So for the rest of this post, I am going to go through an exercise using programmatic languages to analyze data. As a Product Manager, I think it’s value-add to learn through this way of analyzing data. It’s basically the beginning step towards using ML techniques for analysis.

So for the dataset, I’m going to use a data set from Kaggle.

The Dataset

This problem statement is taken directly from the Kaggle dataset:

A Chinese automobile company Geely Auto aspires to enter the US market by setting up their manufacturing unit there and producing cars locally to give competition to their US and European counterparts.

They have contracted an automobile consulting company to understand the factors on which the pricing of cars depends. Specifically, they want to understand the factors affecting the pricing of cars in the American market, since those may be very different from the Chinese market. The company wants to know:

Which variables are significant in predicting the price of a car
How well those variables describe the price of a car
Based on various market surveys, the consulting firm has gathered a large data set of different types of cars across the America market.

And here’s the business goal:

We are required to model the price of cars with the available independent variables. It will be used by the management to understand how exactly the prices vary with the independent variables. They can accordingly manipulate the design of the cars, the business strategy etc. to meet certain price levels. Further, the model will be a good way for management to understand the pricing dynamics of a new market.

My goal for this exercise is to find the answers to the following questions:

1. What are the most common types of car in the dataset?
2. What factors determine the price of the car?

The sample dataset is for learning purposes only. It does not represent real data. After downloading it, I can quickly get a sense of the first 10 records with a simple df.head(10) function. I won’t go over the basics and syntax of python, but in this instance “df” represents the variable of my dataset. It’s shorthand for “dataframe”. And the “head(10)” function means to return the first 10 records of the dataframe.

head(10)

As you can see from the return data, there’s 10 records of cars with 26 dimensions. It doesn’t show all of the 26 dimensions so I need to figure out a way to find out descriptions of all of the fields and what they mean. Luckily, the dataset provided another file as a data dictionary for that.

Data dictionary

Now that I have this, I want a bit more info about the data types of these fields and also the size of the dataframe. I’ll use df.info() and df.shape functions.

data.shape & data.info()

As you can see, at the top of that screen shot, (205, 26) means there are 205 records with 26 fields/dimensions in the dataframe. And looking at the datatypes, there’s nothing that stands out as an error, and there doesn’t seem to be any missing data in the “Non-Null Count” column. The dataset looks pretty clean.

The next thing I want to do is pretty cool in my opinion. I always do this in Excel to get an even better sense of the numerical data I’m working with. I’m talking about the describe() function.

describe(include=’all’) – click to view

This function allows me to see some descriptive statistics on all numerical columns. It helps me see at a glance quick patterns, tendencies, frequencies, and distributions of the dimensions. This might help me later decide to pick certain dimensions to drill down and visualize. This also includes some statistics on categorical dimensions, like CarName and fueltype.

Looking at this data, I want to first answer what are the most common types of cars in this data set. I want to first take a look at the categorial dimensions:

• Carname
• fueltype
• aspiration
• doornumber
• carbody
• drivewheel
• enginelocation
• enginetype
• cylindernumber
• fuelsystem

categorical dimension stats

Count means nothing new, just counts how many records there are. Unique shows how many unique values that exist for each dimension. Top shows the most common value of each dimension, and Freq shows how many times that Top value appears in that dimension.

To me, the dimensions worth taking a deeper dive are:

• carbody
• drivewheel
• enginetype
• cylindernumber
• fuelsystem

These dimensions show more than 2 unique values, and their frequencies also aren’t too low or too near the 205 max. Therefore, I think these dimensions may show an interesting distribution of values.

As for the other dimensions, we can easily deduce what kind of cars are most common for that specific dimension. For example, most of the data set has more gas fuel types and standard aspirations. It takes a bit of car knowledge to know what that means, but basically this means the cars are either gas powered or diesel gas powered. A standard aspiration means the car engine does NOT have a turbo. So therefore, most cars in the data set are non-turbo gas-powered vehicles.

Looking at this chart, the most common types of cars are the sedan and hatchback types, most being front wheel driven. You could have deduced this using the categorical dimension stats. However, you wouldn’t have known that hatchbacks are a relatively close 2nd frequency in this data set nor would you know the distribution of other variables within those body types.

Here is another visual analysis of the other categorical dimensions. An overwhelming majority of vehicles have an engine type = “ohc”, which means overhead cam. I won’t go into details as to what that means because at this point these dimensions are extremely technical. As a simple summary, majority of the cars in this data set have an overhead camshaft with a four cylinder engine. This tells me that most of these cars are economical cars, given the low cost of four cylinder ohc engines.

To simply test that theory, I want to see what’s the distribution of car prices for the whole data set.

And based on car prices, it does seem like the majority of cars are priced under 10,000, indicating they’re on the cheaper end of the spectrum.

Moving on ahead, I want to now analyze the rest of the numerical data sets. There is a lot, so I don’t want to spend time graphing each dimension and comparing its price. So first, I want to produce a correlation heatmap analysis to quickly glance at the data set.

To answer my question #2, which factors determine the price of the car, the correlation function really helps out with a starting point to answer this question. As you can see, the enginesize, curbweight, horsepower, carwidth, and carlength are the independent variables that correlated the most to the price of the car.

Here are some of my thoughts on these findings:

• Although the most common cars are economic cars, price correlates significantly with the power and size output of the car and not its efficiency. In fact, price is inversely related to MPG. An explanation that would make sense is that the more features a car has, the more weight it has. Therefore, in order to move that weight, the larger the power output would be needed. Because of these features, the more costly the car will be. It also doesn’t cost more to make a lesser power output car.
• Many of the independent variables have high correlations with each other, which makes sense. The higher the horsepower of a car, the larger and heavier it tends to be.
• There doesn’t seem to be an independent variable that is over 90% correlated with price. Therefore, I predict an ML algorithm, such as a multiple linear regression, won’t yield entirely accurate results but will still predict a reasonable “ball park” result.
• This heatmap does not include the categorical dimensions, such as engine types. Using ML techniques, we can include those cat-dimensions into our prediction model.

This concludes a basic analysis of the car price data set. On the next part, I will use a machine learning algorithm to create a model to predict car price. Then I will examine the performance of that model.

How Slack’s New Feature Further Eliminates Email

Today, Slack is receiving some backlash for releasing Slack Connect DMs, a feature that allows premium users to send direct messages to people outside of their servers. In mere hours, Slack decided to amend part of the feature citing user complaints how this can lead to unwanted harassment. Specifically, the complaints focuses around the ability to send a customizable message as part of an invitation to connect. To get the full story, click here. I want to focus more on why this is a great feature and that the public complaints about potential harassment doesn’t matter that much.

Why Slack Connect DMs is a Great Feature

Last year, Slack released Slack Connect. If you’re unfamiliar, it basically allows members of two different servers share a channel to cross collaborate. The same reason why this feature is great is the same reason why Slack Connect DMs is great, too. As part of Slack’s overall strategy, Slack is on a mission to kill email. Well, not entirely. But for productivity’s sake and lessening the typical inbox load, they want to focus discussions outside of long email threads and have them in topic channels.

Both Slack Connect and Connect DMs features align directly with the strategy of reducing email workload by replacing those interactions and having them within Slack. With Salesforce’s recent acquisition of Slack for $27.7 billion, Salesforce saw great potential in what Slack can impact. The whole ecosystem of Salesforce customers revolve around B2B customers, vendors, partnerships, integrations, etc. Salesforce represents the mecca of cross-organization collaboration. Slack, historically an internal team chat application, now with Slack Connect allows those cross-collaborators to do business more immediately and effectively with people outside of their organization.

Slack Connect DMs represents a small percentage of people using it for “cold calling”. Salespeople and people wanting to network with others currently use LinkedIn and possibly other platforms to connect. Connect DMs will offer people a new way to do that. Which leads me to why the complaints of the feature is moot.

Slack Connect DMs Complaints are Exaggerated

The main point of contention for this feature seems like the ability to send a customizable message as part of the invitation to connect with outside Slack users poses the potential for harassment. “After rolling out Slack Connect DMs this morning, we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages,” the company said in a statement. Slack is rectifying this by removing the ability to include a customizable message. Although this decision to retract may align with their product strategy of productivity and having less notifications, I see this as an overreaction.

If Slack truly wants to take share of volume of “cold-calling” to connect with individuals, I believe a customizable message will be helpful in allows users to put personalized messaging in it. In fact, for LinkedIn, they already enable users to add a custom message if they want to connect. Emails inherently start out with a message when you’re trying to reach someone. I didn’t view the potential of harassment a huge enough threat to outright remove the custom message. Furthermore, even if that was the case, there are ways to hide the message until the recipient allows the connection. This enables the sender to keep the ability to add a personal message.

In conclusion, I feel like the recent feature releases are huge steps towards eliminating email workload and funneling those conversations into smaller pockets of efficiency. Despite the most recent setback, it’s really not a serious threat to the overall product strategy.

Fighting Forms

I never thought myself to have interest in art history. I actually dreaded that class in college. Fast forward now, I currently enjoy some art pieces from time to time, knowing that its history does have some role in a piece. It’s obvious to me now, but it’s something that wasn’t on my mind. A light discussion about museums and art with a friend led me to reminisce about a certain art piece, Fighting Forms by Franz Marc. By no means am I an expert, but I do want to share my thoughts.

I first saw this piece in a museum in Germany, my first trip to Europe. I was a simple kid back then. Intuitively, this piece piqued my interest out of all the other artwork. The stark contrast is eye-appealing, much similar to the universal theme of good vs evil. But naive themes can’t explore the true depth of this. Or perhaps, that was Marc’s point all along.

To really understand this, we must go back to understand what was going on when Marc painted this. In 1914, Marc painted this right before going into World War I. Scholars dubbed this painting a product of a country at war. The opposing views are clearly shown and the mentality of its people in this time is represented. Thanks to propaganda for the war, it made it seem like it was all about good vs evil, right vs wrong. Fighting Forms represents that belief.

As Marc explains:”Objects speak: objects possess will and form, why should we wish to interrupt them! We have nothing sensible to say to them. Haven’t we learned in the last thousand years that the more we confront objects with the reflection of their appearance, the more silent they become.”

What we perceive may be heavily contrasted. However, that very idea may distort the actual context. At first glance at Fighting Forms, you see the black vs red. Vibrance vs the void. But what you don’t notice later on are the brush strokes and curvature and how they relate to whatever side they’re on. We miss out on the little details at first because the contrast is so vivid. This can be applied in life as well. We see a mold for good vs evil in things. But as you grow older, you realize it’s usually not that simple.

Road to Financial Freedom

I’m 26.5, and I want to be financially free. To give a bit of background, I’m currently employed in tech. My career is basically product management, but I’m still at the associate level. I don’t make $100k per year but almost close to that. Currently, I’m technically not in any financial trouble. Besides the $8k in credit card debt that I’m slowly paying off with every paycheck, I don’t have any serious debt.

Oh wait, I forgot another thing. I co-own a condo with my sister. So I guess I do have some chunk of debt. However, we’re renting that out to a single family. That venture is doing fairly well as we’re getting at a minimum 11.5% return on equity and about 5.8% yearly return on investment (depending on how you calculate ROI; I included all of our expenses).

We’re also in the process of acquiring another property, but more as a vacation home where we can AirBnB it out. It’s definitely a different type of business model, but we think there’s huge opportunity, and it will be fun personally as well.

Regardless, this current investment is my sister + me. We’re pretty solid on that front. This new venture I’m doing is to start real estate investments, by myself. Based on the experience gained, I believe I can prove myself that I can do this alone and starting from nothing. That way, I can prove to you that you can do it also!

I lied, I’m not really starting from nothing. However, I’m not going to start with any help from my current real estate equity; I will start with my own personal equity. Here’s the assets that I will start with.

My job

I think this is the most critical asset. This is how my income generates, obviously. What’s even more important is my ability to save and grow money. By no means am I a frugal person. I travel often and have expensive hobbies. I’m pretty much the mid level worst case scenario in terms of expenses. There’s people out there that definitely spend way more than I do, but that’s a different topic. The real benefit here is that I think I make above the median salary in SF. Keep note that I’m not backing this up with specific industry type. As a tech worker, I don’t think I currently make as much as I could be earning. But again, another topic.

Growth Funds

I’m not the best saver. I have some pretty huge expenses because I like to work on cars and also travel. However, I make it an effort to invest money every paycheck/month to certain funds. Here is a breakdown of how to allocate my money each month.

Couple things to note here… All three of these accounts have dividend reinvestment. That is, any dividend I make I do not cash out. The system automatically reinvests those dividend into assets in each portfolio.

Next thing to note, I’ve had Betterment the longest. So there’s a bunch of sub-accounts that fulfills different goals. For example, I have a safety net account, two general wealth-building accounts, and two retirement accounts. My 401k has the most cash and I just recently started my other retirement account (Roth 401k). As a result, I am unable to use those funds as flexible as I am able to with my other funds. Therefore, I should not include those accounts when determining my current value for this venture.

See the breakdown here…

So as it stands, I’ve been able to save up about $11k in flexible funds. That is, I can withdraw that money fairly quickly with no penalties. That’s why I excluded my retirement account. If you don’t already know, there’s huge tax penalties if you withdraw from your retirement funds early.

I can’t exactly tell you how long it took me to reach $11k but I can tell you that I entered the workforce 3 years ago and I basically slowly started these funds at different times. So in aggregate, it took me 3 years to save $11k held in growth funds.

How do I plan on growing this money?

Well, I intend on keeping up with my monthly deposits each month. Furthermore, my capital can appreciate AND my dividend reinvests. These three are the main strategies used to grow my fund. I will update occasionally at certain milestones to see my status. Keep note that my decisions might change. I may increase/decrease my deposits or do a bulk deposit.

From today, August 23, I will track and grow my little nest egg for 2 years. Who knows, if I can expedite this somehow, I just might. However, I will wait no longer than 2 years to make a move (hopefully!). Once I acquire this first real estate, it will not end there. By usage a of tax deferred strategy, I will sell and acquire more properties. The end goal is to first acquire a multi-family unit and have enough cash flow to live off of.

TLDR

I am saving money to buy a starter type real estate property. I will then turn that investment into a multi-family unit and then turn that into financial freedom!

PokéPower!

If nostalgia ever had a physical manifestation, this would be it. Pokémon is making a comeback, and all the 90’s kids are driving it. Pokémon Go is a mobile app game that allows players to capture Pokémon in the real world using a form of augmented reality. This concept is based on Niantic Labs‘ original game, Ingress, which utilized similar augmented reality game mechanics.

To put into perspective how much hype this is, let’s put some numbers behind this. Nintendo, an investor of both Pokémon and Niantic, had its stock price rise by 9.3% since its launch date on July 6, 2016. On Monday, July 11, 2016, that figure rose another 24.52% to 20,260 Yen per share ($193 USD per share).

How much value did Nintendo’s market cap just gain? $7.5 billion. To put THAT into perspective, just recently UFC sold for only $4 billion, which is one of the largest sports transaction in history.

But is this sustainable? Will users keep coming back? Nintendo has a history of being king and then come crashing down to Earth.

See in the above image the share price at 2007? That was when the Nintendo Wii first released. That rose Nintendo’s share price to over 60,000 Yen ($583 USD), triple of today’s price. But even that leveled off. However, the Wii and Pokémon Go are fundamentally different products.

Pokémon Go is already seeing over 140 million daily active users. They’re matching Twitter and Tinder in that metric and still growing. And that’s only with the app released in three countries (Australia, New Zealand, United States). We can expect growth to continue with the release of more countries, since the only thing that’s holding them back is scalability. There’s even a website to check which countries have Pokémon Go released: http://ispokemongoavailableyet.com

Once they can support all their users, what can Pokémon Go offer to keep its user base engaged and active? What will happen when players “caught them all”? Would the addition of Pokémon passed #150 help? Can the user’s activity in Pokemon Go organically provide value back to the app itself? It’s initially a game, so what happens when users are done playing?

Regardless, it’s great that Nintendo, Niantic, and Pokémon scored on this one, however short it may be. Now enjoy a brief history of Pokémon:

Cultural Self-Awareness: High-Power Distance

I recently finished Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and the main idea is that we can all attribute our successes to external factors such as community, exposure to practice, and historical culture. Culture and community are somewhat related except that community describes your interactions with others around you. Historical culture describes deep roots in your ethnic history where such traits may still exhibit in your daily actions. For this exposition I will focus on culture and how I realized it affected my workplace as a product manager. Furthermore, one must be aware of these cultural tendencies in order to be truly assertive in their profession.

Gladwell describes South Korean Airlines’ cultural communication being the leading cause of airline crashes. It isn’t the ‘failure to communicate’ but the cultural nuance of how a culture communicates. In South Korean cultures (and many Asian cultures), a young man, such as myself, is expected to show respect to an older person. Respect in this sense means that you do not question their authority and are expected to act accordingly to their demands. Countries that portray this are known as high-power distance relationship. Gladwell extensively argues that this notion of respect and authority prevented a junior Korean pilot from assertively informing a senior pilot’s incorrect judgement.

A man with high-power distance relationship in their culture would inform a superior in such a subtle way, as a sign of respect and authority, about a situation that might go awry. However, this scenario works out only if the receiver can read between the lines and really understand this subtle hint as to what the sender really wants. Asian language is receiver oriented — it’s up to the receiver of a message to extrapolate what the message really means. Failure results in ineffective conduct.

I bring this example up because I can somewhat feel this tendency as well. As a project lead, I’m responsible for the strategy and leading 5 others in my team. 4 of them are about my age, if not younger. However, the last 1 is 4 years older than I am. Upon discussing experience-related issues, I can feel myself conceding to their suggestions. These suggestions are in no way ‘make it or break it’ type decisions. However, they’re significant enough that we spent 2 hours discussing marginal outcomes, when clearly we should’ve moved on. At least, that’s what I wanted. However, I kept conceding to talk about the current issue.

I then realized I’m subject to such cultural high-power distance. I’m the project lead, but I feel a minute sense of inferiority to someone who isn’t responsible for the whole strategy. As a result, my focus have shifted into how I want to deliver my messages such that it won’t ‘offend my superior’. I want to disclose now that I’m not praising that I have a ‘higher role’ than this person just because I’m the lead or that this person is such a terrible person to work with. This person does extremely well at his role and I enjoy the meetings I have with them. My point is that my cultural tendency of high-power distance relationship can showcase how it can affect my assertiveness. This high-power distance tendency only exists because I have knowledge that he’s only 4 years older than I am. If I hadn’t known this, I never would’ve fostered such tendency in my mind. You can imagine how such an arbitrary thing can affect my assertiveness.

I want to stress that it’s important to be identify these signs. It exists and it can quietly affect your tendencies, and therefore alter your behavior. I’m not saying all Asians experience this. There are different historically cultural tendencies that we obtain from previous generations. This high-power distance relationship is only one of them. If you’re aware of this and notice it in your activities, you can be mindful that such external arbitrary factor doesn’t have real power over your assertiveness.

WhatsApp???

Couple things have went down recently. One highlight is Facebook acquiring WhatsApp for a crazy $19 billion. Even though the majority of it was through shares of Facebook, it’s still quite a couple million for only 32 engineers. Many are surprised as to why did Facebook pay so much. In comparison, Facebook bought Instagram, a fairly ubiquitous app, for $1 billion. Executives explained that this valuation is based on certain numbers.

WhatsApp claims to serve 450 million active users globally, growing at $1 million user signs-ups per day, projected to reach $1 billion by end of the year (last point may be incorrect). Another factor is the intricate architecture WhatsApp is built on, which gives light to the details on the technology that resulted as a top product in the market.

Some argue that WhatsApp is overvalued. This article argued that China’s WeChat is valued far more than WhatsApp. One metric discussed is WhatsApp $1 per user revenue vs WeChat’s $7 per user revenue. However, WeChat’s surpassing revenue per user is due to the fact that WeChat tries to do everything beyond simple messaging. Although they claim that their business is worth $30 billion, who’s to say any one entity will buy them? They are a government backed company (like all companies in China). Furthermore, only Chinese residents use it, whereas WhatsApp dominates globally by user count.

Because of WhatsApp’s global dominance and clarity in their product, I believe WeChat isn’t valued over WhatsApp, regardless of their $7 per user revenue. Furthermore, even if WeChat’s valuation is projected to be larger, there’s no action to be made in terms of company exit. WeChat will remain in China’s market ecosystem and will have trouble exploring global options. This fact alone makes WhatsApp far more valuable than WeChat without putting a number on it.

A Product I Love

One web and mobile app product that I love is Simple Banking because they make it incredibly easy, user friendly, and fun to manage one’s finances. As a result, users handle their finances, intelligently and have fun doing it. A feature within this product that epitomizes this is the Goals feature.

Current balance/available balance statements don’t show the whole picture when handling finances. The Goals feature budgets foreseeable expenses into a Goal so that you can see how much money you can safely spend. Although this is fairly similar to budgeting applications, like Mint.com, users don’t need a separate application to save money or having to manually move money. Simple organizes your Goals and balances money so that you can spend smarter and save more. Users who budget with Goals save 2x as much as customers who don’t. Furthermore, its user interface provide much of the positive experience that users exclaim in their testimonials.

As you can see above, there are two types of goals. A user can save an allotted amount of money at once, or save it over time–bits of money are transferred from your Safe-to-Spend to your goal everyday. To effectively show what’s happening, Simple implements a gamification strategy, and it’s well executed. Users say it’s “fun” to check their Goal progress as they see their Goal fill up consistently over time. This positive feedback encourages users to actively create more Goals in the future, thereby, effectively driving users to spend money, intelligently, and saving more.

The next feature that further sets itself apart from other banks is its customer support. You can do banking operations from the web or phone app itself: activating your card, blocking (or unblock) a card, change your PIN etc. If anything else, they provide a way to easily send message to their support team that resembles having a conversation. It’s not automated; they’re real people messaging you. They answered any issue I had, technical or just plain questions. They make it incredibly easy to access their knowledge and their answers are clear and concise. This is important because the next time I have questions, I am not afraid to ask or do not dread on the thought of asking for support. It’s an absolute delight to ask for help.

Simple Banking changed my way of saving and spending. Recently, I’ve taken upon a trip to another country. In the past, I would just make a mental note to allot a certain amount of money. That’s one archaic way of budgeting. With Simple, I budget my money over time by setting a Goal. I do this with other purchases I know I will make, such as beer brewing ingredients, gas money, groceries, and road trip expenses. Simple’s tools make it easy and fun to save money, which is why it’s such a powerful tool. It’s gratifying to see your Goals coming into completion or to have a constant progression while its saving over time. They make doing having budgets fun. Its WOW factor is how its changing these conventions. They leverage technology the right way by providing a rewarding experience saving and spending money, intelligently.

Small Wins Keep You Motivated

Today is the first time I felt my voice being heard where I intern at. It’s something really small, but cool at the same time. My suggestion was to implement user account management for fundraising campaigns in Fundly to implement with tumblr blogs. Basically, when you share an update about your campaign on Fundly, it would share to your connected tumblr blog. Yes, really simple, but awesome to see it in the works from sprint planning to production.

Small wins keeps you motivated.

Kapor Fellow Blog Post

My time spent as a Kapor Fellow has been overwhelming. Aside from meeting interesting people and building relationships, I’m captivated by the mission of the Kapor Center: leveraging technology to do social good.

During my journey in college and my first internship, I thought hard about my life and what the future held. As unclear as it was, I didn’t feel like my major and job outlook seemed too fulfilling. I’m majoring in Management Information Systems. The common path of that major is to work for a large network security corporation (or some sort of the same magnitude) and work on back-end processes and projects for the company. I hear talk from other students in this major and they say it’s a good paying job, they’re hiring these type of graduates, etc. But somehow, know this didn’t make me feel conviction or with a purpose. It didn’t excite me all that much. Until I received a chance to be a Kapor Fellow.

Just learning the work the Kapor Center executes excites me. The type of work as Mitch describes working with tech, education, social gaps, solving REAL problems, convinces me to also pursue a professional career similar to this capacity. Seeing the Kapor Center’s work really inspired me that I can take my passion in technology and apply that to do some real good, instead of just because technology can make money and security.

I already had a interest in startups and what they can offer that corporations can’t. In a sense, they’re more grassroots, move fast, and solve problems faster. Acting as a Kapor Fellow re-enforces my decisions to continue on the startup path because I believe that’s where I can see real change happen in front of me. I want to do some real good at some point in my life.