About this site

Welcome! I’m Matt Duffy, a data generalist and strategist who has decided to go back to 2006 and do the en vogue thing, start a blog. This is not my first rodeo, I made two halfhearted blogging efforts just over a decade ago. Those blogs were bad, unfocused, and the general product of “needing to say something” rather than an outlet for thoughtful writing. They also lived on platforms that were bad for blogging. I didn’t always make the best decisions back then. But this time it’s different! I’m using this intro blog to outline both the reason I started this and the general thrust of what I hope to publish here. This will (hopefully) serve as my north star and reference point for whatever I put out in the future.

Why are you doing this?

My partner and I recently had our first child, and about a week into Keegan’s life I decided to start doing daily journaling. It has been an awesome exercise, and a great way to put my personal daily thoughts down on a (virtual) page. Through that process I’ve rediscovered the catharsis that can come from getting ideas out of the brain and into writing. I’ve also realized that there are some thoughts and ideas I have that I would like to put out into the world. So this is my space to do some of that. However, unlike my previous efforts, I plan to narrow the types of thoughts and ideas that make it into the blog, and I plan to have a general structure that provides a potential business world tie-in to those ideas.

Ok, I know why you started this, but what is it?

There’s a rule you’ll see among some writers, primarily journalists or similar commentators, born of the internet age. Essentially they’ll say they were “mad enough to blog about it”. For me this is a shorthand for saying if something sticks in your brain long enough, you might want to discuss it. So that’s basically what I’m going for here. I’m going to aim for weekly posts, but I’m not going to hold myself hard and fast to that, and I plan to write about topics that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Often these will be things that were in the business, policy, or economic news that week. Sometimes they will be items I’ve thought about for a long time that tie in a number of news stories from a number of different years. The common bonds I’m hoping will hold together these write ups is that they are topics that have a lot of awareness, and they will touch on how we seek and evaluate information. For the record, I am not making the “mad” part of “mad enough…” a requirement, there are plenty of reasons a topic might drive my interest.

While that’s most of what I plan for here, I’m leaving the option open for some general interest write ups and personal essay types of things, but they’ll have to meet a high bar of “importance”.

Ok, great, a lot of people consume news and information, what’s unique about you?

One certainty is that, most often, I will not be an expert in the topics that are discussed here. However I do have some skills that I’ve honed over the course of my career that give me a unique perspective on how to find and evaluate information. I’ve built my career such that I can confidently say that:

• I’m a data scientist, which means that I’m good at taking a bunch of noisy information and finding the meaningful tidbits. This goes beyond simply being “good with numbers”.
• I’m a strategist. This means I am very good at finding new sources of information and creative inputs to drive decision making.
• I’m a consultant. This means that I’m used to diving into industries I’m unfamiliar with and familiarizing myself with the landscape quickly and accurately. Getting things wrong means you no longer get hired, so I’m good at getting things right by necessity.
• I understand financial analysis, which is a world where the universe of information you need to evaluate a deal is pretty well known and fairly exhaustive, but where, often, the devil lies in the assumptions about that information. I’m good at evaluating the sturdiness of assumptions.

Anything else?

Because of the nature of the items I’ll be discussing here, I’m sure that I’m going to discuss topics about which people have strong feelings. I’m not going to shy away from including my perspective on the topic, but I will aim to focus more on the process by which I came to my perspective rather than hammering home the perspective itself. We have enough of that elsewhere.

I hope you’ll find this interesting, and if not it’s no big deal. This is mostly for me and if it drives some interaction and interest that’s a plus.