The Diff - Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• Jobs vary in how salesy they are, and, unfortunately, the purest sales job, where success is all about the pitch and gross margins are 100%, is running elaborate scams. Charlotte Cowles writes at length about how she was tricked into withdrawing $50,000 in cash, putting it in a shoebox, and handing it to a stranger. Feel free to read this one as a train wreck, but keep in mind that scammers would choose a different line of business if people reasonable enough to accumulate savings weren't also occasionally unreasonable enough to part with them based on a lie. As with many movies where the entire plot could be solved with a simple phone call, the story would have been a tweet and the $50,000 still would have been there if, the first time the author spoke to the fake CIA agent, she took down his name and number and then promptly hung up, Googled the CIA's phone number, called, and asked to be connected. Emails and incoming phone numbers can be spoofed, but if calling a government agency (or your bank, or the cops) still gets you redirected to scammers, then the problem is much bigger than somebody getting robbed.
• In October, The Diff covered efforts to use machine learning to read ancient scrolls that had been buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. At the time, the big news was the discovery of a single word ("πορφυρας," or purple dye). Now Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet at Bloomberg have the story of how an entire document was recovered. A highlight: Luke Farritor, whose system read the scroll, heard about it on a podcast: "I think there’s a 50% chance that someone will encounter this opportunity, get the data and get nerd-sniped by it, and we’ll solve it this year." It took eleven months.
• Dan Kras on what he learned from trying to start a speed dating company. The dating business rarely gets mentioned alongside education, healthcare, and defense procurement, but they all share something in common: there are obvious flaws with how things work today, but it's extremely non-obvious what can be done about it. For dating, one problem is that if someone has a good approach for using data to match people into long-term relationships, larger competitors who aren't necessarily any better at data science will have far more data, and will be able to identify the same signals. And they've generally A/B tested their way into being a tool for continuous managed dissatisfaction rather than the less lucrative work of matching people who will deactivate their dating site profile and stay together instead.
• Reeves Wiedman profiles Bill Ackman and his crusade against Harvard in NYMag. It's easy to dismiss Ackman as an out-of-touch billionaire who has decided that reforming higher education would be a fun and easy hobby. But he also comes across as a very in-touch billionaire, who is having the time of his life antagonizing people. There's an often lively debate about how well expertise translates across fields. Does someone who made a lot of money picking stocks really have unusually insightful views about higher education? That debate will always be with us, but what's undeniable is that the skill of calling attention to an institution's deficiencies and strongly encouraging them to fix those does, in fact, work across different domains.
• David Pierce writes in The Verge about the past and future of robots.txt, the file indicating to search engines which pages on a site they should access. It's a fortunate coincidence that the cost of getting a site crawled by Google is so low and the benefit of search traffic is so high; that's the only way our current model of search can work. In the case of AI, though, while the cost is the same, the benefit is harder to measure. Some people might want their data incorporated, since the tyranny of link-rot means that this is essentially the only way to make your writing or art live forever, but for most people that's a less salient concern than competing with a GPT agent that can do their job at a fraction of the cost because it's trained, at least in part, on their work.
• This week's episode of The Riff is a look at what's happening in real estate, featuring Brad Hargreaves. Listen on Spotify/Apple/Substack.
• And in Capital Gains, we look at "alternative data," like anonymized consumer spending records, web scraping, app usage, and more. Investing is a relative game, so as one source of information gets commoditized, investors need to find other ones.

Books

Private Equity: A Memoir: This is a book that describes what it's like to work as an assistant for a very thinly-disguised Chase Coleman at Tiger Global. It's not a regular business book profiling the rise and fall of a prominent investor—the author writes about her emotional struggles, her efforts to keep her parents, friends, and romantic partners happy, and the inner experience of being paid very well to do an extremely stressful job. But there's a lot more talk about the art of running an effective organization than you'd typically expect from an MFA writing about being a twentysomething in New York. But perhaps the most important thing the book does is remind readers that behind every incredibly productive person is someone with a talent for administration who makes sure their calendar is managed, their speeches are expertly ghostwritten, and that the office isn't a disaster the morning after a company party.

Reviewed at greater length behind the paywall ($).

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• Aside from robots.txt, what parts of the social contract need to be revised in light of AI?

Diff Jobs

• A seed-stage startup is helping homebuyers assume the homeseller’s low-rate mortgage, and is in need of a product designer and a product manager. (NYC)
• A VC firm using data science and ML to source and evaluate opportunities is looking for a senior data engineer. (Menlo Park, CA or NYC)
• A fintech company using AI to craft new investment strategies seeks a portfolio management associate with 2+ years of experience in trading or operations for equities or crypto. This is a technical role—FIX proficiency required, as well as Python, C#, and SQL. (NYC)
• A private credit fund denominated in Bitcoin needs a credit analyst that can negotiate derivatives pricing. Experience with low-risk crypto lending preferred (i.e. to large miners, prop-trading firms in safe jurisdictions). (Remote)
• A new health startup that gives customers affordable access to preventative care and lifestyle interventions seeks a founding engineer. 7+ years of JavaScript experience preferred (TypeScript is ideal), and payments experience is a plus. A great opportunity for anyone excited to make healthcare better by treating problems cost-effectively before they're catastrophic. (US, remote; Austin preferred)

Even if you don't see an exact match for your skills and interests right now, we're happy to talk early so we can let you know if a good opportunity comes up.

If you’re at a company that's looking for talent, we should talk! Diff Jobs works with companies across fintech, hard tech, consumer software, enterprise software, and other areas—any company where finding unusually effective people is a top priority.