The Sunday (Monday, almost Tuesday) Edition

Newsletter roundup

May 29, 2023

Grandma has no tolerance for today’s complaints. Glad I didn’t tell her I was tired from a busy week last week. It was pretty cool to wake-up this Memorial Day morning to texts of newspaper clippings I had never seen before. Proud of my Grandfather and his 3 brothers and 2 brothers-in-law who all enlisted and served overseas at the same time.

ICYMI

Last week we had M&A in the investment banking space with Mizuho acquiring Greenhill for $550M, as well as a much anticipated acquisition of Neeva by Snowflake.

$96.2M raised across 6 fundraising announcements, including OpenFin’s (shoutout Vicky Sanders!) $35M Series D led by Bank of America.

10 people moves, promotions, and appointments, and noticing increased activity within the large financial information services providers, including Noah Berliner’s promotion at Moody’s and Rachel Lojko joining Fitch. On the fund side, Leigh Marie Braswell joined Kleiner Perkins and Rich Carbone joined Balyasny.

6 interesting roles across companies of all types and sizes, including S&P Global hiring a Global Head of Strategy for S&P Ratings and Tegus hiring a Head of Content.

I read a ton last week, with 7 articles and newsletters, including Top 100 lists of early-stage investors from Insider and most influential people in data from DataIQ.

The Week Ahead

In NYC we have a packed week as conference season is in full swing. Let me know if you’re in town for Neudata. Happy hours on Wednesday at 5:30pm by People Data Labs at their office (20th and 5th), 5:45pm by Jordan Hauer at Legend’s (33rd and 5th), and Thursday at 6pm by Ethan Aaron at Flannery’s (14th and 7th). Neudata’s New York Summer Data Summit is all day Thursday at Convene (1 Liberty).

Newsletter About Newsletters

Highlighting 13 of my favorite newsletters covering data, financial markets, fintech, and research services.

  • The Data Score by Jason DeRise. While this is one of the newest newsletters, Jason is by no means a new name in the data space. He was one of the first sell-side analysts to incorporate alternative data into the research process, before moving over to UBS Evidence Labs, where he worked on data-driven research for 8 years as Head of Data Strategy. Jason and I finally had the opportunity to meet in person recently and also realized we’re fellow Syracuse alums.

  • Alt Data Weekly by John Farrall. John has been writing on the industry for the past 3 years, having just completed his 135th newsletter edition. Few people do more than John to bring the community together and shed light on interesting articles and podcasts (all with his take on each)

  • Magis by Alex Izydorczyk. Alex recently launched Cybersyn and began writing on Substack a little over a year ago. Alex’s writing on the data industry and methods is thought provoking and gets to the core of how data is (or should be) used in practice. Alex’s career journey is fascinating, having interned at Coatue in college and eventually joining and becoming Head of Data Science at age 23, before launching Cybersyn in 2022. The company recently raised $62.9M in Series A funding led by Snowflake with participation from Coatue and Sequoia.

  • Data News by Louise De Leyritz. Louise writes a monthly newsletter from her front row seat in the data catalog world at Castor. One of the best roundups on data tools, each month Louise highlights a tool worth digging into, articles, show & tell, a data person to follow, and she’s also a fellow Meme-master. She also writes in a number of other publications which are consolidated on her Medium Site.

  • Random Walk by Moses Sternstein. Moses is one of the first Substack newsletter writers in the industry, with twice-weekly posts incorporating unique data and insights on markets and economies. Chock full of charts, you’ll surely learn something new each week from Moses’s newsletter, and use that info to sound way smarter amongst your colleagues.

  • Aspiring For Intelligence by Vivek Ramaswami and Sabrina Wu. Vivek and Sabrina are investors at Madrona, one of the leading early-stage tech VC firms having made early investments in companies including Amazon, Lattice, Smartsheet, Snowflake, UiPath, and my selfish favorite, Bobsled (I’m an Advisor). Vivek and Sabrina write about all things AI, with detailed explanations on the market and interviews with other industry thought leaders.

  • ResearchWatch by Michael Mayhew and Sandy Bragg. Michael and Sandy have been covering the capital markets research space for over 20 years running Integrity Research Associates. In addition to tracking activity in investment banking and equity research, Michael and Sandy are the first I can think of to cover expert networks and alternative data. I’d describe their work more as journalism than a newsletter, as they do deep dives on industry activity and company fundraising/M&A, with interviews of CEOs and executives, as well as their take on each deal.

  • Through The Noise by Alex Banks. Alex writes multiple times a week in a Beehiiv newsletter detailed as “AI. Without the noise” including a Sunday Signal where he filters through over 500 pieces of AI-related content and highlights the best news, products, startups, and tweets.

  • This Is The Top by Douglas Boneparth. Douglas is a Financial Advisor and President of Bone Fide Wealth. You’ve likely seen him on CNBC, WSJ, or his absolute GOLD Twitter Account with 250K followers (249.2K to be exact, give him a follow and help him get to 250K).

  • Be Alpha, My Friend by Bill Stephenson. In addition to his role as CEO of plia, Bill is an active industry advisor working with Freeman | Chase, Rosenblatt Securities, and Holt Accelerator. He was previously Global Head of Trading at Franklin Templeton, and he’s also one of the largest contributors to building out the fintech community, notably as founder of the incredibly popular AIR Summits. Bill recently got into the newsletter game with BAMF, where he highlights industry activity and interesting data and solutions providers he meets with.

  • Exec Sum by Litquidity. Does anyone know the identity of Litquidity yet? Either way, the newsletter is great. Published daily, it covers financial markets, earnings, M&A, fundraising, and some great memes. Let’s just hope Karl the intern makes it in to the office tomorrow after dropping an entire summer analyst’s salary at Gurney’s this weekend.

  • Data Storytelling with OpenAxis by Alex Damianou. Alex is Founder & CEO of OpenAxis, a platform for visualizing, sharing, and collaborating with data to tell stories. A popular within the journalist community, Alex uses OpenAxis to write a Substack newsletter of top charts and datasets featured from the community on OpenAxis.

  • Carta Data Minute by Peter Walker. While this one is company sponsored, I wanted to include it as I think it is one of the best uses of one’s data that I have seen. Peter and the Carta team publish weekly insights from Carta’s 30,000 startups. Fascinating insights for anyone investing, fundraising, advising, or just generally interested in the startup ecosystem.