Getting my hands dirty

I’ve been living the startup life and have come to terms with no longer being able to “comp last year”. It’s a game of grow, grow, grow, where sheer volume and customer headcount matter only slightly less than fussy old concepts like margin, and rather than comp last year by 2%, you’re aiming to be 2 orders of magnitude bigger by next year because there is no last year, and even if there was it’d be a sure sign of trouble if you could use last year to tell very much about what’s going on now.

A year after starting this blog (and a month into my new job) I’ve resolved to roll up my sleeves and learn how to deal with data.

Also, when my boss asked me for figures including median and standard deviation I got sweaty palms and goobered up my company iPhone.

So I bought a book; my usual stress response when confronted with my own ignorance. It’s an O’Reilly (my first, I think) from their “Head First” series, which seems to be geared towards impractically-educated people such as myself who are thumbing through night school course catalogues but not quite convinced that this subject is worth the scheduling commitment or risking entanglement in group assignments.

I worked through the first chapter last night (it was good, but you really do need a pencil handy). If I knock off 2 chapters every week I’ll be done before March.

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