Harper Reed – The magic and mystery of Big Data (30min video from Webstock’15)

Harper Reed is speaking, so nothing can go wrong. :) The former CTO of Threadless.com and Obama for America definitly knows to do get stuff done, and he delivers another weird, funny, but also very useful talk. Seriously, even after Big Data is a buzzword for years now, who really knows the meaning ? Harper nails it to the head with the story about estimated customers’s baskets at 25:00 (we know if your 13yo daughter is pregnant before you know). If you have never seen him or even heard of this awesome guy, then do it now.

Some notes from the talk:

• Simple A/B-testing of the Obama (donation?) site led to 49% donation conversion increase
• focus on what really solves the problem
• Track everything. Everything.
• Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test. Test.
• You know more about your users than they know about themselves. Seriously.
• … but don’t show your users this too much.

And by the way, I think he’s into Python.