Author: Edouard Chazal

Ello, goodbye.

Aral is leaving Ello :

When you take venture capital, it is not a matter of if you’re going to sell your users, you already have. It’s called an exit plan. And no investor will give you venture capital without one. In the myopic and upside-down world of venture capital, exits precede the building of the actual thing itself. It would be a comedy if the repercussions of this toxic system were not so tragic.

Personally, I don’t really mind VCs selling my datas to advertisers and brands. That’s the price I’m willing to pay for a good service.

The other way to build a social service like this would be to set a subscription, like App.net does, though it has not proven to be very popular.

Now, how to maintain a service without funding ?

This is mythical. I think Aral’s note falls short without explaining his ideal way to fund a company and feed its employees.

Venture Capital might not be the perfect match between privacy and social medias, but I think it sustains creativity and encourage entrepreneurs to take risk — sometimes in creating some pixel-perfect layouts.

→ Aral Balkan

Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and Culture Clash

The audio is muddy but the words are distinct. So is the tension. Segarra is in Silva’s small office at Goldman Sachs with his deputy. The two are trying to persuade her to change her view about Goldman’s conflicts policy.

“You have to come off the view that Goldman doesn’t have any kind of conflict-of- interest policy,” are the first words Silva says to her. Fed officials didn’t believe her conclusion — that Goldman lacked a policy — was “credible.”

And here is the audio report from This American Life.

→ ProPublica

Reality = Normal + Fat-Tail Distributions

To illustrate the phenomenon, consider the S&P’s daily percentage returns in terms of quantiles, which divides the performance record into equal-sized portions. The graph below plots the sample return of the S&P (black circles) against the theoretical quantiles (red line), defined here by a random distribution. If the S&P’s daily returns were perfectly random, the black circles would match the red line.

sp.a.25sep2014

Normal distributions are still useful for analyzing markets and designing portfolios. Indeed, even in the daily return plot above it’s clear that the distribution looks quite normal for a fair amount of the sample. We can’t rely on normality alone for modeling markets. Factoring in fat-tails risk is essential. But letting a fat-tail worldview dominate your analysis is every bit as flawed as assuming that normal distributions will prevail. Asset pricing doesn’t neatly fit into one theoretical box, which means that our analytical tool kit shouldn’t be in a conceptual straightjacket either.

→ The Capital Spectator

Ello Is a Wake-Up Call for Social Media Marketing

Businesses need to take Ello and its manifesto as a wake-up call to rethink the way they use social networks to reach customers. The intense interest and discussion engendered by this manifesto attests to the profound misgivings many of those customers now have about the networks that occupy a growing place our work, our relationships and our lives.

And here is the manifesto.

→ Harvard Business Review

Bill Gross: The Bond King’s Move to a New Throne

From Bloomberg’s Market Makers :

Celebrity sells. And it can sell mutual funds as well as it sells sneakers. Bill Gross helped build Pacific Investment Management Co. into a $1.97-trillion firm by becoming a star. He cultivated his fame with a busy media schedule and colorful commentary on everything from Paris Hilton to the U.S. economy’s “new normal.”

→ Bloomberg