Golden Data · a workbench by Paul Brown
Bridge data with strategy.
I’m Paul Brown — fourteen years turning messy data into decisions people actually trust: governed data models and semantic layers in fintech, and the propensity work that recovered eight figures of pipeline on enterprise sales channels. Now I build AI-first and in the open from Ogden, UT. Golden Data is my workbench — tools you can use today, dashboards rebuilt from public data, shipped products that earn real money, and two weekly letters, every area entering through the same bench.
- What this is
- A working bench, published as I build it in the open — the place where I prove the patterns I write about actually hold up in production, not just on a slide. Every tool runs on real, inspectable data, and the code sits on GitHub for anyone to read.
- What this isn’t
- Not a portfolio prop, a lead-capture funnel, or a pitch dressed up as a demo. No login, no tracking, no email wall — use anything on the bench, and take what’s useful without ever giving something up in return.
Nothing on the bench matches that yet.
Try a tool, a dataset, or a topic — ‘eval’, ‘salary’, ‘nuclear’, ‘gif’.
Golden Data / Tools
Small tools for the work I actually do
Pipeline coverage and capacity math from the revenue-ops day job, cost caps and eval sizing for AI features, house rules for prose — plus a few built for my own life. No login, no tracking, no email wall.
Pick a tool
Pipeline Coverage Planner
Quota, closed-won, open pipeline, and win rate in — coverage ratio, projected finish, and the pipeline you still have to build (in deals, per week) out. The quarter math, without the spreadsheet.
Sales Capacity Planner
Will the team you have hit the number you signed up for? Reps, ramp, attainment, and attrition in — effective selling capacity, the gap to plan, and what it takes to close it.
Comp Plan Payout Curve
A comp plan is a curve, not a paragraph. OTE, pay mix, threshold, accelerator, and cap in — the whole plan drawn live, with total cash at attainment and what the next point is worth.
SaaS Metrics Scorecard
The five numbers a revenue leader gets asked for first — NRR, GRR, magic number, CAC payback, Rule of 40 — computed from raw inputs and scored against public benchmarks.
AI Feature Cost Estimator
Size the monthly bill for an LLM feature before you build it. Requests, tokens, and rates in — cost per request, monthly, and annual out.
Eval Set Sizer
How many golden examples do you actually need? Pick a target accuracy, a margin of error, and a confidence level — get the sample size.
Prose Voice Linter
Paste a draft. It flags the banned words, exclamation points, and passive voice, then checks the short-declarative rhythm — the exact house rules behind Signal and Crafting.
A/B Test Calculator
Drop in visitors and conversions for two variants to see lift, a p-value, and whether the result is real. Plus a planner for how many you need before you start.
Browser GIF Maker
Convert short screen recordings into platform-sized GIFs with trim, captions, boomerang playback, filters, and client-side ffmpeg.
Ogden Home Finder
A living catalogue of Ogden-metro housing — tracked daily with price history, days-on-market, and an interactive map. Rent today, for-sale next. Updated by a Claude scheduled task.
Wavelength
Swipe on what strangers actually wonder about — the half-baked theories and 2am rabbit holes, not the highlight reel. On a match, the AI drafts the intro, then gets out of the way. A friend’s idea, shipped as a prototype to find out if it holds up.
Next on the bench
Every area hands you to the freshest thing next door — never a dead end. The full build log keeps the running pulse, newest first.
Golden Data / Dashboards
Field notes and briefs, in the open
Questions chased for their own sake, and the same engine aimed at a company. Years of Tableau work — happiness, economics, mobility — ported into interactive charts that live natively on the site. Reskinned to the house style, not embedded in an iframe.
Pick a field note
Start here — one engine, many roles
The through-line behind the whole portfolio: one analytical engine — full-funnel, LTV, experimentation, exec scorecards, Voice-of-Customer — reskinned across competitor spotlights, JD case studies, and AI-enabled work.
Synchrony — VP, Co-Brand & Lifecycle Analytics
A JD case study: the mandate reframed, a 90-day plan, a co-brand cardholder lifecycle funnel, and a requirement→proof map — the same lifecycle-analytics engine I built for Acima, pointed at a co-brand card book.
Affirm — Director, Analytics (Strategic Insights)
A JD case study for Affirm’s Strategic Insights role — the BNPL consumer lifecycle and the Card-attach growth lever, with proof that pairs to my full Affirm competitor spotlight.
Concora Credit — VP, Risk (Fraud Strategy & Analytics)
A JD case study for a subprime credit-card risk leader — the decisioning funnel (first-payment default, charge-offs, the approval/loss frontier), mapped to the Acima risk model I built. The closest fit in the set to that role’s actual day.
Chime — Director, Product Analytics
A JD case study for Chime’s Product Analytics role — the neobank member lifecycle, the direct-deposit activation unlock, and an experimentation-first 90-day plan, with proof mapped to the Dave spotlight.
Airbnb — Staff, Payments Advanced Analytics
A JD case study for Airbnb’s Payments analytics role — the payment funnel, an authorization-rate causal experiment, and the same experimentation + exec-scorecard engine, pointed at money movement.
Headspace — Director, AI Enablement
A different kind of case study: this portfolio IS the proof. A dozen-plus sourced, cited analyses shipped via an AI research→build operating model I designed — discovery→pilot→scale, with responsible-AI guardrails on every page.
Target — Director, Quantitative UX Research & AI Enablement
A JD case study for Target’s Quantitative UX Research role — behavior-vs-voice measurement and a VoC research signal, mapped to my CX Research & Market Intelligence brief and AI-scaled research workflows.
Best Buy — Director, Customer Insights & Integration
A JD case study for Best Buy’s Customer Insights role — the retail customer lifecycle and the channel-integration payoff, mapped to the lifecycle-analytics engine.
Citizens — Head of Decisioning Analytics & Optimization
A JD case study for Citizens’ decisioning role — the portfolio decision funnel optimized end-to-end against profitability, mapped to the decision-optimization engine.
Wealth-tech CRM — Sr RevOps Engineer (GTM Systems)
The off-thesis one: a RevOps / GTM-systems role, not an analytics seat. Reframed around the part that’s hard to hire for — a trustworthy lead-to-revenue funnel with data quality and AI-native workflows on top — and honest about where Salesforce/CPQ admin depth is the ramp. The same full-funnel engine, pointed at a GTM stack.
PE portfolio — Applied AI Engineer (Forward-Deployed)
The stretch goal: a forward-deployed AI engineer embedded across a PE portfolio. Honest that full-stack at staff depth is the reach — but the AI-native half (Claude Code, MCP servers, custom skills, context engineering, tool benchmarking, enablement) is my daily practice, and this whole site is the proof. The spine is reuse: build once, redeploy across the portfolio.
Upbound — Customer Performance Analytics
Inside Acima’s funnel: an interactive unit-economics & LTV model calibrated to the filed FY2025 results, a leakage diagnostic, an experimentation readout, and the SQL underneath. Public data only.
Upbound — Competitive & Market Intelligence
An original market-intelligence briefing on Upbound Group (Acima, Rent-A-Center, Brigit) and the accessible-finance arena — lease-to-own vs BNPL vs cash advance. Every figure sourced and dated.
Competitor Spotlight: Progressive Leasing
A deep-dive on Progressive Leasing / PROG Holdings (NYSE: PRG) — Acima’s purest pure-play mirror, the virtual-LTO rival Acima overtook on GMV in FY2025. Includes the $175M FTC settlement. Public data, every figure cited.
Competitor Spotlight: Dave
A deep-dive on Dave (NASDAQ: DAVE) — Brigit’s most direct competitor, already 2–3× its size, GAAP-profitable, with a banking flywheel Brigit lacks. Public data, every figure cited.
Competitor Spotlight: Affirm
A deep-dive on Affirm (NASDAQ: AFRM) — the no-late-fee, simple-interest, prime-leaning BNPL that sets the transparency benchmark high-take-rate lease-to-own is judged against. Public data, every figure cited.
Competitor Spotlight: Sezzle
A deep-dive on Sezzle (NASDAQ: SEZL) — the subprime-leaning, super-app-building BNPL on a collision course with Acima and Brigit. Trajectory, business model, head-to-head, and implications. Public data, every figure cited.
The Week That Had No Weekend
In 1929 the Soviet Union tried to abolish the weekend. The nepreryvka split the workforce into five colour groups on a rotating five-day cycle — four-fifths always working, so the factories never stopped, and no universal Sunday to anchor religious life. The staggering fractured families: pick two people’s colours and watch their days off never line up. Traces the calendar from the five-day week to the six-day shestidnevka to the seven-day week’s return in 1940 — and debunks the two myths the story usually carries.
When Sweden Vacations Together
Terry Hartig tracked how many antidepressants Swedish pharmacists dispensed, month by month, for twelve years. The more workers were on vacation at the same time, the fewer prescriptions went out that month — and the effect reached retirees too, who had no job to break from. Evidence that rest is contagious. Rebuilt from the paper’s published ARIMA coefficients: an exact dose-response curve, the drop group-by-group, and a reconstruction of the raw seasonal series.
The Agent-vs-Human Scorecard
The workbench measured on itself. Every task I complete is tagged with who did it — agent or human — and this is the two-column readout of that split: outcome rate, dollars per instance, minutes to complete. The agent lane runs ~40× cheaper and 4× faster; the human lane still closes a hair more of what it starts. Fed live at build time from anonymized database views (see the dbt leak gate) that never expose a task title, note, or category.
The Happiness Reports
Three reads on happiness and suicide. The paradox: why happy countries like Finland carry high suicide rates (after Gladwell), on a scatter + world map with a World Cup 2026 lens. Over time: a decade stacked against GDP, where the gap widened and a third of countries grew richer yet sadder. And the decline: world suicide rates fell nearly a fifth since 2000 — happiness never noticed.
Nuclear Weapon Inventory
Every nuclear warhead on Earth, year by year since 1945. The stockpile peaked at 64,452 in 1986 and has fallen 85% since — almost all of it the US and Russia dismantling Cold-War arsenals. Flip between total stockpile and the year-over-year buildup/teardown, overlay the arms-control treaties, and isolate any of the nine arsenals on a linked world map. Fed by an FAS/Our World in Data feed that refreshes year to year.
Productivity Has Left Wages in the Dust
For a generation the typical worker’s pay rose right alongside what they produced. Around 1973 the lines split — net productivity is up +298% since 1948, worker pay only +143% — and the wedge between them is income workers generated but didn’t take home. The setup for the obvious next question: will the AI productivity surge flow back to pay, or repeat the pattern? Fed by EPI’s State of Working America data.
How Far CEO Pay Pulled Away
In 1965 a big-company CEO made about 21 times a typical worker; the ratio peaked at 408:1 in 2021 and sits at 280:1 today. Because executive pay is mostly stock, the line swings with the market — toggle the S&P 500 overlay to see it track. The options-realized measure for the 350 largest U.S. firms, fed by EPI’s State of Working America data — then search a company you know for its own ratio, straight from its SEC proxy.
Topology of Music
Every song I’ve logged since 2019, rebuilt from Tableau as a “mountain range” of my top-15 artists. Not just who I played most, but who I stayed loyal to — each artist climbs for every return inside four days and dips when I let them lapse. deadmau5 never stops climbing.
Mormon Pioneer Trek to the Salt Lake Valley
The 56,000 Latter-day Saints who walked 1,300 miles to the Salt Lake Valley, rebuilt from Tableau as one themed dashboard. A young people’s migration (58% under 25), cholera as the trail’s defining killer, a U-shaped mortality curve — and the Company Type filter made real: pick Willie & Martin to watch mortality jump to 16.5%.
Faith and Human Evolution: Mental Gymnastics
Forty-eight religious university students, read back two of their own contradictory survey answers — “Adam & Eve are our universal ancestors” and “humans share an ancestor with apes.” Half saw no conflict at all. Built from a public BYU interview-transcript deposit: the seven moves they use to hold both at once, and a wall of the transcripts verbatim (“we got our latest model, let’s, Adam and Eve let’s go”).
Next on the bench
Every area hands you to the freshest thing next door — never a dead end. The full build log keeps the running pulse, newest first.
Golden Data / Work
The work itself, with the decision it serves
Shipped features and dashboards — each tied to the moment someone has to choose, and what changed once it landed. The proof, not the pitch.
The builds
High School Pathways
Ogden School District’s degree-requirement PDF rebuilt as a living visual roadmap. Parents see credits earned, gaps to close, and the next decision they need to make.
Economic Dashboard
Live macro indicators from FRED — Buffett indicator, yield curve, employment, housing — with a running notebook of what each move means. Refreshed weekdays by a GitHub Action.
Salary Dashboard
Data-role salary panels from ai-jobs.net postings: base salary only, USD, global, with role classification, per-role outlier trim, sample-size gates, and explicit methodology notes.
Browser GIF Maker
A browser-native video-to-GIF converter for short screen recordings: trim, captions, boomerang playback, filters, and target-size compression without sending source files to a server.
Mr. Meseeks
A task inbox that takes whatever you can throw at it — typed notes, voice memos, photos of receipts, forwarded emails, screenshots — and routes each item into the right project with sensible defaults.
Ogden Home Finder
A living catalogue of Ogden-metro housing. A daily Claude task scrapes 2BR rentals, tracks price history and days-on-market, and renders everything on an interactive map and filterable table — with for-sale homes landing next.
Next on the bench
Every area hands you to the freshest thing next door — never a dead end. The full build log keeps the running pulse, newest first.
Golden Data / Writing
Two columns and a build log
Signal for the people deciding what to build; Crafting for the people doing the work. Plus a running log of everything shipped here, newest first.
Read along
Signal
What B2B SaaS shipped, and what it admits — sales ops, ad tech, analytics, BI. What’s working, what’s bolted on, and one feature I’d build this week.
Crafting
Where the senior analytics craft is moving — the skills climbing the premium curve, the tooling rewriting job descriptions, one move worth making before Monday.
The Build Log
A running log of everything shipped here — a dashboard, a tool, a newsletter issue — newest first. The workbench pulse, in one feed.
Next on the bench
Every area hands you to the freshest thing next door — never a dead end. The full build log keeps the running pulse, newest first.
Everything, newest first
Every published thing on the bench in one reverse-chron feed — tools, dashboards, and newsletter issues, mingled. Filter to a kind; deselect to bring the rest back.
- The Week That Had No Weekend In 1929 the Soviet Union tried to abolish the weekend. The nepreryvka split the workforce into five colour groups on a rotating five-day cycle — four-fifths always working, so the factories never stopped, and no universal Sunday to anchor religious life. The staggering fractured families: pick two people’s colours and watch their days off never line up. Traces the calendar from the five-day week to the six-day shestidnevka to the seven-day week’s return in 1940 — and debunks the two myths the story usually carries.
- When Sweden Vacations Together Terry Hartig tracked how many antidepressants Swedish pharmacists dispensed, month by month, for twelve years. The more workers were on vacation at the same time, the fewer prescriptions went out that month — and the effect reached retirees too, who had no job to break from. Evidence that rest is contagious. Rebuilt from the paper’s published ARIMA coefficients: an exact dose-response curve, the drop group-by-group, and a reconstruction of the raw seasonal series.
- The Agent-vs-Human Scorecard The workbench measured on itself. Every task I complete is tagged with who did it — agent or human — and this is the two-column readout of that split: outcome rate, dollars per instance, minutes to complete. The agent lane runs ~40× cheaper and 4× faster; the human lane still closes a hair more of what it starts. Fed live at build time from anonymized database views (see the dbt leak gate) that never expose a task title, note, or category.
- The SDR job got sold in pieces. HubSpot acquired Warmly on June 30, Salesforce paid $3.6 billion for Fin on June 15, Salesforce's Summer '26 shipped Momentum and a Customer Engagement Agent on June 15, and 6sense turned engaged-account lists into named CRM-ready contacts on June 22 — four moves this fortnight saying the sales rep's day stopped being the unit the software vendor priced against.
- Tool Pipeline Coverage Planner Quota, closed-won, open pipeline, and win rate in — coverage ratio, projected finish, and the pipeline you still have to build (in deals, per week) out. The quarter math, without the spreadsheet.
- Tool Sales Capacity Planner Will the team you have hit the number you signed up for? Reps, ramp, attainment, and attrition in — effective selling capacity, the gap to plan, and what it takes to close it.
- Tool Comp Plan Payout Curve A comp plan is a curve, not a paragraph. OTE, pay mix, threshold, accelerator, and cap in — the whole plan drawn live, with total cash at attainment and what the next point is worth.
- Tool SaaS Metrics Scorecard The five numbers a revenue leader gets asked for first — NRR, GRR, magic number, CAC payback, Rule of 40 — computed from raw inputs and scored against public benchmarks.
- Oracle's 10-K Said What the Press Releases Didn't. Oracle's fiscal 2026 10-K named AI as the direct cause of 21,000 layoffs this week, while PwC's 2026 AI Jobs Barometer confirmed a 62% wage premium for AI-skilled roles — together, two data points that answer the career question most senior analytics ICs have been putting off.
- The BI Brief Changed in June. The JD Hasn't. Microsoft Build 2026 shipped Agent Skills for Power BI — AI that writes reports from screenshots — and the $30K–$65K Fabric governance premium now has a visible job description gap behind it.
- Productivity Has Left Wages in the Dust For a generation the typical worker’s pay rose right alongside what they produced. Around 1973 the lines split — net productivity is up +298% since 1948, worker pay only +143% — and the wedge between them is income workers generated but didn’t take home. The setup for the obvious next question: will the AI productivity surge flow back to pay, or repeat the pattern? Fed by EPI’s State of Working America data.
- How Far CEO Pay Pulled Away In 1965 a big-company CEO made about 21 times a typical worker; the ratio peaked at 408:1 in 2021 and sits at 280:1 today. Because executive pay is mostly stock, the line swings with the market — toggle the S&P 500 overlay to see it track. The options-realized measure for the 350 largest U.S. firms, fed by EPI’s State of Working America data — then search a company you know for its own ratio, straight from its SEC proxy.
- The dashboard wrote itself. Microsoft open-sourced Fabric Skills for Claude and GitHub Copilot through the June Fabric Updates Blog, Databricks made Genie One GA at Data + AI Summit on June 16 with Unity Catalog Metrics turned into governed objects the agent drafts against, ThoughtSpot integrated Spotter with Snowflake Cortex AI and Semantic Views at Snowflake Summit 26 on June 2, and Sigma Agents went Public Beta on June 12 with MCP tool support — four BI vendors this fortnight stopped shipping the dashboard the analyst clicked and started shipping the agent that authors the model behind it.
- Brief PE portfolio — Applied AI Engineer (Forward-Deployed) The stretch goal: a forward-deployed AI engineer embedded across a PE portfolio. Honest that full-stack at staff depth is the reach — but the AI-native half (Claude Code, MCP servers, custom skills, context engineering, tool benchmarking, enablement) is my daily practice, and this whole site is the proof. The spine is reuse: build once, redeploy across the portfolio.
- Nuclear Weapon Inventory Every nuclear warhead on Earth, year by year since 1945. The stockpile peaked at 64,452 in 1986 and has fallen 85% since — almost all of it the US and Russia dismantling Cold-War arsenals. Flip between total stockpile and the year-over-year buildup/teardown, overlay the arms-control treaties, and isolate any of the nine arsenals on a linked world map. Fed by an FAS/Our World in Data feed that refreshes year to year.
- Brief Wealth-tech CRM — Sr RevOps Engineer (GTM Systems) The off-thesis one: a RevOps / GTM-systems role, not an analytics seat. Reframed around the part that’s hard to hire for — a trustworthy lead-to-revenue funnel with data quality and AI-native workflows on top — and honest about where Salesforce/CPQ admin depth is the ramp. The same full-funnel engine, pointed at a GTM stack.
- Every Staff Analytics JD Lists dbt. Here's What It Actually Does — and Why It's the Trust Layer. A field guide to the trust layer underneath every modern data stack — and why the job descriptions never explain it.
- Topology of Music Every song I’ve logged since 2019, rebuilt from Tableau as a “mountain range” of my top-15 artists. Not just who I played most, but who I stayed loyal to — each artist climbs for every return inside four days and dips when I let them lapse. deadmau5 never stops climbing.
- Mormon Pioneer Trek to the Salt Lake Valley The 56,000 Latter-day Saints who walked 1,300 miles to the Salt Lake Valley, rebuilt from Tableau as one themed dashboard. A young people’s migration (58% under 25), cholera as the trail’s defining killer, a U-shaped mortality curve — and the Company Type filter made real: pick Willie & Martin to watch mortality jump to 16.5%.
- Faith and Human Evolution: Mental Gymnastics Forty-eight religious university students, read back two of their own contradictory survey answers — “Adam & Eve are our universal ancestors” and “humans share an ancestor with apes.” Half saw no conflict at all. Built from a public BYU interview-transcript deposit: the seven moves they use to hold both at once, and a wall of the transcripts verbatim (“we got our latest model, let’s, Adam and Eve let’s go”).
- Brief Start here — one engine, many roles The through-line behind the whole portfolio: one analytical engine — full-funnel, LTV, experimentation, exec scorecards, Voice-of-Customer — reskinned across competitor spotlights, JD case studies, and AI-enabled work.
- Brief Synchrony — VP, Co-Brand & Lifecycle Analytics A JD case study: the mandate reframed, a 90-day plan, a co-brand cardholder lifecycle funnel, and a requirement→proof map — the same lifecycle-analytics engine I built for Acima, pointed at a co-brand card book.
- Brief Affirm — Director, Analytics (Strategic Insights) A JD case study for Affirm’s Strategic Insights role — the BNPL consumer lifecycle and the Card-attach growth lever, with proof that pairs to my full Affirm competitor spotlight.
- Brief Concora Credit — VP, Risk (Fraud Strategy & Analytics) A JD case study for a subprime credit-card risk leader — the decisioning funnel (first-payment default, charge-offs, the approval/loss frontier), mapped to the Acima risk model I built. The closest fit in the set to that role’s actual day.
- Brief Chime — Director, Product Analytics A JD case study for Chime’s Product Analytics role — the neobank member lifecycle, the direct-deposit activation unlock, and an experimentation-first 90-day plan, with proof mapped to the Dave spotlight.
- Brief Airbnb — Staff, Payments Advanced Analytics A JD case study for Airbnb’s Payments analytics role — the payment funnel, an authorization-rate causal experiment, and the same experimentation + exec-scorecard engine, pointed at money movement.
- Brief Headspace — Director, AI Enablement A different kind of case study: this portfolio IS the proof. A dozen-plus sourced, cited analyses shipped via an AI research→build operating model I designed — discovery→pilot→scale, with responsible-AI guardrails on every page.
- Brief Target — Director, Quantitative UX Research & AI Enablement A JD case study for Target’s Quantitative UX Research role — behavior-vs-voice measurement and a VoC research signal, mapped to my CX Research & Market Intelligence brief and AI-scaled research workflows.
- Brief Best Buy — Director, Customer Insights & Integration A JD case study for Best Buy’s Customer Insights role — the retail customer lifecycle and the channel-integration payoff, mapped to the lifecycle-analytics engine.
- Brief Citizens — Head of Decisioning Analytics & Optimization A JD case study for Citizens’ decisioning role — the portfolio decision funnel optimized end-to-end against profitability, mapped to the decision-optimization engine.
- Brief Competitor Spotlight: Progressive Leasing A deep-dive on Progressive Leasing / PROG Holdings (NYSE: PRG) — Acima’s purest pure-play mirror, the virtual-LTO rival Acima overtook on GMV in FY2025. Includes the $175M FTC settlement. Public data, every figure cited.
- Brief Competitor Spotlight: Dave A deep-dive on Dave (NASDAQ: DAVE) — Brigit’s most direct competitor, already 2–3× its size, GAAP-profitable, with a banking flywheel Brigit lacks. Public data, every figure cited.
- Tool · experimental Wavelength Swipe on what strangers actually wonder about — the half-baked theories and 2am rabbit holes, not the highlight reel. On a match, the AI drafts the intro, then gets out of the way. A friend’s idea, shipped as a prototype to find out if it holds up.
- Brief Upbound — Customer Performance Analytics Inside Acima’s funnel: an interactive unit-economics & LTV model calibrated to the filed FY2025 results, a leakage diagnostic, an experimentation readout, and the SQL underneath. Public data only.
- Brief Upbound — Competitive & Market Intelligence An original market-intelligence briefing on Upbound Group (Acima, Rent-A-Center, Brigit) and the accessible-finance arena — lease-to-own vs BNPL vs cash advance. Every figure sourced and dated.
- Brief Competitor Spotlight: Affirm A deep-dive on Affirm (NASDAQ: AFRM) — the no-late-fee, simple-interest, prime-leaning BNPL that sets the transparency benchmark high-take-rate lease-to-own is judged against. Public data, every figure cited.
- Brief Competitor Spotlight: Sezzle A deep-dive on Sezzle (NASDAQ: SEZL) — the subprime-leaning, super-app-building BNPL on a collision course with Acima and Brigit. Trajectory, business model, head-to-head, and implications. Public data, every figure cited.
- The Happiness Reports Three reads on happiness and suicide. The paradox: why happy countries like Finland carry high suicide rates (after Gladwell), on a scatter + world map with a World Cup 2026 lens. Over time: a decade stacked against GDP, where the gap widened and a third of countries grew richer yet sadder. And the decline: world suicide rates fell nearly a fifth since 2000 — happiness never noticed.
- The platform shipped the badge. Four platform vendors stopped pitching the agent this fortnight and started shipping the badge it has to wear.
- The AI Feature Shipped. The PAM Interview Now Tests Whether You Can Measure It. Q2 is the measure quarter. Most social platforms shipped AI features in Q1 — personalized feeds, optimized ad delivery, AI-assisted tools — without finalizing how they'd be evaluated.
- The agent became a graph. Salesforce ships Multi-Agent Orchestration GA on June 15, ServiceNow Autonomous CRM names production volumes, Anthropic Claude Managed Agents goes multi-agent with Netflix in production, and a reliability paper measures the gap — four moves in one fortnight saying the AI feature stopped being a single LLM call.
- The Analytics Interview Changed This Month. Most Prep Is Still for Last Month. The dbt Developer Agent shipped this month, Meta and Shopify now allow AI in technical interviews, and Ravio's 2026 comp data documented a 12% AI/ML IC premium alongside a 73% collapse in entry-level analytics hiring. The interview changed. Most prep guides haven't.
- Tool Ogden Home Finder A living catalogue of Ogden-metro housing — tracked daily with price history, days-on-market, and an interactive map. Rent today, for-sale next. Updated by a Claude scheduled task.
- The press release became a split test. Pinterest, Atlassian, Reddit, Anthropic, and CrowdStrike each printed an AI feature alongside a labeled lift number this fortnight — the same disclosure shape, written by five vendors who would not name each other.
- The Restructuring Wave Is Running Two Operations. Most Résumés Are Only Reading One. The May 2026 AI restructuring wave is cutting analytics roles at the mid-level and opening them at the senior IC tier simultaneously — and reading both signals off the same headlines is the week's first career move.
- Tool Browser GIF Maker Convert short screen recordings into platform-sized GIFs with trim, captions, boomerang playback, filters, and client-side ffmpeg.
- Signal — Week of May 31, 2026: The audit log became the moat. Salesforce printed Agentforce at $1.2B ARR, Snowflake bought Natoma, and Microsoft made Agent 365 mandatory at five agents — three vendors quietly naming the same moat: identity and audit at the tool-call level.
- Tool AI Feature Cost Estimator Size the monthly bill for an LLM feature before you build it. Requests, tokens, and rates in — cost per request, monthly, and annual out.
- Tool Eval Set Sizer How many golden examples do you actually need? Pick a target accuracy, a margin of error, and a confidence level — get the sample size.
- Tool Prose Voice Linter Paste a draft. It flags the banned words, exclamation points, and passive voice, then checks the short-declarative rhythm — the exact house rules behind Signal and Crafting.
- Tool A/B Test Calculator Drop in visitors and conversions for two variants to see lift, a p-value, and whether the result is real. Plus a planner for how many you need before you start.
- Analytics Leadership Has a Build Brief and a Scale Brief. They're Not the Same Interview. The analytics leadership pool is about to get bigger. Meta's notice periods clear in mid-June, and most of that clearance lands at the Director and Head of Analytics tier.
- The agent moved inside the suite. Anthropic shipped Claude inside Microsoft Office. SAP turned 200 workflows into agents. The standalone AI tab is being demoted; the integration is taking the seat.
- The Senior Analyst Brief Has Split. Most Résumés Address the Half That Isn't Hiring. The Senior / Staff Data Analyst title is running two separate job briefs right now. The product analytics version has been the default. The advertiser measurement version is the active hire.
- AI revenue is becoming a line item. Salesforce is about to break out Agentforce ARR as its own segment. Every competitor's CFO is drafting the same slide. The renewal sheet just grew a column.
- Social Platform RevOps Runs Two Books. Most Candidates Only Know One. Meta cleared the supply side. Snap, Pinterest, and Reddit are the demand side — and they're building something the Meta playbook doesn't cover.
- The dashboard stopped being the product. Four BI vendors moved the same direction last week. The semantic layer is the new product surface. The dashboard is the fallback.
- The Director Brief Has a New Question. Most Résumés Are Still Answering the Old One. Three weeks out from Snowflake Summit. The Director interview shifted from 'tell me about your stack' to 'tell me about a decision you changed.'
- Product Analytics Is the Q2 Hire. Here's What the Brief Now Requires. The companies that named AI revenue in Q1 now have a Q2 problem: proving it. That proof is a hiring event.
- The Cuts Are Priced In. The Build-Out Isn't. Meta's 8,000-person reduction is underway. The Q1 ad-platform prints sorted the sales-ops job market into two columns.
Proof, by the numbers
Contact
Two ways to use this place. Read the writing and follow the work — or, if you've got a data or AI problem worth chewing on, tell me about it. I take on the occasional outside project when the fit's right, and I read every note that comes in.