Author Archives: Simeon Simeonov

About Simeon Simeonov

Entrepreneur. Investor. Trusted advisor.

Startup anti-pattern: elephant hunting

As part of the continued series on startup anti-patterns, we look at elephant hunting: chasing big customers/deals. Continue reading

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More startup anti-patterns

It’s been a decade since I first assembled the list of startup anti-patterns, the repeatable ways startups waste time and money. The project has always been near and dear to my heart, as I often find myself directing entrepreneurs to … Continue reading

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Apache Spark native functions

There are many ways to extend Apache Spark and one of the easiest is with functions that manipulate one of more columns in a DataFrame. When considering different Spark function types, it is important to not ignore the full set … Continue reading

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Unicorn pressures and startup failures

The startup anti-patterns section of my blog summarizes the repeatable ways startups waste time & money and, often, fail. Learning from startup failure is valuable because there are many more examples of failures that successes. (Anti-)Patterns become more noticeable and … Continue reading

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Advertising marketplace design

In the past decade several Nobel prizes in Economics have been awarded in the broader area of market (mechanism/auction/game) design. This is not surprising as the combination of Internet connectivity and ample computing resources are causing automated markets to pop … Continue reading

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Angel investing strategies

My friend Jerry Neumann wrote a great post on angel investing strategies, dissecting truth and myth about different betting strategies and sharing his own approach. The question of luck came up and a commenter linked to my work on data-driven patterns of successful … Continue reading

Posted in angel investing, VC, Venture Capital | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

JSON and JSONlines from the command line

At Swoop we have many terabytes of JSON-like data in MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch, HDFS/Hadoop and even Amazon Redshift. While the internal representations are typically not JSON but BSON, MsgPack or native encodings, when it comes time to move large amounts … Continue reading

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My most favorite math proof ever

Math is beautiful and, sometimes, math becomes even more beautiful with the help of a bit of computer science. My favorite proof of all time combines the two in just such a way. Goal: prove that the cardinality of the … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Monitoring Redis with MONITOR and WireShark

At Swoop we use Redis extensively for caching, message processing and analytics. The Redis documentation can be pithy at times and recently I found myself wanting to look in more depth at the Redis wire protocol. Getting everything set up … Continue reading

Posted in Software Development | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Google and the ecosystem test

I am roaming the halls of Google I/O 2013 and wondering whether Google’s platform passes the ecosystem test. … no platform has become hugely successful without a corresponding ecosystem of vendors building significant businesses on top of the platform. Typically, … Continue reading

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