Author Archives: Simeon Simeonov

About Simeon Simeonov

I'm an entrepreneur, hacker, angel investor and reformed VC. I am currently Founder & CTO of Swoop, a search advertising platform. Through FastIgnite I invest in and work with a few great startups to get more done with less. Learn more, follow @simeons on Twitter and connect with me on LinkedIn.

Apache Spark native functions

Posted on November 14, 2018

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 →

Posted in Big data | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Unicorn pressures and startup failures

Posted on April 26, 2016

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 →

Posted in angel investing, Anti-pattern, startups, VC, Venture Capital | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Advertising marketplace design

Posted on October 13, 2015

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 →

Posted in Advertising, Digital Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Angel investing strategies

Posted on July 7, 2014

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

Posted on January 21, 2014

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 →

Posted in Code | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

My most favorite math proof ever

Posted on November 25, 2013

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

Posted on May 28, 2013

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

Posted on May 16, 2013

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 →

Posted in Google | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Anatomy of an online ad

Posted on April 17, 2013

I’ve been asked to explain how online ads are delivered many times and every time I’m surprised by the complexity of covering even the most basic elements of how ads appear on Web pages. Since Wikipedia’s article on ad serving … Continue reading →

Posted in Advertising, Swoop | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Startup anti-pattern: platform risk

Posted on March 5, 2013

One of the fastest ways for a startup to grow has always been to ride on the shoulders of a successful platform: from Microsoft/OSS in software to AWS in cloud computing to iOS/Android in mobile to Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest in social to … Continue reading →

Posted in Anti-pattern, startups | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments