[Podcast] The Nomics Daily Update - Audio Journal of CEO Clay Collins

This post was last updated on September 3rd, 2019 at 03:09 pm

There’s a concept in cognitive psychology called theory of mind, and theory of mind is the ability for someone to predict what someone else might be thinking in a given scenario. Young children have pretty horrific theory of mind. They’re unable in most cases, you know, when kids are pretty young, to guess what a third party might be thinking [00:00:30] in a given scenario. They’re unable to figure out or estimate what someone else might be thinking.

So an experiment that’s done with very young children to figure out if they have developed theory of mind is a child who is being tested for theory of mind abilities might see a stuffed animal, and [00:01:00] the experiment or the person that’s running this experiment would show the child that a stuffed animal sees a piece of candy. Then the researcher would cover up the eyes of the stuffed animal and put the candy in his or her pocket and then lift up the blindfold or whatever that’s on the eyes of the stuffed [00:01:30] animal, and then ask the child who’s seen all of this where the stuffed animal thinks the piece of candy is. And in most instances the child will tell the researcher that the stuffed animal thinks the piece of candy is in the researcher’s pocket because the child ascribes to the stuffed animal what the child knows about where the candy is, even though during this experiment it was very evident [00:02:00] that the stuffed animal’s eyes were covered when the piece of candy was placed in the experimenter’s pocket.

And theory of mind is something that is commonly known to differentiate between people with and without autism. So people with autism are known for not doing especially well on theory of mind tests, but theory of mind [00:02:30] isn’t just something that people with autism score poorly on. I’ve found through the years that most people who are looking to engage in business relationships don’t have very good theory of mind at all. They don’t spend much time trying to figure out what the person on the other end of a deal might be thinking, what a customer might be thinking, what problems [00:03:00] they’d be struggling with.

On a very, very small scale, it looks like salespeople who reach out to someone and try to set an appointment not using the time zone of the person that they’re looking to set an appointment with. So let’s say I’m in Chicago and I’m communicating with a salesperson in California, someone with highly [00:03:30] developed theory of mind, in my opinion, would give me times in my time zone, right, would relate to me on my own terms. They would also do some background and try and get a sense for what my pain points might be.

I encounter this lack of theory of mind or lack of consideration of theory of mind all the time when people pitch [00:04:00] me on coming onto the Flippening podcast, right, our popular podcast that often gets over 30,000 downloads an episode. People will pitch me on coming onto that podcast. They’ll often asked to come on and talk about the same topic that someone else just spoke about. They won’t say anything about how they’ll promote the episode. They won’t say anything about sponsoring [00:04:30]

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Website: https://nomics.com

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Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

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This post was last updated on April 1st, 2020 at 01:49 pm

Something I’ve been really curious about for a long time are the methods of Wim Hof. Wim Hof is a Dutch extreme athlete and a really likable guy. I’ve seen him interviewed several times and he doesn’t have the typical stunt devil persona. He really seems to be coming from a great place and he is really into [00:00:30] breath and breathing and how that lets you go deeper into yourself. He’s set a bunch of really, really remarkable world records.

For example, he holds the record for swimming the longest under ice without any wetsuit or anything else on, just wearing a pair of shorts. He at one time held the record for the fastest half-marathon barefoot [00:01:00] on ice and snow. He frequently swims in frozen water. He holds the record for the longest time in direct full-body contact with ice, which is pretty nuts. He’s climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro wearing only shorts.

But his program, which I’m going through and enjoying, I’m only one week into this, [00:01:30] his program is called The Wim Hof Method and it’s a couple hundred bucks. It’s really about breathing. It’s almost a meditation and yoga course. He claims that this comes with a bunch of health benefits. I remember seeing a documentary about him where folks at a hospital in a very controlled environment ejected him with, I believe, a virus and he was able to fight it off [00:02:00] by breathing in a certain way, keep his temperature down, and it was a virus that could have brought a lot of harm to him unmedicated, but he beat it without medication.

But I’m going through this because of the benefits that it claims, better sleep, better energy, better mood, and [00:02:30] overall better mindfulness. The practice really takes, I don’t know, maybe 20 minutes a day of breathing and taking cold showers. I don’t know, I’m only a week in, or I have one week down. It might escalate quite a bit, but it’s a lot of fun. I’m enjoying it.

I have already noticed that I am sleeping better, that I do have more energy throughout the day, that my mood is [00:03:00] generally better. I’m just generally happier. Maybe it’s all this forced hyperventilation or something. But yeah, it’s a good thing. This entry is definitely more on the journal side of the kind of topics that are covered by this podcast, but yeah, this is my personal audio journal. I think that a startup can only grow at the rate that a founder [00:03:30] is growing, so I try and do things like this to expand myself. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Maybe I’ll report back after I’m done with the 10-week course.

But again, it’s proving to be really enjoyable and it’s amazing how good I feel after, you know, cold exposure, after taking a long cold shower. Alright, take care. Bye.

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

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Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nomics/support

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while is offer you the opportunity to post thoughts and tips and experiences here on the Nomics Update. We’ve got a nice audience kind of aggregated around what we’re doing. Each episode will get a few thousand downloads, and generally I think the people that listen are interested in a range of topics. [00:00:30] Everything from growing startups to crypto to personal development, so if you have a tip that you want to share on the Nomics Update, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll take that tip from you. I’ll introduce you and your company if you want, say a little bit about how folks can find you on Twitter, and then I’ll roll the tip from you. 

So to send me a tip that you’d like to share with the audience, or an update or some thoughts [00:01:00] in general, you can go to claytelegram.com and just leave me an audio message there on claytelegram.com. Telegram has a really great asynchronous voice feature where you can leave a voice message. So just leave me a voice message at that location, and if I like it and I think it would be useful to the broader community that listens to this podcast, then I will [00:01:30] absolutely share it. All right. Take care. Bye.

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

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Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nomics/support

At Nomics, one of the things we don’t talk about very often but something that’s been really popular among our enterprise customers are our consultative or concierge data services. It’s something that’s a lot of fun because it allows us to partner at a deeper level with institutional investors, family offices, hedge funds, private investment offices, prop [00:00:30] shops, et cetera. It allows us to get to know a lot more about how these organizations use data, how they think about data, and how data is integrated with their trading strategy. Whether it’s active strategy, and maybe they’re running a real time trading environment or it’s more of a passive strategy and they’re looking for analysis on historical data sets for the purpose of [00:01:00] back testing and things like that.

But our concierge data services are really for organizations that make heavy use of crypto asset data. They either don’t have an in-house development staff that can build out arrays of machines or the infrastructure necessary to run [00:01:30] pretty complex trading operations. That’s fine. There’s a lot of really brilliant investors and big data people at these places that are really great at what they do but they don’t necessarily have a background in software development or they’re too busy making money for their fun to set up some of this infrastructure at least to take the first pass [00:02:00] at some of this infrastructure.

They either don’t have the in-house engineering resources or the people that could do this in the organization are too busy executing against strategies that they know work, and that they know make money and they come to us because they have a hypothesis around some things that might work, and they want to test a strategy. In most cases [00:02:30] when these folks come to us to have custom work done, to have concierge data services done or created, we’re able to charge them a lot less than it would cost them to build it themselves from scratch even paying existing employees, or to farm this out because we’re working with data and cryptocurrency data all day long, really. So, we have a lot [00:03:00] of the building blocks in place already to do this. We’re usually not starting from scratch, we’re usually not testing different ways to store this data or to ingest new data sources that they might need. We have a lot of these ingestion pipelines already in place if they need a strategy that scales across multiple machines, we have that infrastructure in place already.

I should note that, [00:03:30] to get started, it’s usually again, less money than hiring someone to do this from scratch. But these services do start at 30 grand, for anyone I think, who has a fund of the size that would need these services, this usually isn’t a problem at all, especially if you’re a $20 million plus fund and [00:04:00] you’re winning, and you have a hypothesis of what might work. This is really a drop in the bucket and certainly below market, well below market.

In fact, often we’re able to charge sometimes, less than other firms might charge for just out of the box products that are already created. A little bit about [00:04:30]

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

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Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nomics/support

I think founders for the most part seem to, at least speaking for myself here, I think founders go through roughly a nine month cycle of founder failure that starts up, gets going, and then, repeats itself over, and over, and over again. The cycle’s pretty simple. I think most founders when they start a company, if they’re experienced, and they know what they’re doing, [00:00:30] they start off doing a pretty good job. They’ve thought a lot about a given problem, and what they’re looking to do when they first start a business, and they spend about three months being pretty good at their job. They know what their responsibilities are, what their duties are.

They’ve thought a lot about what needs to be done, and what order it needs to be done in, and all of that. After this first initial three months of being pretty good at [00:01:00] their job, if they’re having any kind of success, there’s getting, traction is developing, then usually the job changes. In any kind of fast evolving situation, a situation with a lot of momentum behind it, I think after the first three months the job generally changes, and often a founder, and this applies to many people in startups. I think anyone who’s at an early [00:01:30] stage company might, after the first three months of having a general sense of what needs to be done.

After those first three months they realize that the job has changed, and often they don’t know how it’s changed. They just know that the things that they were doing initially weren’t working, so after the first three months of doing a pretty good job at their job, I think they spend another three months learning how their job has changed, [00:02:00] and usually they learn why, they learn that their job is changing, and how their job is changing, because old things aren’t working anymore. They start failing. Maybe at first they were doing a lot of meetings, but then they realized they need to start implementing, and they can’t be on all the meetings that they were being … That they were on before, and execute like they need to execute now that they have a sense of what needs to be done.

The second three months of the cycle is around learning how [00:02:30] the job has changed, and the nature of the differences that have emerged, and then, I think the last three months of this nine month cycle of founder failure is learning the new job, and what it entails, and what needs to be done to be successful in the new job, so creating the circumstances to be successful again, and then, [00:03:00] once they’ve learned what their new job is, the cycle starts all over again. To summarize, I think the three months cycle of founder failure, or the three months cycle of founder success, I guess that’s a little bit more optimistic is that there’s three months at being okay at your job, three months learning that your job has changed, three months learning the new job, and then, of course starting all over, being okay at your job again once you’ve learned what the new job is.

[00:03:30] I’m certainly right now in the phase where I’m learning my new job. I think, I was really, I think, I was doing a really great job for a while, then hired more people, got more customers, got a lot more traction to the website, and realized that things have started to change. The things that worked when there wasn’t as much traction in the business, [00:04:00]

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

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Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nomics/support