Tony Tran's presentation at Intriguing Ideas in Data Science event, November 18, 2015

1. Making Money with Data
$cience
Tony Tran

2. About me
● Spent time doing Data Engineering in Ad-Tech
● Currently consulting
● Organizer of SF Bay Area Machine Learning meetup group:
○ www.meetup.com/SF-Bayarea-Machine-Learning
○ Met A LOT of interesting people working on interesting things
● Interested in creative ways people make money.

3. This Talk:
● about real Data Scientists who have found creative ways to make money
that doesn’t involve being a full time employee.
● Some stories/names have been modified for privacy reasons.

4. Quick Survey: how many people here ...
● Have a fulltime job?
● Have external activities that bring in extra income?
○ pet projects
○ passive income
○ freelancing on the side
● Want to make extra $$$?

5. Story 1: Frankie

6. Story 1: Frankie the Teacher

7. Story 1: Frankie the Teacher
● Summary
○ Left full-time job as a developer.
○ Started an after school program teaching kids how to code.
○ Income dependent on number of children enrolled.
○ Time investment includes: teaching the course, preparing material, grading assignments,
marketing classes.

8. Story 2: Jamie

9. Story 2: Jamie the workshop-aholic

10. Story 2: Jamie the workshop-aholic
● Summary
○ Had a full-time day job, but periodically taught workshops during evenings and weekends
at places such as General Assembly, Galvanize University, etc.
○ Income dependent on number of students enrolled.
○ Time investment:
■ teaching the course
■ preparing material
○ Benefits:
■ No grading required.
■ Marketing and venue taken care of by academies, but they take a percentage of
revenue.

11. Story 3: Ricky

12. Story 3: Ricky the Udemy instructor

13. Story 3: Ricky the Udemy instructor
● Summary
○ Started off with in person workshops.
○ Decided to recorded the content from workshops and posted lectures online (Udemy.com)
○ Time investment:
■ creating content
■ recording and editing course material (Udemy may be picky with sound and content
quality).
○ Benefits:
■ Write once and collect money (hopefully)! #passiveincome
■ Udemy takes care of “Marketing”

14. How you can replicate their results
1. Brain storm topics that you can teach
a. Examples: “Intro to Javascript”, “Intro to Python”, “Data Science for Designers
b. See what courses are popular by checking past event listings.
2. Reach out to Bootcamps/Academies regarding workshops:
a. General Assembly
b. Galvanize University
3. Record lessons and post to Udemy

15. Story 4: $herm

16. Story 4: Sherm the shirt hustler

17. Story 4: Sherm the shirt hustler
● Summary
○ Really liked t-shirts!
○ Created a t-shirt brand.
○ Used data science to develop twitter/instagram user engagement strategy.
○ Built software to automate user engagement and user growth for t-shirt business.
○ Licensed software and marketing service to clients.

18. How to replicate:
● Tooling:
○ Scrapper
○ Numerical/Scientific analysis
○ Twitter and instagram client library
● Come up with a bunch of user behavior models and test!
○ collect data
○ test models
○ automate strategies that work
● T-shirt validation:
○ https://teespring.com/

19. Story 5: Dan

20. Story 5: Dan the day trader

21. Story 5: Dan the day trader
● Summary
○ Has a fulltime job.
○ Had some money to play around with.
○ Came up with some trading strategies.
■ back-tested strategies
■ coded up execution engine
○ Making money$$$

22. How to replicate:
● Algorithmic Trading:
○ Check out Quantopian and Quantiacs
■ Has great introductory tutorials on algorithmic trading
■ If you write your code in Quantopian’s environment, you can run your strategy on
interactive-brokers. In other words, you won’t need to develop your own execution
engine.
○ Check out Computational Investing on Coursera
● Brokerage with $0 trade fees (https://www.robinhood.com/)
● Podcast: Chat with traders
● Social Media:
○ Twitter
○ Stocktwits

23. Summary:
● A LOT of ways people are making money
○ Mentioned: teaching, trading, monetizing software
○ Other ways: recruiting, writing books, blogging, referral sites, etc...
● Don’t wait until tomorrow, you can start today.

24. Keep in touch:
Let me know about:
● Stuff you are working on.
● Crazy ideas you have.
● If you want to know more about anything we’ve discussed today.
----------
Twitter: @quicksorter
Email: tony [at] sfbayml.com

25. Question/Challenge: How would you go about
making $100 by next week?
To hear about more stories/events ⇒
http://bit.ly/datamoney