Blog on Data Foundry. — Independent Data & AI Consultant

Day Trading with People's Lives

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jack Dorsey laid off more than 4,000 people at Block yesterday — roughly 40% of the company — announced with Q4 earnings, sparking a 24% stock jump. The layoffs were framed as an “intelligence-native” transformation where smaller teams using AI tools would accomplish more.

The hiring binge and the crypto bet

Between late 2019 and 2022, Block tripled headcount from 3,900 to 12,500 during an era of cheap money and crypto enthusiasm. The stock peaked above $250 in mid-2021 but now trades around $67 — a 75% decline. Bitcoin ecosystem revenue fell nearly 20% year-on-year in Q4 2025, undermining one of Block’s three revenue pillars despite Dorsey’s vocal bitcoin maximalism.

Is Your Organisation Ready for AI? A Practical Framework

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most organisations I work with are eager to adopt AI — but few have stopped to ask whether their data foundations are ready to support it. The result is wasted investment, stalled projects, and growing scepticism about whether AI can deliver for their business.

The Five Pillars of Data Readiness

After working with over 40 organisations across industries, I’ve found that data readiness comes down to five pillars:

1. Data Quality

AI is only as good as the data it learns from. If your data is incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated, no amount of model sophistication will save you. Start by auditing your core data assets: customer records, transaction data, operational metrics.

Your CTO and CDO Are Not What You Think They Are

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the uncomfortable bit: the CTO and Chief Data Officer roles are not the top of the engineering and data career ladders. They’re something else entirely. And if you treat them as promotions, you’re going to have a bad time.

I know, I know. You’ve been a senior engineer for years. You’ve led teams, shipped products, wrestled with legacy systems at 3am. Surely the next step is CTO? And for the data folks — you’ve built pipelines, wrangled stakeholders, delivered dashboards that actually get used (rare, I know). CDO must be the finish line, right?

Imagine — Data Centres, but in Space!

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You can’t have not seen the latest Silicon Valley obsession — “hey guys, these data centres are getting awfully big and energy hungry down here on Earth, what if we were to build them in space instead?” And everyone who’s anyone is talking about it. Sundar Pichai has Google Research burning cycles on looking into it. The World Economic Forum recently published a piece on it too, putting all of the complexity at the end — not dishonest, but perhaps putting hype before focus.

Advice for Startups

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I decided I would share something short and sweet this week: a list of things that I think startups should know. I have been compiling this for a few months. Creating a successful startup is always a bit like a game of Frogger — you have to find a path through the traffic whilst still keeping an eye open for the trucks.

I’m not trying to say I have all the answers here, and in the wise words of Baz Luhrmann:

AI for Boards

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been in a lot of conversations with CEOs and board members lately where the topic naturally turns to AI, and I’ve noticed something interesting: the questions being asked often reveal more about the questioner’s assumptions than they do about the technology itself. There’s a tendency to treat AI as though it were traditional software: deterministic, reliable, and fundamentally understandable. This is a category error, and it’s one that could prove expensive.

When Agents Fail: Compounding Errors in Organisational Systems

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a dirty little secret about multi-step agentic systems that nobody particularly wants to talk about. It’s not that they fail - of course they fail, everything fails - it’s that they fail in ways that compound mercilessly, and that this compounding is a feature of the mathematics, not a bug in the implementation. You cannot engineer your way out of it. You can only manage it.

The maths of sequential failure

Let’s start with something deceptively simple. Imagine you have a five-step process, and each step has a 95% success rate. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? 95% is an A grade. It’s the kind of number you’d be happy to show a stakeholder.

The Tower and the (public) Square

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s take a look at the world from a social point of view for this week. In general, human organisation proceeds in two roughly equi-temporal phases, which are very different in terms of power structures and politics. These phases are already playing out in the new AI frontier, and so past developments might help guide our thinking as to where we go from here.

The Square and the Tower

Historian Niall Ferguson wrote a well thought-out book on this topic, in which he posits that human power structures can be understood to adopt two different phases, each of which is unstable under the right circumstances to the other. We can roughly speaking understand these as:

Pareto Frontiers

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For this week’s ramble, I’d like to take you on a tour of how cycles tend to begin and end for the development of new scaling technologies, and why I think things might be different for AI. In particular, I’d like to dig into the VC-powered business model behind our current funding structures for big AI companies like OpenAI, and smaller ones that are using these underlying technologies, and how I foresee things going in the next 12-18 months. I’ll also take a brief look at some important canaries which might suggest if you have a lot of money invested in this technology, it might be a good idea to deleverage a bit!