This page contains every episode of my weekly newsletter released so far in chronological order.
Is 11,385 words too many? Click here
It's been over three months since I resigned from what most people would consider a top tier software engineering job. High pay, difficult problems, and truly intelligent colleagues to learn from and work with. I'm now completely independent (read unemployed) and just moved to Aix en Provence (France) after 29 years in the UK.
This first episode of my probably weekly newsletter will set the scene for how we got here, provide some context behind decisions I'm making as I pursue a new life as an independent engineer/founder, and give a flavour of what to expect in future episodes.
If you've subscribed to this newsletter, we've probably already met, messaged on LinkedIn, or maybe we worked together. For anyone that's completely new, I've spent the last few years as a commercial software engineer at some of the most intense and profitable organisations in the world . Before that, I was completing my PhD at the University of York, and before that I was doing my undergraduate in computer science at the University of Hull.
I would describe this almost 11 year journey as a collection of the most 'failing forwards' moments imaginable. I almost dropped out of my PhD in the final months because I'd fallen out of love with the research. I happened to land a job at Squarepoint - a top tier competitive hedge fund - because a recruiter on LinkedIn sent me a message. I got a job at Vitol - the largest independent commodity trading company in the world - because my friend had moved there from Squarepoint and wanted to work together (shout out Rohan). Then to now, having reached a great job in a massively successful company I began to question, is this what I want, or have I just been failing forwards?
Since the times where my only furniture was a desk, chair, and mattress on the floor (not much has changed*), I have questioned the role that I want ownership to play in my life and in my work. For example, as a software engineer, the software that you write, extend, and support, is wholly owned by your employer. This means that if your software gains widespread adoption, or leads to significant profits for the firm, you are not directly rewarded. Instead, its success will probably be bundled in to your annual/bi-annual review, and maybe you'll receive an amount larger than you were expecting, but nothing directly proportional to the success of your software. Ownership isn't a part of the story.
Against the backdrop of other industries this makes total sense - a carpenter doesn't receive any bonuses if a staircase they build supports 1000 people or 10,000 over its lifetime. However, unlike physical industries software exists in the digital world, where it's more about the context that your code is executing in, rather than the code itself (although sometimes the code itself can also be pretty impressive, apparently).
This means that although anyone can copy-paste your software, the benefit comes from providing it as a service rather than just as an artefact. To follow the carpenter analogy, software is about enabling movement between places, not adding steps to a structure, but is unique in that there is essentially no barrier to owning the structure. All this to say; if you don't own the end result of your labour, then you can never stop trading your time for money . If however you own the software you produce, and can provide its outputs or usage to others, then you can begin to trade your software for money, which opens the door to true financial, time, location, and intellectual independence - which I think is a worthwhile pursuit.
Short answer: I'm not sure. But, I'm willing to back myself to use every available resource, every connection, and every moment in my day** to find out, and this newsletter will be a collection of notes, findings, and resources I find along the way to inspire you to do the same.
Longer answer: You have to take deliberate action against your own short-term best interests, and give yourself the space to find out. At least, that's what I'm telling myself I'm doing, and not recklessly sacrificing my own financial stability, housing, and employment prospects with (almost) no clear plan. The plan is to find a plan.
I'm out of the furnace, and into the fiery hellscape that is independent engineering in 2025. A year where AI slop is polluting the internet, where vibe coding is coming for senior engineering jobs (just like self-driving cars and other hype cycles...), and where if you're not building a unicorn with a $100M loan you're not doing it right. It's exciting, scary, and I'm looking forward to sharing what I learn along the way.
To get started, I'm going to build a distributed technical infrastructure with the goal of steadily adding capabilities and providing them to organisations that couldn't normally afford it. I'm not looking to build the next Uber, or land a rover on Mars, but would instead like to focus on building a company in which high quality engineering matters, where I'm free to work with new and interesting people across different industries, and which could scale at a reliable and predictable pace - a big change from the years in the furnace. So, if this sounds like something you might be interested in, please get in touch.
If you've read this far, then I hope this all made sense, and that you're interested and excited to see how this journey plays out.
If you'd like to support me, please forward this message to your entire company, or mention reading this article to get out of an awkward silence. Next episode will be about the first week in hell 😉
All the best,
Oliver
*mattress is no longer on floor
**in a non-hustle-culture kind of way, there might be an episode on neurodivergence/special interests in the future, but please go outside and touch grass sometimes
It's already been a week since I gave away almost everything I owned and set out into the world of business/solopreneurship (while also moving house and country). I do miss the feeling of walking through the trading floor and having random discussions with top tier engineers, but would still recommend taking a leap since the full ownership and self-directed progression is a very real and exciting challenge.
The deepest realisation I've had is that I'm not yet equipped to deal with the many topics which you need to be good at if you are to experience even a moderate amount of success. I have no experience in sales, I've never done any marketing, and I've never experienced direct commercial competition when it comes to providing some good or service.
This past week has been about understanding which of these skills I should be spending most time developing, and exactly how outside of how I know, which is sitting and studying for hours from textbooks and lectures. If it were possible from textbooks, the world would be a very different place.
My main driver for choosing what to focus on is which capabilities it will unlock. For example, if I spend time learning cold outreach techniques then I build my capability to attract new customers. However, that time cannot be spent elsewhere, which means things like building deep technical infrastructure, branding, and marketing won't move.
There is however one other driver; someone has done it better. There are many cases where other people have just done a much better job than I could do, even after weeks/months of work. This includes things like website design templates, simple subscription contracts, business contracts, and that kind of thing. These are all available for free if you know where to look, and collecting all the lego bricks to build something interesting is actually quite a fun process which I thoroughly recommend.
In similar news, if you're in tech and reading this, you'll be aware of the latest large language models (LLMs) and the roles they are increasingly playing in modern business. Building something from the ground up is nice because it means I can choose how much of a role I want this technology to play. For example, I guarantee that no part of any of these newsletters, nor any of my personal emails, will ever be touched by an LLM . However, I sometimes use Perplexity or ChatGPT to get simple (untrusted) summaries of useful things. I see the outputs much like comments from postgrad students at a bar - very plausible but only probably correct. If you're anything like me and/or interested in serious engineering, then probably correct isn't enough.
Having spoken to several senior engineering colleagues across the hedge fund/trading industries, it's clear that these models are not a threat to full scope discussion-to-deployment engineering, but are more just high tech productivity tools which bring 5 minute tasks down to 30 seconds. This isn't in my opinion worth the $300/month price tag (given their limitations on larger engineering tasks), but if you've had revolutionary experiences and think I'm missing something then please let me know.
The final interesting thing this past week has been all of the paperwork and infrastructure set up for my new company: OJS Group - which I'll steadily be building into a Bloomberg competitor ( just kidding... unless 👀). It's very early days still, but I'm looking forward to sharing more as things come together. For now, please share this newsletter with someone who needs bespoke technology services or a just a push to take a risk on something new. Future episodes will include topics like building advanced technology on a shoestring, branching out into different disciplines, latest/useful open source technologies, and more. If there's anything in particular you'd like to know about what I'm doing, please also let me know as it could be featured in a future episode.
Thanks for reading and all the best,
Oliver
PS; here are some ( not sponsored ) resources which have been really useful in this first week;
Previous Episode: Out Of The Furnace
We're two weeks in to what so far has been a really enjoyable process of building something completely new. I'm still what the VC community would describe as 'pre-revenue', but as discussions with businesses and tech leaders get underway it's clear that there's no shortage of interesting opportunities.
In this episode, I wanted to discuss how closing the right doors can be an extremely powerful tool, both in a career setting and in a business setting. This will be of interest both if you're ascending the corporate ladder and if you're thinking about going out on your own, since it's a universal skill which in my experience is tricky to get right.
When I'm talking about closing doors, I'm talking about opportunities, but more specifically the pathways your life could take for any given opportunity. For example, by living where you are, you have (possibly unknowingly) closed the door to all opportunities in [insert town/country name here], unless those opportunities might reach you through the magic of the internet.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I for example have no interest in becoming a pumpkin farmer in the Cotswolds, so not being physically nearby is no issue. However, if you invert this mentality and instead choose somewhere you'd like to be and start closing the doors which won't lead you there, then getting there becomes less of a goal and more of an inevitable outcome .
The whole door metaphor works well for physical locations, but it becomes really powerful when you apply it to more abstract concepts in your life like relationships, routine, health & fitness, and so on. The tricky bit is figuring out which doors to close and how.
There are some doors which you can only close permanently. I will never know what it's like to drive a Corsa around a car park on a sixth form lunch break, and I've made peace with that. But others can be temporary, much like moving to another country and leaving a corporate job. It's easy to frame that as a permanent decision, but it's really just a calculated risk. When it comes to actually closing the door it might be as simple as having a conversation, making a purchase, selling an item, or installing or uninstalling an app.
If you're thinking about your own life and which doors you might want to close, I find it helps to consider questions like 'is this path actually interesting to me', 'what's the best possible outcome', and 'would I regret not closing this door'. The worst thing you can do is not even consider which doors are open, so if one thing comes from reading this please let it be to consider it. It's amazing how you're forced to achieve your goals when you take decisive action to close all the right doors.
This door metaphor isn't only about long term thinking, it can apply very (very) short term as well. In a previous job I was what you would describe as a 'support engineer', basically someone who fixes things when they break, and hopefully in a somewhat reasonable time. This is all well and good when the thing you're fixing is a squeaky door or a broken chair, but if it's software which could cost many multiples of your salary should it not work for X minutes, it's a bit of a different game.
In these high stakes response environments, you quickly learn that there are basically no doors open to you in the moment. You either diagnose and fix the issue, or you don't. You may be the most senior engineer and you may have the most knowledge of the system, so it's not for lack of people nearby - it may literally be only you who can fix it. This pressure creates a pathway towards a level of expertise unlike anything I've ever seen, to the point where you'd eventualy reach a 'there's no problem I can't solve' level - not sure I ever got there, but I've definitely seen it happen. All this to say that sometimes closing most/all of the doors available to you can be a good way to create pressure in the right direction, even if that direction is just 'away from where you currently are'.
Anyway, for those of you reading this newsletter that are considering leaving corporate life, that same pressure exists when you're building a business. If you can't get something working then you have no choice but to fix it. There is nobody who will help you, but even if it takes hours/days it's time well spent , since after the dust settles you're one step closer towards having no problem you can't solve.
Next week I'll be describing very literally what I've been doing during the week, which technologies I'm using, and which discussions I've been having on the path to engineering independence - see you then!
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
Previous Episode: Thinking In Capabilities
Week three of setting out on a solo mission to revenue has come and gone, and as promised in this episode we're going to cover exactly how I'm bootstrapping a business from scratch. If you're not familiar with the term, bootstrapping is used to describe the process of building a business without using outside investments . No lobster dinners, no investor meetings, and no presentations about overly-confident forecasts.
In practical terms, this means spending little to no money on as many things as possible, and creating a business model around steadily growing revenue , rather than building something huge (and likely expensive) in secret and then 'launching' it, among many other models.
To set the scene and to share why I'm taking this approach at all, it's probably helpful to know that I'm not a millionaire. I do however have a particular interest in personal finance, so have been on top of everything from Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) , Self Invested Pension Plans (SIPPs) , and other techniques to get the most bang for each buck I've ever earned. Even with a savings rate of >60% it's not yet been enough to retire comfortably in any western country. However, I am able to not work for 12-24 months which gives me the opportunity to explore other options*. One of those options is building my own business.
Having time is one thing, but why not take external investments and build from there? This answer comes back to the first episode in this series, which is that as soon as you take money from anyone, they will probably want a say in what you're doing and how you're doing it. So the question then becomes, do you want to build something bigger with someone else , or do you want to build something smaller for yourself - the answer for me personally is the latter (nothing against the former though).
Now for the moment of truth; what are the essential costs, and what are the bits you can really save on when you're starting out. The answer so far for me comes in two parts. There are things which you legally have to do if you're starting a business, this includes things like registering with companies house, creating a business bank account, keeping records, and things like that. To start a business in the UK cost me £50 (to Companies House ), and to register a business address in the UK cost me an additional £64.80 through an address service ( of which there are many options ). Other things I would consider essential for the type of company I'd like to build are the website ( ojsgroup.net ) which I paid £27.33 for 3 years, plus hosting which I'm paying £1.20/month ( also many options available ). The business bank account I went with is free.
Short note: I have been looking into more tax efficient setups, for example non-resident corporations in Gibraltar as the UK tax system leaves a lot to be desired, but I'll do a full episode on offshore options in the future if I do take that route.
So we're in for £143.33 to enjoy a basic legal existence , plus an ongoing £1.20/month to have an online presence. The missing thing here is that as a computer scientist I can have a reasonable go at things like web design**, some light infrastructure setup, and that kind of thing, which might set you back an additional £50-£5,000 if you go with Fiverr or an independent web design consultant.
The second part is the other things which your business needs in order to generate any revenue . If you're a baker this is your oven, and if you're a computer scientist this is your servers, laptop, and other tech. I've chosen to rent virtual private servers (computers in the sky) to start things off, as I don't have a long term physical address to use. That said, renting is very cheap . I have one small server which costs an additional £1.20/month, and a slightly bigger one which costs £3.60/month. The small one is where my business website and email live, and the bigger one is the first of what will become a globally distributed fleet of data processing hosts. My other tech includes an old laptop (purchased in 2018 so counting as free), a mouse, and a keyboard (also both old, but lets say £30 total).
All in all, that's a whopping £178.13 all in to get a tech company off the ground, plus £6/month in infrastructure costs ongoing (although this will inevitably rise). The only bit missing is the software to start getting things done on these shiny new machines.
If you're not familiar, the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement is a collection of talented engineers, companies, and other organisations working to build software whose source code is freely available. This software isn't always free to use for businesses, but in many cases it is, or there are free versions which provide core capabilities without cost. When it comes to bootstrapping a business (and avoiding spyware, but that's another story), FOSS is a massive help. All it takes is knowing what to search for, how to make use of these things, and I've found you can find pretty much everything you might pay several thousand pounds a month for as an upcoming tech company.
Now for some software. If you're not technical some of these might not mean much, but I'll describe them in a way that hopefully matches something you're familiar with. These choices may be out of date if you're reading this in the future, but this is how I'm starting out;
Starting with emails, I use Docker Mailserver to send and receive emails (from the servers), with Betterbird instead of Outlook to read them on my laptop (plus calendar, address book etc). To host the website I use Apache HTTP Server so that when you go to ojsgroup.net you actually get a webpage and not a blank screen. For my internal documentation I use Sphinx to turn my notes into a collection of webpages I can view locally, and the website ojsgroup.net is just an HTML file and some custom PHP for any dynamic pages. For my laptop operating system I use Arch Linux (yes) instead of Windows, and for editing files I use vim rather than Microsoft Word/VS Code/Pycharm/etc. When it comes to spreadsheets I'll be using LibreOffice (as little as possible, spreadsheets are very dull). Powerpoint presentations are banned permanently, along with all Microsoft products. For video calls/meetings I use whatever my counterparty uses, and if I'm organising it'll probably be a WhatsApp/regular call.
For tech on the servers themselves I'm using the latest stable versions of Python/PHP, uv for package/environment management, and MySQL and PostgreSQL for data storage. For LLMs I'm using Perplexity and ChatGPT (website versions), and many other small tools like tmux for terminal multiplexing, xorg / i3 for window management, markmap for project planning, quickref for quick refreshers on syntax, ruff for code linting, and many more.
The grand total for all of the software above is £0 , with an extra £0/month ongoing. So when you hear of billion dollar corporations 'doing more with less', please feel free to reference this episode as being able to do it for free. Jokes aside I wanted this to be a showcase that you don't need millions to get started , and in the enterprise software world there are lots of predatory models (free for X months/users, free but no exporting data, etc), but avoiding them is easy if you have ownership of your processes and are open to free and open source software.
I want to end here as this is the longest episode so far already, but next week I promise I'll cover what I'm doing during the week, and some of the interesting discussions I've been having along the way. I hope this was useful and as always let me know if you'd like to know more about anything above.
If you haven't already, please tell a stranger on the tube about this newsletter and how they too can build infrastructure on a shoestring, I'm sure it'll spark a truly memorable conversation. While you've got them you could also mention OJS Group - an exciting new tech startup with huge upside potential. Until next week...
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
PS: We're almost at 50 subscribers which is great, looking forward to the first annual subscriber meetup in Monaco sometime soon 😉.
*I appreciate that in the current economy this is a position of extreme privilege - if you'd like any of the resources or tools I've used along the way then please get in touch and I'd be happy to help.
*Please also note that I'm not a VC investor and don't plan to be any time soon.
**Yes Harry, I am a full stack developer now
Previous Episode: How To Close Doors
Week four has come and gone, and this week I wanted to share what I'm doing in very literal terms each day. This will be useful if you're thinking about your life as an employee and find comfort in the daily routine (and not having to think about it), but have a hint of an idea brewing in your mind that things could be different , and what that different life might look like.
The overwhelming majority of my time over the last few weeks has been spent on building something that I can pitch to other people. In the case of OJS Group that's provisioning servers, setting up a website, paying the mega-contracts described in last week's episode, all to have a 'Services' page at some point in the coming days which will give a non-technical business audience a sense of what exactly I can sell them. This has been a 'low and slow' process deliberately, as security and maintainability are super-critical in my mind. I'd rather have a rock solid setup of two tiny servers, than a slightly shaky 'go fast and break things' setup on a large cluster.
To a technical audience pitching is pretty straightforward; everything from business intelligence tools, workflow optimization, automation pipelines, and more, need reliable datasets. If this means collecting publicly linked accounts to a business on LinkedIn, or an event-driven notification setup for mentions of [your company here] on dark web data broker forums, or an hourly feed of hotel price data in [your town of interest here], that's all something I can help with.
However, my gut feeling is that the majority of decision makers in businesses which would actually engage in such a contract are non technical, or used to be technical, meaning it's less about pitching a capability, and more about pitching reliability, great infrastructure, strong contracts, and all that sort of thing. This is a bit like doing the first few months as an engineer in an organisation where you need to prove that you're not terrible over again. In tech this is so that eventually you're given broader access rights, and can write code and do work in a more trusted way. In business it seems no different.
The non technical analogy is that it's just comforting to know that your food has been prepared by an experienced and capable chef, rather than an intern who just finished an youtube video in fugu preparation . So the goal with all this work is to become the chef, in a very obvious and easy to understand way.
The second major thing I've been doing is wasting time. With the transition to a more 'nomadic' lifestyle comes an absolutely massive amount of information which comes in an ongoing deluge straight into your eyes and ears. Being in a foreign country, figuring out which products in stores roughly match those I'm familiar with, and all the other things you 'just know' become things which you have to actively think about on a daily basis. This does get less intense over time, but all of that thinking energy is spent, meaning it can be tricky to context-switch back to building your business, writing, reading, and more. Then again, this could just be a skill issue , in any case I'll share more about how to handle it in the future.
If you follow me on LinkedIn you'll have noticed that over the past month I've been posting about some useful tech tools I'm using, some stuff about this newsletter, and that kind of thing. In these strange times where most popular posts take the form of an AI-sterilised, adderal infused pitch deck (a'la You won't believe this. I fired my team and here's why. This is a game changer. ), writing anything outside this format doesn't seem to be as broadly interesting to those in my current network, and therefore isn't promoted as broadly by the algorithm.
This puts me in a tricky spot - keep posting in the way that feels more natural, or bend the knee to the algorithm overlords and start writing as if the elevator door to my readers is constantly closing. This newsletter will forever and always be longer form (and AI free), but my gut feeling is to switch up some styles on my other formats and see what happens. The reason I mention this to you now, is that if you're doing anything similar and starting your own business, then your personal brand and your business become essentially one and the same . So it's definitely a priority to get it right.
The final thing I've been working on is a techical setup for customer acquisition. Each day in the UK several thousand companies are incorporated, and I retrieve this data from Companies House and store it for analysis. By taking the postcode of each of the addresses I can identify companies in major cities or specific districts (e.g. Canary Wharf, City of London, etc), and can then pull director information also from Companies House. From there I can search online for social media accounts, addresses, business focus/industries, etc, and reach out to those who might be interested in my services. This isn't the typical word-of-mouth advertising approach, but more of a systematic method which I hope will become a pretty powerful system as it matures.
The tool is still in the early prototype stage, but once complete it will become a semi-automatic lead generator, which is definitely welcome to a humble tech startup still in the pre-revenue stage.
That's all for this week - there was an attempted cyberattack on one of the OJS Group servers last night so I've been busy checking and hardening everything there, fortunately it seems to have had no impact.
Next week I have some exciting plans to share, if the last four weeks have been turbulent, the next 4-6 will be a category 5 hurricane. See you then 🇻🇳
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
Previous Episode: How To Bootstrap A Business
It's been five weeks already and this week I've been thinking about what it really means to be travelling internationally, and how it can change your perspective on things like taxes, community, and finance. Plus, some exciting development things to share. Plus plus, there is also a big announcement at the end - things are about to get even more spicy .
Choosing your tax residency is probably only second to who you choose as a partner in terms of the impact it will have on your life. Choose well and you'll have access to great public services in a peaceful and friendly country, and paying taxes will feel good because you're contributing to improving your surroundings and community. Choose poorly and you'll feel an overwhelming sense of disappointment each month as your income evaporates, and as other types of taxes are applied across most things you do, for seemingly little impact. This is worse still if you see the funds being spent inefficiently.
One of the things that's changed significantly since leaving the UK has been the way I think about taxes. As a commercial software engineer (in London), a portion of your income will probably be in the top tax bracket ( which in the UK is 45% *). This means that almost half of any amount in that bracket and beyond is gone before you see it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing , after all, to be taxed at that rate means that your income is already well above the national and local averages. However, it also means that if you look at the raw amount of how much you're taxed versus the impact paying those extra taxes has on your quality of life, there is essentially no difference.
In other words, you could pay $40,000 in income tax or $100,000 and the quality of the services, the healthcare, and everything else, is the same. The question then becomes; is contributing the $60,000 difference to stay in this system worth it , or would my quality of life meaningfully improve if I travelled elsewhere? This needs to be balanced with the likely reduction in income that moving/travelling would bring, plus the relationships, community, and everything else that ties you to your home town/country. But all that considered, I personally want to explore different parts of the world and see if the UK really is that great, or if there are other places to live which offer a higher quality of life without as big an impact on my financial future.
I'll do a full episode on international personal finances in the future if you think it would be useful!
The development thing I wanted to share is that there is now a showcase page at show.ojsgroup.net which gives an example of some simple analytics/pipelines which are now live, just to give a flavour of what types of services I can set up as part of OJS Group .
I'll be updating and expanding this page with more as I build, but just as a quick aside for the software engineers reading this; it's such a great feeling waking up to continue building something and knowing that you maintain ownership of the entire system, it reminds me of writing my thesis all those years ago, and I thoroughly recommend it.
In other news, the major announcement I hinted at in last weeks episode is that in 5 short weeks I will be relocating once again from Aix En Provence to Da Nang - the fourth largest city in Vietnam with some of the top beaches in South East Asia. The motivation for this move comes in two parts, the first is lifestyle and the second is adventure. For lifestyle; when I imagined leaving London I was picturing morning walks on the beach, mountain views, and luxury as a part of daily life rather than as an occasional experience. From what I've read so far, Da Nang can check that box. For adventure; Da Nang's location means direct flights to all neighbouring countries, access to the best beaches in the world , and lots to explore in a culture and language completely different to the UK/Europe. It's a big move, but if it works out then it might be one of the best decisions I've ever made.
In case you're thinking of something similar, making this move from a paperwork perspective has been surprisingly straigthforward. Vietnam offers a renewable 90-day E-Visa, which means 'border-runs' every quarter, but all through a short online form with confirmation after a few days (plus a $25 fee). For most nationalities the simplest option is to take a one week trip to Malaysia (which is 30 days visa free), renew the Vietnam E-Visa during that trip and then heading back. I'm not sure if that's the route I'll be taking, but I will of course let you know as it happens. Coming back to the topic of taxes ( and none of this or any future episodes are in any way financial advice ), I'll be considered a tax resident in Vietnam if I stay for more than 183 days per tax year, so it's not that relevant yet, but I'll definitely be factoring it in as I think about where I'm staying over the next 6 months.
That's all for this week, we're up to 52 subscribers now (welcome to the new joiners 👋), so with a projected 4% increase per week we'll be at almost 108,000 in just 4 years!
Next week I'll cover exactly how I'm sourcing data for the ongoing lead generation project, plus some of the interesting things I've found along the way. See you then!
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
* There is the higher effective rate in the tax trap, but lets not get into all that this time
Previous Episode: Day To Day Life In The French Riviera
Six weeks in and this week I wanted to share how to find datasets, and how by systematically retrieving those datasets and a writing a bit of code you can build a tool capable of generating actionable intelligence (for you or your business).
This isn't going to be written in a technical way , as almost all technical writing is very dull. Instead, it'll be a whistlestop tour of interesting approaches and findings so that by the end you hopefully begin to see how in this world; 1 + 1 can equal 5.
Almost every part of a business in the modern world exists because it contributes towards achieving some unique objective, and retrieving and analysing datasets is no different. As an example, my first business motivation is simple; businesses need customers, and nobody I know has bought anything from me (yet). This means that my customers must (probably) be people I don't already know. The question then is; who are they? where are they? would they be interested in subscribing? ( just kidding... unless 👀)
The first step in this process is to sit and have a think about what's available on the internet. Which things are publicly accessible, which organisations, governments, or hobbyists might already be gathering data which could help answer this 'who' and 'where'. A trick from a book I read recently is to define a 'customer archetype', which is just a short (and changeable) description of who exactly your customers are. In my case, this is going to be early stage asset management companies and tech consultancies, although ideally I could cast a slightly wider net if needed.
Now this is where it gets interesting; what we're looking to achieve is what my cryptography professor described as the creative moment . That is, the moment where you combine two pieces of information to unlock a new way to solve a problem. An example from student life might be; problem = what's to eat for dinner, information = haven't been shopping recently, no fresh vegetables available, answer = cereal for dinner*. This creative moment of realising that cereal is a viable option depends on the knowledge that you have milk, you have cereal, and that the two can be combined. In other words, with more information comes more creative moments .
In the data world, we need to find the equivalent facts and then write some code to capture them so that in student terms we can make a bowl of cereal automatically, every day, for ever.
Quick note: I'm aware that this is a somewhat backward approach to most business textbooks, which is to find a person with a problem, solve it for them, and then find another person. My current approach is a little different, in that I know that every hedge fund, bank, family office, and other asset management companies, (and tech consultancies) need reliable and discretely collected datasets for whatever business motivations they are pursuing. My goal is therefore to find ones which are open to partnership , since I can adapt technically to any data acquisition requirements, but don't want to drift into the business of something like mobile app development.
When it comes to finding data sources (cereal), it's really about knowing which businesses depend on which datasets. For example, if you're trading equities (stocks and shares), you'll need price data about those equities. This is going to be available wherever those equities are traded, and probably with a hefty price tag depending on how much and how frequently you want it.
So back to the 'who' and 'where' problem, which industries rely on data about companies and employees? The recruitment industry stands out, since platforms like Indeed , CV Library , and of course LinkedIn , contain profiles for most people and companies. However, platforms like this are typically pretty well defended in that you might need to do the technical equivalent of wearing a trilby and trench coat each time you ask for some data, otherwise you might get blocked . Approaches like this are never technically insurmountable, but it's a question of taking several hours/days to get something reliable set up, versus looking elsewhere for a source that's a bit more meaty.
The other obvious place where company and employee information is held is by the central government. In the UK that means Companies House, and unlike their peers in the business world, most government websites which aren't classed as critical national infrastructure are essentially wide open. In the case of Companies House specifically, this is actually by design, since this openness enables an entire genre of businesses to exist which use this data for science, strategy, and profit . With a viable source now identified, the next step is to go about getting their data in a recurring, reliable way.
As any Game of Thrones enjoyer would know, it's usually not enough to just drink and know things, instead you'll need to actually do something in order to make any kind of progress. Here, that means setting up servers, data storage infrastructure, sneaky secret tech things like proxy chains, counter-fingerprinting measures, and more.
I could insert a shameless plug here about how the experts over at OJS Group do this as a full time job, but this is an ad-free newsletter. Instead, lets assume that we've got all of that set up already, and can reliably retrieve data from Companies House and other places. With a bit of testing, we also know that the data is updated every day, so we can set our system up to retrieve it every morning before breakfast.
Having identified at least one useful source, and set up a way of reliably retrieving it (plus any updates), the final step is to magically turn thing one and thing two into thing five. To do this, we need to introduce a second piece of information (the milk!) which can be combined with the companies data to generate some action we can take.
To get this right, we can go back to the original question of 'who' and 'where'. Data from Companies House gives us the 'who' every morning, we can see which companies were incorporated, who their directors are, and some other bits and bobs. We also have a 'registered office address' for both the companies and directors, but no way of turning that data into usable information. We also don't have any contact information for the directors, which is sort of the whole point.
To remedy both of these, we can use the postcodes in the addresses to get the latitude and longitude coordinates of the offices and directors (usually the same). This lets us plot them on a map , which then means we can see something like 'a new company was formed in Wimbledon, London, and the directors are X, Y, Z'. That's already pretty useful, but we can do better by adding the 'nature of business' to the display, which will let us hone in on baby hedge funds, tech companies, crypto trading bros, and AI slop factories - really whatever we want.
This is even more useful, but for the final point we need an action to take. For me, this would be most useful as a daily email which said something like 'Here are the baby hedge funds and asset management firms which were born yesterday, and here are links to google/linkedin/reddit searches of their founding directors'. I can then click these links or store them as part of another system, to then 'reach out' and 'sync up' with them (😷), or just send them branded flowers or cake or something.
Anyway, this entire process plays out multiple times and in many different ways across the finance world, and it's been really interesting building out something that's more of an intelligence/surveillance tool than a more standard data pipeline. It's been doubly interesting in that the systems and tools which I'm building are implicitly useful for my business , and are therefore self-validating. I'm working with others already to provide useful things for their businesses, so if it sounds like something you'd be interested in please get in touch! I hope this has been interesting, and that you can start to see how intelligence as a business function makes sense, since without it, I'd probably be doing something like endlessly scrolling LinkedIn fishing for leads, or worse, talking to people in person.
That's all for this week, next week I'll be sharing another intelligence tool I'm working on to do with European land prices , but I haven't finished it yet - lots to do!
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
* I encourage you to do this at least once a year to remember how it all started, preferably not for a major anniversary or holiday, but that's up to you.
Previous Episode: Thinking Internationally
It's been seven short days since the last newsletter, and inevitably, another week has passed. This week has been an interesting one. In this episode we'll cover some tools I've built which can be used for monitoring land prices , some rationale for why this is even useful, plus some other thoughts about business, employment, and goal setting.
If you're reading this then it's very likely that you know me personally, and if you know me personally then you'll also know that I've historically been strongly against land ownership (from a personal finance perspective), instead advocating for broadly diversified global equities (a'la MSCI World Index ). None of this is financial advice, this is just my personal thoughts . Whilst I maintain the belief that this is probably the best option for the majority of people (and that renting is indeed worthwhile for the flexibility it provides*), there comes a point where sustainability in the truest sense of the word is only possible through long term residence on a reasonable amount of land. Here I'm talking about food sustainability, environmental sustainability, energy self-sufficiency, and everything else associated with more sustainable living. After all, sustainability in the economic sense is possible with enough money invested to sustain one's lifestyle without depleting the principal amount, but at what cost...
So, without sounding like a drooling eco-crusader, I think it's probably a good idea if more people were able to live more sustainably in whichever way sustainability sounds best for them . And don't worry, I appreciate the irony that this is coming from someone who's spent years working in both a hedge fund and an oil company.
Anyway, as you might have anticipated, even the possibility of living more sustainably is predicated on the ability to find somewhere where you can grow things, and build energy, water, and climate (HVAC) infrastructure. The obvious candidate for this kind of project is a piece of land, and with the state of the British economy as it is, ownership of any reasonable parcel of land (say one hectare, or 10,000m 2 +), is not possible without significant investment. Significant here is on the order of £10/m 2 , so for one hectare this is £100,000 at an absolute (unrealistic) minimum, with things like access, planning and zoning laws, taxes, and things like that roughly quadrupling the cost for the mission of 'buy land and build something sustainable'. Taking over an existing smallholding is also a viable option, but much like in software engineering, sometimes nothing is better than something.
Side note: I found this site with a rough quote of over half a million for a hectare of land for housing development in my old home of Hull - pretty steep, but the chip spice might be worth it.
The only option then is going offshore, and while land in the Cayman Islands is just a shade more expensive (!), I am fortunate enough to enjoy the post-Brexit luxuries of a Dutch passport. As a Dutch national, I am therefore able to buy land and live freely anywhere in Europe, which is pretty cool. And of course with that flexibility comes a need for actionable intelligence around land prices, rules, regulations, and exchange rates.
Which brings us to the (currently unpublished) land price aggregator, which pulls in a number of different datasources to plot land for sale across Europe (currently only Spain and Italy). If you read the last episode about the importance of the creative moment , it's clear that I need to combine this with some other dataset and interactivity to make it actually useful. I've therefore also collected data around average yearly rainfall, solar radiation, and that kind of thing across Europe.
The end goal here is being best informed to make the decision of where one might pursue true sustainability, without having to sell a kidney. On top of plotting this on a map, I've set up alerts which email me every mid-morning with the latest listings and opportunities. As a subscriber of this newsletter, if this is something you'd be interested in, please let me know by text/linkedin/email at ojs@ojsgroup.net and I'll add you to this morning email (100% free).
As you know the goal now is to primarily to build a business, but I feel like living more sustainably is a worthwhile secondary pursuit. I'm telling you this not to try and convert you in any way, in fact I know that some of you reading this are committed consumerists and I respect that, but to warm you to the idea of a (very) slow drift towards that kind of writing ( in addition to business learnings and updates ). Maybe 12 months from now one of these episodes will be about programming a crop monitoring system, or pitching a new breed of jalapeño. Whichever direction it takes, I hope to see you in the next episode, which will be about balancing over-engineering with delivering something useful while building a tech startup, plus some very rough thoughts about long-term business planning and how that's shaping what I'm working on.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Oliver
*Happy to discuss this after no less than 3 pints.
Previous Episode: Intelligence As A Business Function
Welcome back to the end of the eighth week of business development and international travel! In this week's episode, I wanted to talk about over-engineering, and how as an academic purist you might be tempted to put profit on hold whilst you build the perfect infrastructure, but that this pursuit will lead to zero gains in the short term. Plus a bit about the final boss of entrepreneurship - acquisition.
As a founder, entrepreneur, tech shaman, or whichever title you feel most suitably describes your situation, you have only one job. That job is to make money, and not only to make money; but to do so in a sustainable and repeatable way. If we're being specific, your job is actually to plan, build, and maintain, revenue engines . A revenue engine is a like any other engine, but instead of an input and output of petrol and mechanical power respectively, it takes in cash and time, and outputs more cash. For context, the global stock market has grown (- inflation) by roughly 7% every year for the last 100 years. In this sense, a global index is a bit like a revenue engine; if you put in $1000 and one year, you'll probably get $1070 back. The goal then is to build revenue engines with a higher annual return than this, otherwise it makes more sense to just sit and do nothing, or enjoy gainful employment as a reliable way to get money to then buy more of the global index (not financial advice).
If you read my earlier episode about How To Bootstrap A Business , you'll know that getting a business started can be done very cost effectively. It's important to remember (since we're thinking in terms of revenue engines) that these are only the visible costs . You also need to account for the cost of your own time, and the opportunity cost of other pursuits (e.g. emploment), when you're deciding which revenue engines to pursue. For example, growing and selling house plants is an almost guaranteed revenue engine in most western countries (if you're reading this and are passionate about killing plants, I recommend this book ), however, when considering the opportunity cost of employment or other ventures it might not be worthwhile. It's also important to consider the upper limit of the engine, taking the house plant venture as an example; there is a maximum cash input before space, market, and management constraints will choke the engine. This means it's hard to scale, which makes heavily constrained ventures like this less attractive from a business development perspective, but if you can mitigate these issues then they can become worthwhile (looking at you, house plant NFTs *).
The technical infrastructure I'm building has enabled me to create at least one revenue engine already, with others on the way ( nothing to do with plants, yet ). This is exciting but it introduces other questions like; is it better to spend time improving the infrastructure for building engines, or just to build more engines ? I've been improving infrastructure only when it directly contributes to an existing engine, or one which is under construction, which I think makes sense. The follow up issue is what 'done' looks like, since like in most areas of life, there is a 'bare minimum' implementation, one which is a bit more polished, and a perfect solution. I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I'm yet to create a solid test framework for my core internal services, which is what I would consider a polished implementation. This doesn't affect the execution of the engine, but does affect its maintainability and extensibility in the short term , so is something I'll be working on this week.
In other news; if you're interested in the world of startups and business, then you'll be familiar with the concept of acquisition. If not, this is when a larger company buys a smaller company, either to strip it for parts (take e.g. an engineering team out and put it in another area, or extract datasets and information), or to assert control over the direction and growth whilst letting it exist in/close to its current form (and hopefully making more than a 7% return). If you're building a startup with AI in the name, then your mission is to get someone less intelligent but wealthier than you to do this. However, if you're building anything else, then acquisition is about how your revenue engines work , how reliable they are, and how transferrable they are.
When it comes to building something like technical infrastructure, this means asking how easy your systems are to maintain, how much technical expertise is required to understand and use them, and ultimately how replaceable you are as the tech shaman in the middle of your spiders web of systems**. If however your goal is not acquisition, then your replaceability factors in much less to your overall plan, and you can therefore spend less time on polishing your systems, and more time on building engines. I don't have any stats on this but I don't think many businesses are acquired out of all the businesses which ever exist (and most fail), but I think it's still a worthwhile pursuit if only for the nudge towards better engineering and more explainable processes that it provides.
Maybe one day OJS Group will be absorbed into Alphabetflix Megacorp for $250 and all of this will become a distant memory, but until then, I'll be writing more about what I'm doing, where I'm going, and what I'm working on, so next time please join me for a comprehensive boots-on-the-ground review of France, and just a few short days after that I'll be packing up and travelling to Da Nang. I hope everything is going well wherever you are in the world, and if you haven't already, please let your favourite colleague/parent/group chat know that if they haven't subscribed to this newsletter, they're not going to be invited to the 2030 subscriber gala.
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
* this is of course a joke, please don't buy NFTs
** a clean, well organised, and fully documented spiders web
Previous Episode: In Pursuit Of Sustainability
Nine weeks have gone already, and this week's episode is all about France. What's the vibe like, what is the overall experience like, and would I recommend it for other people interested in travelling around Europe. Spoiler alert: I wouldn't recommend it, but it's been a good experience overall and a gentle introduction to the challenges of living internationally.
France is a huge country, covering over 550,000 km 2 , and with a population of ~68,000,000 people there is going to be a broad range of goods and services available at different prices. The region I've been staying in is called the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur , which is unfortunately one of the most expensive areas in Europe to live (outside of Switzerland). For context, there is a restaurant 100m away which charges €30 for a hamburger, and the majority of house prices in the area outside of sheds or large wardrobes can be purchased for around €1M+. If you're planning on staying here, I would mentally prepare to pay roughly the same as you would in London for things like cocktails, dining out, and other experiences, although local prices (whilst still high) are more reasonable if you know where to look.
For the someone travelling to live as a local (as I am) rather than as a tourist, there are many options just like any other town. The trick is mentally mapping equivalents (if there are any) to shops, and identifying where locals would get resources like clothes, medicine, transport, and so on. For shops you have a supermarket tri-opoly in Aix of Carrefour, Utile, and Monoprix. Carrefour is like Tesco, Utile is like Sainsburys, and Monoprix is like Waitrose or M&S. There are also local butchers, lots of bakeries and patiseries (of course), and more, but don't be surprised if you're invoiced for 1.5x-2x the supermarket cost of an item because it's from a small business - same as the UK - although the increase in quality for baguettes in particular is massive. I recommend Hats Boulangerie if you are looking for baguettes, not sponsored but they're really good.
My experience with French people has been mixed - there have been some friendly encounters but also some racist/anti-tourist moments which to be honest have tainted the trip and which contribute most strongly towards my overall non-recommendation. This is in the context of growing anti-unsustainable-tourism protests which happened across the border in Spain in 2024 and earlier this year, and it's easy to see that while there haven't been protests in France under this cause (that I'm aware of), I would be very surprised if that remains true over the next few years. As a white British (/Dutch) man, I'm also very aware that my particular demographic has an incredibly bad and internationally recognised reputation; poor treatment of service staff, over-consumption of alcohol, a high petty crime rate, ignorance of local culture, and so on. While I don't personally contribute to these stereotypes, I can't blame locals for painting me with the same brush. After all, you'd only know I'm not a complete degenerate if you subscribed to my newsletter. Strangely, this experience hasn't only been felt by British nationals, it seems to be more specifically against non-French-speaking people I've spent time with, so that's something.
To end this section on a positive, I will say that small encounters with the public have been generally good . For example, I was in a bakery trying to order a specific raspberry cake from a display cabinet with many raspberry cakes*, and an elderly French lady after hearing my scuffed French asked if I needed any help (which I did), so that was nice**. Similarly, a drunk middle aged Frenchman on a beach in Marseille gestured for me to be careful of burning in the sun on account of my complexion, which was wholesome, I think.
Aix-En-Provence is to Paris what York is to London in the UK, with a direct train link there are many Parisians here and unfortunately a similar approach to public spaces. It's very common to find human/animal waste in the streets, and although garbage trucks tour the streets daily (yes!) this is somehow still an issue. The approach to waste management is one of 'put it in the street after 20:00 and it will be gone by morning', which admittedly takes some getting used to coming from either industrial/residential bins collected weekly, but on the flip side it is impressive that one day you might go to get some drinks from the supermarket in the evening and see half a wardrobe, a mattress, four bin bags, and a 5ft tall teddy bear, and then come by the next morning and they have all disappeared.
One positive of the public spaces in Aix specifically is that there are many many fountains, statues, and other nice architecture to look at. I'm not any kind of architecture nerd (no judgement if you are), but even to my simple eyes it sets a nice scene for the markets, outdoor concerts, cafe tables, and more. There are also many museums, galleries, and that kind of thing if you're into that. Again not really my main passion but they're nice to have around.
Aix-En-Provence is exactly what you might expect it to be if you've heard people talking about the south of France. It's expensive to be a tourist, not as expensive to be a local, and there are many opportunities to be extorted if that's what you're into. If you're considering travelling here, I would strongly recommend staying in a less culturally influential/touristy town, but would say that you should definitely come here for a day trip to see what it's like - just as someone in Leeds might go for a day out in York. If you're a local reading this and are displeased with my assessment, then please anchor your yacht and get in touch , I might re-assess after a few vineyard tours and boat trips.
See you for the next one, which will be back to technical & business things as usual!
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
* A relatable and exciting challenge I know
** Cake was successfully acquired (for €20)
Previous Episode: Engineering Quality For Acquisition