Hello! My name’s Blake. I work with Analytics, Systems Analysis, and Design.
Analytics represents the way we sense the world
Whatever you’re doing, the starting point is your ability to sense and understand what’s happening around you. Working with data is sensation at scale. The amount of data humans generate is inconceivable and doubles at least every two years. How do we relate to these incredible streams of sensation, and how can we use it to understand what’s happening around us?
I started studying data in 2022 and shortly after started working as a Senior Analyst at Source Medium, an analytics agency managing data for over 100 companies including Clif Bar, Olipop, Dr. Bronners, and others with a combined ARR of over 1bn. While at Source Medium I saw a wide set of how some of the fastest growing organizations operate, including their advertising strategies, data streams, analytical methods, and expenses. I witnessed and helped build systems which continuously streamed data from Facebook, Amazon, Google, Shopify, Stripe, and dozens of other sources into a single source of truth so that these organizations could understand their environment and their decisions.
The other side of data work is AI and Machine Learning. There are unprecedented opportunities in choosing where and how to adopt these methods - predictive analytics and AI literacy are already succeed-or-fail factors for many businesses and this will likely increase in the coming years. I’ve developed a number of machine learning systems, you can read about some of the highlights here:
Systems Analysis represents the way we make sense of the world
Systems Analysis describes a set of strategies to make complicated things simpler. Nature has a habit of reusing organizational strategies that work well. By studying these organizational strategies it’s possible to carry insights across domains and solve difficult problems with more coherence and structure.
My introduction to Systems Theory happened in 2013 when a mentor, Hal Bennett, lent me his favorite books collected over his ~30 years of running R&D organizations. These books explored and connected human organizations, technical systems architecture, and nature. Systems Theory refers to a set of perspectives to view things as emergent, interconnected, nested, nonlinear, scale-dependent, modular, and isomorphic, and these methods are particularly useful in management and the mapping of organizational dynamics and product development.
Here are some computer simulations I’ve made of these organizational dynamics:
Criticality in Networks
Phase-changes, self-organization, & sensitivity to initial conditions in snowflake formation
Feedback, Circular-Causality, and Graph Bundling
Edge-of-chaos & Criticality
Graph Bundling
Fitness Landscapes & Hill Climbing
Studying systems theory and dynamics of nature also led to the creation of this website, Alterity, as simulations of organizational dynamics can continuously create unique things using creative processes that reflect what we find in nature.
A side-effect of this research has been a number of consulting conversations with organizational leaders about their business systems, incentive structures, marketing strategy, and product direction. This has supported successful product lines, fundraising, business models, and companies. I love these consulting conversations, I’m always open to new ones.
Growing products by starting from simulations of organizational systems.
Design represents what we create and change in the world
I’ve worked with prototyping, product design, and engineering for over a decade, starting right out of high-school at an optics and electronics startup in California. I’ve worked extensively with Lasers, 3D printers, CNC machines, CAD software, and other design and fabrication tools. My design work comes in the form of physical parts:
And projects like this open-source scanning hyperspectral microscope:
What’s next?
I’d like to continue to build and design things that make people’s lives better!
For software I’m particularly interested in building systems using Large Language Models and Graph Neural Networks in applications such as education technology, organizational intelligence, machine-reading of whitepapers or patents, and social network analysis. I’m very interested in information propagation and the optimization of the R&D cycle.
For hardware projects, I’m interested in exploring scientific and precision systems, developing procedural product lines for existing brands, or developing 3D printing hardware and software.
Thanks for reading about me - now let’s make something! To get in touch, just reach out through one of these channels:
“organizations get “lost in the sauce” of long games of “telephone” that cause us to forget the broader market dynamics or systemic reasons for why we are doing what we’re doing.”