ckelly's comments

ckelly | 3 years ago | on: The Magic of Sampling, and Its Limitations

It has always surprised me that many technology professionals (and business professionals in general) don't have a strong intuition for the power of sampling. For example, in this case, the author states: "With 100 samples, our estimates are accurate to within about 5%. The magic of sampling is that we can derive accurate estimates about a very large population using a relatively small number of samples. In the last scenario (100 billion M&MS), we have 1% accuracy despite only sampling 0.00001% of the M&Ms."

I bet many would think n=100 would be worthless once the population reaches millions, or especially billions.

One HN-related piece of evidence for that is when I pointed out what margin of error would be for a n=164 survey sample, I got downvoted hard! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050801

But I saw this hundreds of times talking to customers when I ran a survey sampling product out of YC.

ckelly | 3 years ago | on: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

Yes, I wasn't commenting on the original "taking it seriously" language.

> If the market price reflected the probability, then an arbitrage strategy should not be profitable > The market doesn't reflect the probability of an event happening.

No, the market's implied probability could be right, on average, across all deals...and the top merger arb funds could absolutely still be profitable by selecting deals when they think the market is mispricing the probability (for the reasons you mention: better experience, knowledge, etc.)

It's like the sports betting market: you can roughly impute a team's win probability from the (opening) betting line...and even if that's right on average, the top gamblers are still profitable.

And, of course, sometimes things with a say, 40% chance of happening do happen...so that doesn't mean the market was "wrong" about the chance (i.e. your LinkedIn mispricing exmaple).

But sounds like we're in full agreement you can't look at the implied probability from the market price and draw some conclusion about it definitely happening, or definitely not happening (e.g. the market not taking it seriously).

ckelly | 3 years ago | on: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

> I wouldn't put too much weight into any sort of imputed probability from the price.

It's absolutely fair to impute a rough probability of deal closure from the stock price. The whole "merger arbitrage" industry works around that premise.

Sometimes the market doesn't think a deal has a 100% chance of closing (like MSFT and LinkedIn) and it still closes. There were valid antitrust concerns circling that deal, e.g. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/298573-salesforce-rais...

ckelly | 9 years ago | on: Introducing Initialized Capital

This is fantastic news for founders. Survata (S12) was pumped to have Initialized in our Series A last year. Garry worked the closest with us of all YC partners, and Alexis had already been a customer! They make valuable customer intros, always offer time to help, and have such a pro-founder view of the world.

ckelly | 10 years ago | on: The murky history of moderation and how it’s shaping the future of free speech

> In April of 2005, they tested their first upload. By October, they had posted their first one million-view hit: Brazilian soccer phenom Ronaldinho trying out a pair of gold cleats. Weeks later, Google paid an unprecedented $1.65 billion to buy the site.

This article misstates when Google acquired YouTube. It was October 2006, not October 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Company_history

ckelly | 10 years ago | on: Thank you, Y Combinator

Garry has been incredibly impactful to us, even after we graduated YC. Can't wait to see what's next!

Enjoy your time abroad, Garry.

ckelly | 11 years ago | on: Airbnb Logo Redesign Survey: More People See Hearts Than Naughty Parts

Hi Max, Survata co-founder here. 164 respondents is actually a fine sample size for a quick read on qualitative feedback. Even if this had been a quantitative study, that would represent a 7.7% margin of error at a 95% confidence level. Counter-intuitively, you don't always need thousands of respondents to measure an audience's behavior!

ckelly | 12 years ago | on: Snapchat usage triples among teens in the last year

Hi Max, Survata co-founder here. The 365 respondents were used as the denominator for calculating the % of teens that use a service (like Snapchat) regularly. So that's the sample size for the first chart shown in the link. (The margin of error on 365 respondents is about 5%). Naturally, we had to exclude the respondents who used no social services from the questions that asked about their favorite social service, like the second chart shown in the link.

Hope that helps.

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