Thales, a little known Greek philosopher became the world's first data scientist by correctly making agricultural forecasts using data on natural phenomena. Thales' radical thinking make him a fabulously wealthy and began our path to the brave new world of Big Data. Find out how the principles uncovered by Thales in ancient Greece can shape how we think about data, technology and business today.

1. The First Data Scientist
forgotten lessons from ancient greece
about winning with data

2. Data Ignorance: When markets or organizations
fail to collect, study and apply data.

3. Thalesian Opportunity: Competitive advantage
gained from the data ignorance of a market or
competitor.

4. Anatomy of Thalesian Opprotunity

5. Find a Heuristic to Challenge: If there is something that everyone assumes
cannot or does not need to be measured…go measure it.

6. Mine Your Data: Once you gather enough data go study it carefully.

7. Deploy a Strategy: Identify a way to monetize the insight you gained using an
indirect approach.

8. Who is Thales and
why does he matter
to the modern
world?

9. Thales of Miletus
- First western philosopher
- First data scientist
- First oil tycoon

10. Miletus
(far from America)

11. Time and Progress
0

12. In Thales’ day,
everyone thought
everything was the
will of the arbitrary
and capricious gods.

13. “You know what this calls for?
This calls for more #thunderbolt.”
- @BronzedOlympianGod
“Cause & effect. Ha! More like
cause & #thunderbolt” @BronzedOlympianGod
“Last mortal to RT this gets a
free #thunderbolt” @BronzedOlympianGod

14. Think Status Quo.

15. “Wht if everything ISN’T caused by
#thunderbolts #randomthought” @Philosobro
“Rain = more olives. 4 reals
#revelation #science” - @Philosobro
“btw #science = stuff caused by
something not #thunderbolts” @Philosobro

16. Think Different.

17. In 624 b.c., everyone was in the oil business

18. Olive oil was used for everything
Lamp
light
Money!
Delicious
foods

19. For several years,
Thales collected
data on weather,
animal behavior,
celestrial bodies et.

20. One year, he
studies his data and
decides to make a
forecast.

21. “I’ve got scrolls full of data and I’m
thinking big year for olive crops
#bigdata” - @Philosobro

22. Thales’
contemporaries
were deeply
skeptical of his
fancy learning.

23. “Every1 knows only random
#thunderbolts from gods make
plants grow. #lunatic ” - @WaitAPeasent
“@philosobro less #thinking
and more #thoughtlesstoil” @JavelinJunkie
“Any bros want to get naked, cover
yourself in oil and wrestle me this
weekend? @Philosobro
@JavelinJunkie” - @GreeklySpeaking

24. A quick note.

25. Thales’ recorded his
observations about
nature in his scrolls
and thereby created
the first database.

26. Thales recorded
data on everything
from weather to
solar activity. His
analysis of this data
is the first data
mining effort.

27. While oracles had
been making
predictions for
hundreds of years,
Thales’s made the
first data based,
scientific forecast.

28. The Prehistoric Olive Oil Supply Chain
Farm
Olive Press
Storage

29. If you were Thales
and knew the olive
crop would be
large, what would
you have done do
to capitalize?

30. Thales Rents All the Olive Presses in Miletus

31. At harvest,
everyone in the
region had to pay
Thales to use the
olive presses.

32. He became
massively wealthy.

33. “Getting rich is soooo easy when you
have data. #Thunderbolts are crap.” @Philosobro
“Swimming in my vault of gold coins
#ScroogeMcDuck style.” - @Philosobro

34. Thalesian opportunities are everywhere.

35. Hidden in mounds of ignored data…
10010100110101001010111001010100011
10010100110101001010111001010100011
100101001101010INSIGHT1011100101010
10010100110101001010111001010100011
10010100110101001010111001010100011

36. Or in mundane activities no one measures…
I
S
I
G
N
H
T

37. Are opportunities in every field for anyone
curious enough…

38. To question.
To measure.
To explore.

39. Think about this:

40. Camera
Speaker
GPS
Gyroscope
Accelerometer
Clock

41. That’s 6 sensors, capable of recording millions of
bytes of information every second.

42. But more important.

43. High Speed Internet
Connection

44. All that data is sent over the internet and kept in a place like…

45. It’s a data party and everyone is invited!

46. To clarify…

47. Amount of data Thales could
access

48. Amount of data you
can access!
(Probably not to scale)
Yikes!

49. All this data…more data generated this year alone
than the whole of human history combined.

50. Thales found a fortune in just a few scrolls of
handwritten data.

51. We have Excel, cloud computing, open source data
mining programs, public data and API access.

52. What can you discover?

53. Remember these lessons…

54. Be curious where others are disinterested

55. Be innovative where others are stagnate

56. Be thorough where others summarize

57. And always remember…

58. Data
is
King
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