MLOps, neuromorphic computing, next-generation enterprises. These are concepts you generally don't hear about in the field of data analytics. This episode shows that you can parlay a career in data analysis into any field you want. That's exactly what Ryan Cunningham did to become a Senior Associate Builder at AI Fund. Ryan studied finance and computer science at Georgetown, and honed his modeling skills at Credit Suisse after graduation focusing on the oil and gas sector. At Uber, Ryan helped scale the Uber Eats product and worked on various moonshot products like Uber Elevate and Uber JUMP. After a stint at an AI gaming company, Ryan eventually joined AI Fund, an AI startup studio founded by Andrew Ng (founder of Google Brain and co-founder of Coursera). This episode follow Ryan's journey writing VBA as a banker, challenging the status quo at Uber Eats, and diving into the world of AI. VBA is the gateway drug to automation If you're in Excel long enough, you'll eventually come across VBA macros. Either you use the ones your colleagues build or you dive into writing/recording the macro yourself. The reason I think VBA is the gateway to automation, generally, is because you are able to break Excel down into its building blocks. Furthermore, you can tie other Microsoft apps together using VBA. When I was a financial analyst, I automated the creation of reports in Excel and PowerPoint with the push of a button. That feeling was powerful and extremely gratifying. The next obvious question is: what else can be automated? You don't realize it at the time, but the object-oriented programming skills you learn from VBA can be carried into web development, Python scripting, and more. Source: The Register While at Georgetown, Ryan was introduced to VBA and quickly started using VBA in all of his classes since he was in Excel all the time. VBA is not the most popular programming language to learn. According to this source, it's popularity has decreased 60% since 2004. Eventually, Microsoft's Office Scripts (a flavor of TypeScript) should, in theory, replace VBA. But for those old Excel macros from the early 2000s, someone has to maintain or migrate those scripts. In addition to VBA, Ryan taught himself Python in his free time while at university. Python wasn't in the regular curriculum at Georgetown, so Ryan learned through Codeacademy. He built programs to scrape Twitter to calculate sentiment in Tweets. When Dogecoin came onto the scene in 2013, Ryan built a mini super computer with four Raspberry Pis to mine Dogecoin. He wrote a Python script to tie everything together so that he would get a Tweet when he successfully mined some Dogecoin. Source: Coincu News M&A modeling at Credit Suisse An investment banking job right out of college used be a coveted position since you get to learn a lot of analytical skills on the job. When Ryan first got into banking, he tried to get as much as he could out of the experience. He broke down his experience into three mental models: * Perception - This is the part of the job where you're doing the actual work. Modeling, analyzing financial statements, spreading comps, and putting together decks. You're mostly being paid to execute,