An Interview with Jeff Ma

The House Advantage

In college, Jeff Ma was apart of MIT’s famous blackjack team. This experience led to Jeff being the basis of the book Bringing Down the House and the movie 21. Jeff want on to found Citizen Sports, which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year. To say he is brilliant at math is an understatement of epic proportions.

I was lucky enough to interview him for his first book, The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big In Business, about businesses using calculated risk-taking. What I like about this book is that while Jeff’s mathematical skills are light years ahead of mine, the book was written in a way that small business owners can understand. What’s also cool is that Trada received several shout outs in the book.

One of the first questions I asked Jeff was what are most small businesses missing when it comes to data? What Jeff said makes sense. Small businesses aren’t comfortable with data until they have the right resources/people to deal with it. But Jeff encourages small businesses to realize that they don’t have to be perfect. They just need to start collecting data because you’ll always make better decisions with a data-driven approach. In his book, he cited how at Trada, we know that a certain percentage will convert with paid-search campaigns, but business owners can be nervous about the results at first. They have to trust that the percentage will work, and not to give up if there isn’t immediate success after paying for a couple days of clicks.

While data is king, Jeff talked about situations that require judgment. He cited an example of when he was with the MIT Blackjack team in Shreveport, and they felt they were under surveillance by the casino. They had to take the information and signals they were receiving and decide whether to continue playing or leave. It was examples like these that made this book more interesting than most.  According to Jeff, “Think about the opportunity costs associated with your actions and make sure your judgment is not being clouded by greed or impatience.”

Another example I really loved from The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business was his experience helping the Portland Blazers with choosing college basketball players. He came up with a mathematical model to help determine college players chance of succeeding in the NBA based on their past performance and what position they would play and then his team would report back to the Blazers. The Blazers asked how they could get their rankings to reflect Jeff’s rankings. Jeff’s response was that they shouldn’t. I loved his quote, “We use analytics because they help make smart decisions. They aren’t supposed to mimic human observation; they are simply a tool to measure what human observation can’t.”

We definitely recommend this book to any business owner – big or small – to help make better data-driven decisions. We’ll be doing a drawing for a copy of Jeff’s book. All you have to do is leave a comment, and we’ll do a random drawing to pick the winner.