Startup life can be all-consuming. Anyone who has ever worked at a budding early-stage company knows the job doesn’t adhere to traditional business hours or routine meals. Here at MarkITx, we’ve witnessed Neil polish off a single-taco lunch with a breakfast sandwich chaser, and pretty much everyone can subsist on KIND bars, pretzels and multiple espresso shots (that’s four for Frank) at all times of the day.
So I suppose we shouldn’t have been too surprised when we discovered Bryan Harakh, our resident data scientist, has been crunching HappyGrams™ in a spreadsheet called LunchMetrics™.
Charted over the course of several months on a mostly-consistent basis, Bryan has combined quantitative data (e.g. the weight and price of his lunch meal) with other factors (lunch location, items, and “HappinessFactor”) to calculate an overall happiness-per-gram metric. Though this value set isn’t yet approaching “big data,” we can now report the following initial findings related to the care and feeding of our Chief Data Scientist:
- Chipotle consistently scores the most HappyGrams™
- Seven on State–though composed of a number of delicious stations–falls quite short of the average
- There seems to be a larger-than-expected variance in portion size–even at the same restaurant and for the same order
- Variety is important: restaurants are rarely visited more than once a week, and restaurants with a wide range of HappyGrams™ per dollar are visited with equal frequency
Building the industry’s first real-time exchange for trading IT equipment requires the right kind of fuel. Any opportunity to improve the efficiency of our technology and operations will be taken seriously. With the data model in place, more of us are going to start using LunchMetrics™. And now that data drives more than fair pricing algorithms around here, we can get smarter about maintaining a well-fed and happy team.
We’ll return for a Q1 update to see if HappyGram levels remain constant and Chipotle continues to eat Taco Fresco’s lunch. Meantime, we’re going to make sure all our data is properly digested by taking Bryan out for his favorite meal. Bon appetit!
