I've spent 10+ years turning data into an unfair competitive advantage.

I'm Malcolm Angus, in San Francisco . I've never fit one title: analytics engineer by trade, data product manager by instinct, forward-deployed engineer by necessity. I've done the work at every altitude: keyboard-level pipelines, principal-level analytics at Atlassian, founding and running the data team at an SEO agency, and now building agentic data systems at Retool. I work both ends of the mess: greenfield 0 → 1, the first data product where there is no pipeline, no agreed metric, and no obvious place to begin; and brownfield data work, wiring new AI and data into a company that already has systems, politics, and a real process that lives in people's heads instead of the documentation. The through line is ownership: being the one person accountable for whether a data product changes a decision, not just whether it ships.

Along the way I kept meeting the same gap. Companies collect data for years, call it a moat in the pitch deck, and never build the loop that would make it one. The engineering is rarely the hard part. The hard part is strategy: choosing the decision worth improving, instrumenting outcomes instead of events, and resisting the platform until it hurts.

That gap is what this site is about. I write essays on data products, moats, flywheels, business strategy, and how markets really work, the same questions my day job keeps circling back to.

The bull? Angus. Family name. You can thank my ancestors for bringing the steak 🐂 to the USA.