July 16, 2009.
“Stephen! How are you? Give me a second. Let me clear out my office. I was just finishing up a meeting,” Sebastin said enthusiastically as soon as he recognized the caller.
“I can call back later…,” Stephen said. As he was accustomed to at this point, nobody stuck around to hear his last words. He was talking to himself again.
About a minute later, Sebastin returned to the phone after ushering the others out of the room. “Alright, the room’s empty. I have the files you e-mailed me open on my screen. So what have you found?”
“First things first,” Stephen replied. “Let me tell you what I did. I started by doing exactly what we talked about, finding everyone who bought one of the books. The procedure I used was to . . .” and he continued his monologue for three minutes. He knew it was unlikely Sebastin was interested, but he had also learned from working with all the other advertisers in the past few weeks that his results never seemed as impressive to them as when they were derived in some mostly unintelligible manner that suitably confused them. “. . . so, in the first file I sent you, are all the people who purchased a book from your list within the last year.”
“That file looks huge. How many people did you find?”
“29,084. I also included their e-mail addresses. I thought you would probably want those.”
“Wonderful, this is truly wonderful,” Sebastin said.
“That’s just the beginning,” Stephen said happily. “That number was too big, of course. So, first, I found all the people who bought at least two books. Then I went ahead and checked which ones of those wrote about the books in their e-mails or instant messages. These people are the high-priority ones. Warn them first. They’re the most likely to be talking about the books in public, writing messages about them, and so on.”
“You scanned through all of their e-mails? Really?”
“Just the ones who used our own e-mail service. Fortunately, from what I remember, that’s most of them. Anyway, I found 2,423 people. The entire processing took less than two minutes.” It was always fun to boast about Ubatoo’s massive computing resources. A couple years ago, nobody wanted to hear about how many machines were used or how long the processing took. It was just in the past year that the number of machines grew so astronomically large that even the average advertising client, or charity client in this case, cared.
“Amazing. Just amazing.”
“Yeah. It really is. But, wait, there’s more!” he said. He always used this line in his presentations to advertisers. It was a bit cheesy, a bit too much like he was selling a set of knives in an infomercial, but if the advertiser liked the results already, this only endeared them further to the presentation.
“Alright. I’m all ears.”
“Now, this is something I didn’t quite understand, but I checked it a bunch of times to make sure it was right. In the process of doing this analysis, I had to cluster the buyers and books.” Without Sebastin’s expression to judge, Stephen couldn’t be sure whether Sebastin had any idea what clustering meant. “I mean, I grouped the results together so I could find correlations between the books by using the people who bought them as signals. Basically, I created a bipartite graph and propagated the signals originating from each node . . .” Too much again. He stopped talking there, realizing all this was probably far more gibberish than Sebastin had bargained for.
“What I’m trying to say is that if I look just at the people who bought more than one book on your list, almost all of them only bought books from a tiny set of sixty books. Doesn’t that seem strange?” Stephen waited for Sebastin to digest this.
Sebastin didn’t respond, so Stephen tried to explain it one last time, “Out of the 960 books, 900 of them were random—they had nothing to do with that tiny set of 60. In other words, 900 books were just a distraction. It was almost like someone in your group just stuck them in there to make this task more challenging for me. Does that sound plausible?”
More silence on the other end of the phone. Stephen waited patiently, but when a minute had passed without a sound, he had to say something. “Sebastin? You still there?”
“Yes, yes. I’m here. Sorry, just thinking. That is very strange. I have no explanation for why that is.” Some typing started in the background. “That is the small list of books in your third attachment? I’ll look into that. Let me think . . .”
Another long pause arose before Sebastin spoke again. “This is certainly a lot of information for me to absorb.” He sounded distant.
Stephen feared he was losing Sebastin, so he quickly went on before Sebastin had time to make an excuse about having to leave, or being called into a different meeting. Most advertisers resorted to any number of excuses the moment the analyses started getting too hairy.
But Sebastin had no intention of cutting the call short before he understood absolutely everything Stephen had to say. He was quiet only because he was trying his best to make sure he could follow every step. Sebastin was thankful for the conversations he had endured with the engineers at his old company, iJenix—otherwise, he’d be struggling far more than he was right now.
Stephen launched into a discussion of Lucy, profiles, and hallucinations and archetypes. These were all words that Sebastin thought he knew the meaning of, but certainly not in this context. It was only when Stephen started winding down that Sebastin could begin to understand again.
“Remember when I said that I thought books were a . . . well, ridiculous thing to look at that didn’t make sense to me? This is my way of getting around that. Sebastin, this is really important. This is what you should have been asking me for . . .”
Stephen finally paused for a breath before the final push. “I found people like Lucy. The list of books that Lucy read is just one of her attributes. But she’s more complex than that. There are other attributes about her that are just as important—what she bought, which web sites she visited, what she was interested in—what she searched for, and where she traveled . . . Even if some of the people who are like Lucy didn’t read the same books, so what? Many of the people I found are just like her in other ways, I mean dead-on, exact, matches—and some have read the books, some haven’t. That’s not really what’s important. What do you think?”
“I gave you a list of books—and this is what you came up with?”
Stephen couldn’t tell if Sebastin was angry or happy. He didn’t know what to say.
Sebastin continued, “That’s incredible. I’m speechless.”
“Exactly right. Me and my girl, Lucy,” Stephen said, delighted.
Sebastin, though, had one more question to ask before he was ready to share fully in the happiness, “How many people are on this list?”
“5,000.”
Stephen explained further, “What I mean is that I just gave you the top 5,000 people to keep it simple. They’re all pretty good matches, but it is sorted. The people on top are the ones who matched Lucy the most closely; the people toward the bottom matched less. So, if you’re going to go after the highest-risk people on this list, start at the top.”
If Stephen could have seen Sebastin, he would have found a man in a state of excitement that went beyond the surprise witnessed by wide-open eyes and a mouth agape. The emotion for Sebastin was a combination of stunned, contented, aware, done. “5,000 people—this, this is really a lot to digest so fast, Stephen. This has really surpassed all my expectations. Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure. Hope that it does you some good.”
“It will. I’m sure of it. Listen, Stephen, let me take you out to lunch to thank you in person . . .” They set a time and exchanged pleasant well wishes.
Stephen was ecstatic. Someone had made it through all of his analyses, and even though he wasn’t sure Sebastin had completely understood, he seemed to genuinely appreciate it.
It was approaching 4 p.m. Finally, Stephen’s to-do list for the day was empty. The company-wide “rally the troops” meeting was getting ready to begin; he gladly would have skipped it to hear about Kohan’s night. But, alas, Kohan and the rest were still nowhere to be found.