The newsletter
Alternative Data Weekly
A weekly reading list for the alternative data industry. Every Friday at 7am Eastern since 2020, with commentary on what each piece actually means. Free.
4,500+Subscribers
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The business of data, from the inside.
Table Stakes Data covers the commercial side of the data industry. Who is buying, who is selling, what it is worth, and who is worth knowing.
It is two things. A newsletter that has gone out every Friday since 2020, and the searchable record of every source it has ever cited.
The archive
The Data Industry Index
Every article, podcast, paper and post the newsletter has ever cited, in one searchable table. Tagged by topic, filterable by year and source, with my original commentary attached.
2,500+Sources indexed
Open the indexWho writes it
John Farrall
Founder, Table Stakes Data
I am Chief Commercial Officer at SymetryML, where I run go-to-market for a novel approach to machine learning that is changing how firms work with data at massive scale in the age of AI. I also advise Alternata on data monetization and Dalto on data partnerships for AI application builders.
Before that I spent more than twenty years at the commercial end of the data business. I was a founding equity holder at Cleveland Research Company, which opened in 2006 with no revenue and grew into a highly regarded institutional research firm serving global hedge funds and mutual funds. I co-founded and ran 90 West Data, licensing, marketing and commercializing novel consumer data across financial services and corporate end markets.
I am the author of Advising Midas, a history of sell-side equity research, and I have written Alternative Data Weekly every Friday since 2020.
| Years | Role |
|---|---|
| 2026 to now | Chief Commercial OfficerSymetryML |
| 2024 to 2025 | Director of SalesModuleQ |
| 2023 to 2024 | GTM Strategy & Institutional SalesVertical Knowledge |
| 2020 to now | Creator, Publisher, ProprietorAlternative Data Weekly |
| 2019 to 2023 | Co-founder and CEO90 West Data |
| 2006 to 2019 | Partner, Senior Institutional SalesCleveland Research Company |
| 2003 to 2006 | Institutional SalesFTN Midwest Research |
| 1998 to 2002 | AnalystCrystal Internet Venture Fund |
MBA, Case Western Reserve University. BS in Finance, Penn State, Men's Ice Hockey 1991-95, Captain 1994-95.
Advisory
I help data people
Alongside the newsletter I take on a small number of advisory engagements. These are the ones where my experience compounds instead of resetting. If your problem is not one of these, I will say so and point you at someone better.
01
Zero to one go-to-market
You have a real product and no repeatable way to sell it. I have done this from a standing start four times, beginning with Cleveland Research Company in 2006. The work is unglamorous: positioning a technical buyer will respect, an ICP list that is actually reachable, and a pitch that survives the first twenty conversations.
If the buyer is a hedge fund or an asset manager, that is the audience I have covered for more than twenty years, and I can tell you what earns a meeting.
02
Data monetization and partnerships
You are sitting on data with commercial value and no clear view of what it is worth or who buys it. I built and ran that operating model from scratch at 90 West Data, with distribution through AWS, IEX, BattleFin, Eagle Alpha, Neudata, Snowflake, Crux, Exabel, Maiden Century, CloudQuant, Neuravest, Datarade and SS&C.
Sponsorship
Put your name in front of the industry
Alternative Data Weekly carries a sponsor block at the top of the issue, in front of 4,500+ people who work in and around data every Friday morning. Sponsors have included Carbon Arc, Sequentum and Big Data Federation.
Email is the fastest way to reach me and I answer it myself. Tell me what you are working on and what good looks like ninety days from now.
If I am not the right person for it, I will usually know who is.