🎓 CAREER TRACK

Worth Backing?

SQL and Python together, the way analysts work now, learned on four years of an accelerator's records. Six tables about Lanternfield, a fictional accelerator and seed fund: 1,000 applications with their plans, pitches and revenue, what happened to each, the research team's markets, and month by month metrics for the 91 startups it funded. You query them with DuckDB inside Python, clean the 30 faults planted in them with a record of every decision, analyze them with pandas, chart them with matplotlib, and turn the results into the investment committee's spring decision: which ten of eighty pending applications to back with 2.5 million dollars. One brief, one notebook for the whole book, seventeen tasks: one per chapter of the book Worth Backing?, each with an automatic Python check. Everything runs in the browser, nothing to install. Python names live in the browser session: after reopening the project, press Run all before running anything else, so that every earlier block rebuilds what later blocks use.