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Nick Sinai

Managing Director, Insight Partners · 1 appearance on the record.

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investoracademicauthorpoliticianLinkedIn ↗insightpartners.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Nick Sinai is a Managing Director at Insight Partners, focusing on public sector, gov-tech, and national security investments. He previously served as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer under President Obama and co-authored the book Hack Your Bureaucracy.

11statements → 9claims → 9claims resolved → 89%fully supported → 4.09/5average certainty → 1.27/5average debate potential →

8 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

9 assertions · 1 insight · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 9 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Nick argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
NOAA collects 20 terabytes of weather data daily but releases only 10%
“They still have 20 terabytes of data that they collect and create a day around weather, and they're only making 10% of that available.”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 16:06 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
94% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

235 words/min while actually speaking · 66.8 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Nick Sinai: only 2 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,850 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Nick Sinai said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Tracking dataset quantity creates perverse incentives for government open data
“If you're just counting and you tell the bureaucracy that, that the numbers are important, and even if you don't explicitly say that, but implicitly, if you have folks in the minute, senior officials that keep using higher and higher numbers, it encourages peo…”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 8:42 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
NOAA collects 20 terabytes of weather data daily but releases only 10%
“They still have 20 terabytes of data that they collect and create a day around weather, and they're only making 10% of that available.”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 16:06 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
The U.S. federal government spends about $80 billion annually on IT
“We spend about eighty billion dollars in federal IT”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 1:50 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
Barack Obama signed a 2013 executive order prioritizing open, machine-readable data
“In 2013, the president signed, ah an executive order making open and machine readable the new default for government information.”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 3:50 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Partly supported
The U.S. federal government spends $140 billion annually on research and development
“We spend a hundred and forty billion dollars a year in research and development.”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 4:33 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
Data.gov is open-source on GitHub, built with CKAN and WordPress
“So we moved it to an open source project. So it's now CCAN and WordPress. It's on GitHub, so you can actually log an issue or put your, put some feedback. We're pushing code, I think every four weeks or so.”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 8:06 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
Google and Bing source their drug knowledge panels from FDA and HHS
“If you use a major search platform Google, or Bing, or others, and I guess a major search platform and you put in a drug name you'll see in the knowledge box, or knowledge panel, or something like that, you'll see a bunch of information, and sourced will be th…”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 13:03 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
Federal agencies like Commerce, Energy, and Transportation are appointing Chief Data Officers
“Department of Commerce is hiring for a Chief Data Officer. Department of Energy is hiring for Chief Data Officer. Department of Transportation just hired a Chief Data Officer. So you see a number of Cabinet-level agencies that are hiring them.”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 19:30 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
The unmarketed IRS GetTranscript tool increased annual digital requests to 12 million
“The IRS launched this thing in 2014 with really no marketing called GetTranscript, and they went from three million, kind of, paper, ah, requests served a year. Now there are over twelve million, ah, ah, requests served a year”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 21:07 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
The White House asks agencies to classify data into three access tiers
“One of the practical ways that we're asking agencies to deal with this is to really think about data in three, three classes. There's stuff that is public, there's stuff that is restricted public, and there's stuff that is non-public”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 24:07 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
Nick Sinai was a venture capitalist at Lehman Brothers during its collapse
“So I was in, in the business world for about 10 years, and I was a venture capitalist, ah, for about five years after business school, and I was actually on my honeymoon, and I opened up the newspaper, and it says Lehman Brothers goes bust. Ah, the challenge w…”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 0:30 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Cap Oct 16, 2014 19m
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