He seems to have done a pretty good job of negotiating his contracts with respect to owning a lot of his model IP moving forward. Still needs to find a platform/pub moving forward of course but far from starting from scratch.
> Much of FiveThirtyEight’s vital intellectual property — such as the election forecast models — is merely licensed to Disney. The license term for these models expires with my contract this summer. I still own these models, and can license or sell them elsewhere.
This is one hell of an agreement to have with your employer. That was my next question given that most of FiveThirtyEight was Nate's own work, and he had very good insight to have an escape hatch.
I really hope to have the power to do this one day.
What interest would the Mouse have in numerical models? They want entertainment IP, not weird programs that they have no experience marketing or hiring people to run. They’re not just going to transfer it over to Pixar so the guys behind Cars 2 can predict the next election.
Disney wants the talent. It’s just not as valuable to them as keeping Nate happy
Disney is a multi industry conglomerate interested in understanding/manipulating public policy and political trends through numerical models in the same way you would be interested in your local politics and it's trends.
They're also not just after "entertainment IP". In fact I'd say they are one of the premier proprietary data analytics orgs with respect to park management, fast passing, queuing. Same with Market Research on film/animation, they've quite literally been doing it since it's been a thing.
I wouldn't presume that most of it is Nate's own work. (I suspect that for most sports he is delegating but "owns" the output, he does seem to directly build most of the political stuff.)
Isn't this what the Skype guys pulled off with Microsoft too?
Nate got his start in this world doing baseball forecasting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PECOTA), well before he delved into politics. Jay Boice definitely doing much of the heavy lifting these days, and deserves more personal recognition than he currently gets. But I wouldn't discount the amount of work Nate personally put in on the sports front.
I don't entirely disagree. We know from his public statements that he personally builds the political models. I think he is personally invested in the baseball modelling but we know it is a team effort and 538 is doing a lot. Nate is a media figure, he has to delegate.
Wow... if that's true, it's some real amateur hour idiocy. As much as I like the brand, I'd trivially stick with Nate, especially if he somehow got the old band back together: Harry, Claire, etc.
I'm not sure how much I'd read into that. Maybe some Disney execs have seller's remorse (or never wanted to sell in the first place). But, at the end of the day, a lot of the "IP" is pretty much public in considerable detail. (That said, having some explicit ownership is a good way to avoid unnecessary haggling with lawyers.) And if Disney had actually wanted the full analytic and writing ability of FiveThirtyEight surely even an entertainment exec would realize you're giving that up if you let those people go.
