Primordial Aspect • RESEARCH LAB
Portrait of Jonathan Dahan

Jonathan Dahan

Data scientist. Founder of Primordial Aspect.

I studied mathematics and became a data scientist. I built credit risk models from bank transaction data, for a financial institution and for startups, and learned early that data says more than it first appears to.

I founded a fintech, then an intelligence company whose clients included firms across South Asia. Primordial Aspect brings both together: a lab that turns thirty years of scattered public records into something that can be read as a whole.

Most of what matters about a company was made public at some point. Almost nobody reads it together. That's the problem I decided to work on.

I write often on technology and economics, and about findings from the lab. Some of it goes on my Substack.

I'm a father of two. I hike, and I train most days.

Lines I return to

  1. “You cannot step twice into the same river.”
    Heraclitus, fragment B91, as reported by Plato, Cratylus (402a)
  2. “In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
    Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa”, in Summer (L’Été), 1954
  3. “Wanderer, there is no road; the road is made by walking.”
    Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla (1912), “Proverbios y cantares”, XXIX
  4. “Fight life, not men.”
    Mohed Altrad, in conversation
  5. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
    G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), Preface
  6. “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
    Unattributed
  7. “Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering…”
    Marc Andreessen, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, a16z, October 2023