History
Competitive Advantage Research was founded in April, 2013, in order to satisfy demand for data analytics which founder Jon Reznick had stimulated with his blog about NYC election campaign expenditures—2013 being a major election year in New York. Jon has attained specialties in SQL databases, Linux administration, micro-services architecture, and Python software programming.
In 2015, Sam Hudis joined the firm, bringing fire-power in both cartography and geographic information systems (GIS)—with considerable experience using ArcGIS Pro by ESRI.
We started by building the tools we wanted to have and we have continuously released new products for clients together for over half a decade at this point. Some of our odd flexes (that we talk about) include doing the following with our software and data.
We:
Automated turf-cutting and do our processing overnight, meaning we literally cut turf in our sleep
Predicted a political corruption arrest using campaign finance data
Identified a cooperating federal witness using campaign finance data and indictment details
Won a finalist prize from NYC DOITT for a method to forecast public school enrollment using tax lot data, US Census ACS-5 data, and other sources
Broke a campaign finance story 11 weeks before the New York Times did the same story
Partly inspired the story which provoked the lawsuit, and the lawsuit got the emails
Contributed testimony to the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption
Partners
©2019 Kent Meister
Partner
Sam Hudis
Sam is a full stack software/GIS engineer, cartographer, and former campaign field director who started in politics as an activist before becoming a technologist.
Sam’s years of bringing geographic and GIS expertise to political data have included authoring tens of thousands of maps of political, finance, and demographic data, the development and mass production of algorithmically derived shortest geographic walking paths for canvassing, as well as prize recognition by the New York City Department of Education for expertise in developing a predictive model for the growth of public elementary school class sizes.
Sam has a B.A. in political Science from George Washington University, and is also a licensed airplane pilot.
©2019 Kent Meister
Partner
Jon Reznick
Jon has worked in operative politics continuously since 2010; he previously worked for an ad agency on two major television brand websites; before that he was an operations manager for a streaming media software and network provider in the Financial District, where he worked with Global 1000 companies.
He started in politics as a portrait photographer and digital strategist, and spent many years capturing the social graph of politics… as 8x10 glossy color photographs. After he became treasurer of the New York State Young Democrats—an entity which files campaign finance records the same way politicians do—Jon began to turn his attention to the data. He founded Competitive Advantage Research in order to weaponize his new hobby in campaign analytics and has spent the past seven years teaching himself full-stack technology in order to develop new political capabilities.
Jon has a degree in Film & TV Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.