She stared down at her notes and then looked up at the crowd. Though not a stranger to crowds and the limelight, this was different. This was pressure; true pressure that she had earned. Amongst the onlookers, there were a few friends, but mostly there were news reporters. She thought to herself, “hmph, well I had always wanted attention”, smiling. As she started to rifle through her notecards, flashes of her past grasped at her consciousness from the far reaches of her mind.

Meet Venice Mariot

Venice Mariot was a unique girl, whose looks had gotten her far in life. But to most, it was not her looks but her name that drew their attention. She was the daughter of a wealthy hotel chain owner, and while interested in celebrity, she also had a particular chip on her shoulder. She was, as her third grade tutor had put it, a smartypants who annoyed to no end.

In high school, she was a fair student, A’s and B’s, but could’ve gone to any school. Her father, after all, was quick with a checkbook. She chose a state school as her horrified mother looked on, dumbfounded. Her classmates knew who she was, of course; everyone knew who she was. On Friday night, her phone would ring, and they’d hear:

“No, Paris, I think I’ll stay in tonight.”

“Sorry Miley, I’ve got a big test tomorrow.”

Despite shenanigans and the usual partying, undergrad was boring…until she took that one class: the class that forever caused her eyes to light up: Machine Learning 101. She was hooked, and she let the world know about it. When she came home, it was deep learning this, and support vector machines that. This went on, and she published her first academic article as an undergraduate while deciding to pursue a Ph.D.

Academics aside, during her studies, there was a single moment that struck her. One day at a conference, a Japanese student approached her. He was slightly awkward, making Venice look more skeptical.

“Great. Well, I haven’t been hit on in a while…,” she thought.

Then he spoke, “Ah Mariot Miss Venice? Ah yes. Ah, I like read your paper on … robust fast 2nd moment approximation for the gradient descent,” as he bowed excessively. “Ah I always think Advisor Clem is very famous to get good research papers.”

At first she couldn’t explain the sense of elation she had at that moment. After all, the guy said Advisor Clem was very famous and not her. A few moments after addressing his questions, she started to think about it. It was the last interaction that was supposed to anger her but caused the opposite reaction. “Advisor Clem is very famous.” He had no idea who she was other than she had published a very well-written paper. The daughter of the great George Mariot was acknowledged, perhaps for the first unequivocal time, for her academic contributions and not for the name Mariot.

After graduation, she received offers, but decided against the larger companies that swept talent up through the weight of their money. After taking several trips to Silicon Valley, she felt lost and retreated to her home, jobless. It was a defining moment for her, the first in which she felt lost. It was then that the bonds of blood showed their metal in the form of her father.

The Great George Mariot

George Mariot always said that he knew gold when he came across it. He prided himself on recognizing value in deals. That ability came about through effort, and George worked hard to get where he was.

But he’d always worked for himself, which granted, was rewarded by being able to pay for anything his children wanted. He would have paid for Venice’s pop star career or her own clothing line, but she wanted neither. It was only until after Venice refused an MIT or Stanford education via a Mariot charitable donation that he began to realize that his problems until then had been solved exclusively with money. Venice’s independence made George realize that, like his businesses, effort and time were more valuable.

It was two days after her 29th birthday, and Venice sat in the living room, ignoring texts that suggested she come out and party. After her return from SFO where she’d interviewed with three small startups, she felt dejected when she realized all three were ad-tech companies waiting to be bought out by a larger ad-tech company. She was scooping out strawberry ice cream from the container with her fingers when her father found her.

George sat down with several financial report printouts, which she would later find out were quite old and irrelevant. “Hmm, I’m not sure why we’re flagging on sales.”

Rolling her eyes, “You should have all those things in a database, Dad. It’d make things so searchable.”

“You know me: old school,” he said, smiling as he started making a mess by scattering them on the couch.

“Ugh, it’s so painful watching you,” she sighed. “How bad is it, anyway?”

“Well, we opened up this hotel here, and it’s doing horribly. I thought it’d do well because Steve Wynn bought in the area.”

Venice stood up and hovered over the scattered sheets of paper, “Not sure I’m surprised, Dad. You’re using that feature? No wonder it’s tanking.”

“Feature? What do you mean, Venice? Is this some of that fancy math talk that you’ve been going on about? That stuff never works.”

Gauntlet thrown, George smiled to himself. The challenge was accepted that night, and Venice angrily worked to prove the value of her time in school. In the days that followed, she applied her knowledge of nonlinear regression and modeling to statistically analyze where to build next and which indicators were the most useful in doing so. In the year that followed, the applied mathematician and businessman began to respect each other’s talents.

Two independent personalities soon realized that they depended on each other. That fateful day after her 29th birthday when she was moping, more than money and talk, Venice had needed guidance. Perhaps it is how all offspring continue businesses, but George beamed with unparalleled pride as though he developed a new brand in the philosophy of life. It wasn’t just that feeling useful and being applied could be a vaccine against sex tapes and scandals, a trap Venice’s counterparts often fell into. It was that George’s focus and hard work could also apply to people as well as business.

A Career

As Venice offered suggestions based on statistical rigor, so called “data science”, the Mariot Hotel Chain began to flourish, with a grand opening in New York selected using previously archived demographic features in the census bureau. And it worked. Hilton and Hyatt quickly moved to replicate Mariot’s success, but were ultimately late to the market and the Mariot reaped its rewards.

George’s confidence in Venice moved him to ask for her consulting on Mariot’s lower tier, longer stay residences in disadvantaged areas. Under different branding (the Care Housing line), few knew that the Mariot name was tied to it. Venice was eager to prove her skills, but as she visited each site, it was compassion that drove her rather than ambition. She began a program to educate and provide life-decision making skills after collecting data on successful residents and using reinforcement learning algorithms.

She believed deeply in her trained models, but at times, she failed. In some cases, she would pay the rent for those who were struggling. As she returned one day from bringing groceries to the Azili family, she noticed a man who was scoffed at a teenage boy, the Azili family’s eldest son, who had dropped his lunch too close the man’s shiney shoes.

“Hey! Don’t kick his food away! If you were a decent human, you’d be helping him pick it up!” she hissed angrily. She put the groceries down, and knelt to aid the teenager.

“Lady, my time is worth way more doing something else. And don’t threaten me. Do you have any idea who I am. I make more than you could ever could.” He paused as if to contemplate whether or not to turn vitriolic. He did. “The gall of you to speak to me that way. Tell you what; I’m a reasonable man. I’ll forget about this and even throw couple of dollars for a few hours with that body of yours.”

Venice looked down at her attire. Yes, maybe her appearance was slightly on the grungier side. But no, she was enraged to the point of tears! The man walked off before further incident, but Venice had never been so furious. In the evening, she called her father to vent. He tried to calm her with a usual refrain from when she was little: breathe and count to three. As their conversation continued, George realized that the man with the shiney shoes happened to be in the state senate. Her father immediately withdrew support as a major donor. Without Mariot dollar support and with new allegations on misconduct, a fortuitous vacancy in the senate opened a month later.

It didn’t take long before the thought entered Venice’s brain that she could seek to fill the recently vacated state senate seat. Again, she called her father, this time in a more collected and thoughtful manner. His response was simple. “Go ahead”, he smiled. “Do…everything.”

George Mariot died of cancer a few years later with Venice by his side. It hit her hard, and she couldn’t bring herself to visit his grave for a long while. Still, she talked to him regularly before bed every night…more frequently when things got rough. After a meeting where easy concepts were “mansplained” to her, she recalled sitting in the lady’s room looking up at the ceiling asking for advice. After a while, she took a deep breath, counted to three, and prepared for a fight as the bathroom stall door flew open.

It would be fifteen years later when Venice would first stop by his grave. “I miss you, Dad. I wish you could have seen what I’ve accomplished.” He knew, of course. Maybe not the specifics, but he’d known for a while…even before he sat next to her after her 29th birthday. He always said he could recognize gold when he came across it.

Final Preparations

Back at the podium, she looked up from her note cards and took a breath…slowly. One. Two. Three. She’d worked hard to get to where she was, something unexpected of many from her echelon. Just then, the moderator, Chris Wallace, called her opponent to the stage, an equally famous brand, though his rise engendered from reality TV and real estate. Her heart skipped beats as he waved at the crowd. And then…just then, she heard her name announced as she stepped out from behind the curtains. She was ready for the 3rd debate for the most unconventional campaign season ever to have graced the United States landscape,

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