John Friedman
- Managing Director, ESG and Sustainability Services, Grant Thornton LLP (US)
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Sustainability strategy, reporting & communication: Someday we'll just call it 'business.'
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Articles by John Friedman
Rising anti-LGBTQ+ censorship efforts pull directly from the playbooks of modern authoritarian leaders
John Friedman,Madison Markham Thu, June 11, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC 5 min read Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A display of LGBTQ+ books at a California bookstore Across the U.S., a campaign to seclude and suppress queer and trans lives from public visibility is continuing to spread.
Rising anti-LGBTQ+ censorship efforts pull directly from the playbooks of modern authoritarian leaders
Across the U.S., a campaign to seclude and suppress queer and trans lives from public visibility is continuing to spread. In public schools, libraries, universities, art galleries, museums, government websites, and national monuments, we are seeing art, books, terms, and symbols of LGBTQ+ identity disappear at a quickening pace. We don’t need to wonder where this is coming from or where it’s going. Wielding state power against LGBTQ+ communities has been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.
FO Talks: Public Anthropology in the Age of Startup Universities and Profit-Driven Education
Fair Observer’s Communications and Outreach officer, Roberta Campani, speaks with Professor John Friedman, a public anthropologist who spent over two decades teaching at University College Roosevelt, part of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. They diagnose the neoliberal transformation of higher education, the erosion of academic freedom and the uncertain future of the humanities. Friedman begins by recounting the moment his university abruptly dismissed roughly 30% of its staff.
The World’s Top Universities of 2026
Consider two students who apply to college with an SAT score of 1500, one from a family in the top 1% and another from a middle-class family. The student from the high-income family is more than twice as likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college as students from middle class families. A student whose parents are business executives are far more likely to be admitted to top-ranked colleges than a student with the same high school test scores and grades whose parents are teachers or bus drivers.
Datamule Cloud V2
I need to rework datamule cloud to support a larger userbase. The following text goes into why I need a new pricing model, what it will look like, the offerings, and the basic architecture. Trust Datamule was built with trust in mind. Specifically that I do not trust you, and that you shouldn't trust me. When I started datamule, I had just left my PhD program. I had no reputation, and there was a possibility that I would stop maintaining the project.
Prospective NLP API
Here is a task that should be simple and cheap - from an 8 terabyte (~1 trillion tokens) corpus of pdf, html, and text legal documents, extract persons' full names per document. It is currently not cheap or simple. For example, extracting entities using Google Cloud Natural Language would cost about $1 million. Here is a rough draft for a pipeline that would cost around $50: Extract sentences from the documents for processing. I've open-sourced a performant parser here.
August Update
Over the summer I figured out how to quickly deploy cloud infrastructure. I released several cloud offerings and retooled my existing cloud resources. A websocket to notify users of new SEC submissions. Company Fundamentals Database XBRL Database going back to 2005 Proxy Voting Records Database Institutional Holdings Database Insider Transactions Database Moved my SEC archive (every submission since 1995) off of a spare laptop and onto a joint AWS and Cloudflare architecture.
Datamule Cloud (7/12/25)
Last month I got into Cloudflare for Startups as well as AWS Activate. This gave me resources to move stuff into the cloud. t4g.nano using monitor_submissions to poll the RSS feed every 200ms t4g.nano using monitor_submissions to validate using EFTS endpoint every 60s. (Catches submissions the RSS misses) t4g.micro websocket written in Go, to stream new submissions to users.
Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy-Plus Colleges
This study examines the relationship between standardized test scores (SAT/ACT), high school GPA, and first-year college grades. We use data from admissions and transcript records at multiple Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy-Plus includes the eight Ivy League colleges plus Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford). Our research highlights three key findings. First, SAT and ACT scores have substantial predictive power for forecasting first-year college GPA.
Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy-Plus Colleges
We thank Sian Beilock, Zachary Bleemer, Liz Cascio, Raj Chetty, Nathan Hendren, David Leonhardt, Adam Looney, and Andrei Shleifer, and numerous seminar participants for helpful comments. This paper incorporates input from the work of Cascio et al. (2024). We are indebted to Hamidah Alatas and Arjun Shanmugam for their outstanding research assistance.
Month 6
Journaling John Friedman · Follow 4 min read · -- Decided to return to documenting my progress here again. For a few months I used ODF’s private weekly digest, but realized that I’d rather have more control over my data. Might throw it through an LLM at some point. Last Month Optimized secsgml parsing in cython. Ported secsgml to Rust. Performance was slightly worse — not unexpected, cython is pretty optimized. However, Rust is better at parallel processing. Might give it another chance.
Hosting the SEC archive
John Friedman · Follow 3 min read · -- I’m currently working on hosting the SEC archive. I’m doing this for a couple reasons: The SEC archive unzipped is at least 12tb of data There is a lot of SEC data that is not easily accessible as it is stored in SGML submission txt files The SEC has strict rate limits. Around 5 requests / second, or 30 mb/s of egress.
Week 3
Took some time off to travel. Consistent pattern of code becomes complex => I figure out how to simplify it and make it much better => burst of progress => bloat => repeat. Simplified website design. Last iteration was to test how hard it was to add features, e.g. auth. Current iteration has better UI and is easier to debug. Added redirects using Cloudflare dashboard. Made parser a LOT simpler and faster. Added a lot of useful features, so now it needs a rewrite.
Week 2
This week I worked on improving the parser. Reduced complexity by finding a simpler ruleset to parse SEC filings. The solution felt obvious and is simple to implement. Switched from adding background colors to parsed html, to generating new html trees. I love this change as it both improves the debugging process, and is easy for users to check quality of data. I received an email from YC inviting me to apply to the next batch, as I was in the top 5% of applications in S24.
Week 1
I’ve committed to working on a startup for a few months. Learn cool stuff, build something useful, and profit. The startup path seems like the best way to improve the product for users. The most useful feature so far is parsed filings in a database. Open-source lacks the necessary compute/storage, and I can’t pay myself a stipend. What I did this week Compared HTML parsing in Node.js, Python, and C. Python’s with was faster than all but the C implementation, though it's slow to load HTML into memory.
David Deming and John Friedman on Highly Selective College Admissions
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, selective colleges, and their admissions practices, have received a lot of scrutiny. Does going to a highly selective college affect long-term outcomes? How much preference are legacy applicants given? To what extent does socioeconomic background influence chances of admission? And how can highly selective colleges improve social mobility and diversify the American elite? In a new paper, Diversifying Society’s Leaders?
Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges
The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Treasury Department, the College Board, ACT, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. This work was conducted under IRS contract TIRNO-16-E-00013 and reviewed by the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Treasury.
'Trust, but verify' to attract investors
John Friedman John Friedman One day what we call #ESG will just be called "business" | Global Background & Experience Published Apr 27, 2023 After attending the New York Energy Capital Assembly hosted by The Energy Council last week, I came away with two important and interconnected observations around a singular concept: trust.
Which New York team will bring the next Champion's Cup to Gotham?
To the dismay of New York sports fans, no New York professional team has lifted the championship trophy and been honored with a ribbon ribbon at a parade at the Canyon of Heroes in over a decade. Who will be next? Yankee superstar Aaron Judge will receive the keys to New York City from Mayor Eric Adams at a city hall ceremony in the near future. That’s good after last year’s AL record 62 HRs helped earn him MVP honors. But where are the rest of his teammates?
How CFOs can lead on ESG now
ESG is an area of increasing focus for CFOs. In Grant Thornton’s CFO survey for the third quarter of 2021, 57% of respondents reported that prioritization of ESG efforts has increased since January 2020. And 87% of respondents indicate that, when it comes to corporate decision making, ESG is either a major consideration, a consideration equal to financial success, or a fundamental business driver.
COP26 likely to accelerate focus on climate and ESG
The 26th United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) Climate Change Conference (COP26) begins Nov. 1 in Glasgow, Scotland.
"Carmelite Propaganda in a Fifteenth-Century French Gradual Fragment" by John B. Friedman
Home > Journals > RMMRA > Vol. 8 (1987) Keywords Carmelites, mendicant orders, propoganda Abstract The late Middle Ages was a difficult period for the mendicant orders. Many of their claims to be the "New Apostles," with special efficacy in the confessional, the pulpit, and the classroom—as Penn Szittya has recently shown—were under sharp attack.
The Bruce Wayne/Batman Paradox and the Rise of ESG - CHC: Creating Healthier Communities
John Friedman, Manager, Sustainability for WGL With an international career spanning 2 decades, John Friedman is an award-winning communications professional and recognized sustainability expert who has helped some of the leading global companies to integrate their operational, financial, and cultural aspirations into sustainable and responsible business practices.
Six Key GOP Senators Could Tip the Balance on the American Jobs Plan
This Thursday, Republican senators from Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wyoming will meet with President Joe Biden at the White House to discuss infrastructure. These six senators could determine the fate of the president’s ambitious American Jobs Plan proposal. They could help ensure that the American economy leaps to the head of the global decarbonization race - or they could enable other nations to leave the U.S. behind in the dust. Why these six states?
Lenders Should Be Clamoring to Lend to Women Entrepreneurs. Why Aren’t They?
Who are the lowest risks for banks? Women entrepreneurs, new research reveals. If only we were getting credit for it. (And yes, I mean that in both senses of the word.) Knowing that women receive less than 5 percent of small business loans, CNote partnered with ICA Fund Good Jobs, an Oakland, California–based community development financial institution that invests in high-potential businesses, to find out if women are riskier borrowers.
Is Agriculture the Missed Opportunity in Climate Investment?
In this year of increased focus on climate action leading up to COP 26 UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, investors may be overlooking a sector ready to be harvested for its unique ability to fight the climate crisis - agriculture. In fact, some $972 billion flowing annually into the agriculture value chain could be channeled into transformative investment that would accelerate the adoption of climate-smart agriculture, according to a new report.
Those Intangible Assets Matter More than Ever. Here’s Why.
We have all heard that measuring what matters is how successful businesses are run. As for what are often called “intangible assets,” that has long been a different conversation. Research points to the inescapable conclusion that we are emphasizing measurement on what used to matter, whereas the focus and robust attention needs to shift to what matters in today’s world – environmental, social and governance (ESG) actions and impacts.
Measuring What Matters Most
The increase in value of ‘intangible’ assets over time We have all heard that measuring what matters is how successful businesses are run. Research points to the inescapable conclusion that we are emphasizing measurement on what used to matter, whereas the focus and robust attention needs to shift to what matters in today’s world — environmental, social and governance.
Report: Are Silver Linings Enough When Corporate Climate Commitments Are ‘Stagnating?’
Investors are continuing to show their concern over the progress that their assets – as their shares of companies’ securities - are making toward Paris Agreement goals. This year’s State of Transition Report from the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI), a corporate climate commitments benchmark initiative led by investors, dives into industry progress toward a low-carbon economy.
April Fools: Celebrating Things Bosses Said that Inspired Good Employees … to Quit
We have all heard stories of the truly egregious things that supervisors have said (and done) to subordinates that make us wonder how they were ever put in a position of authority. In cases like intimidation, harassment, claiming subordinates’ work as their own, engaging in falsehoods, playing favorites, pitting peers against each other, etc. there is no excuse.
Who Spent Their Stimulus Checks?
Raj Chetty & John N. Friedman & Michael Stepner New York Times February 9, 2021 AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File Companies and financial analysts use timely data to make better business decisions. It's time for Washington to do it, too. Read Full Article »
Opinion | How All Americans Can Benefit From the Tools of the Information Age
As President Biden works with Congress to pass the American Rescue Plan, policymakers are debating who should receive the next round of stimulus checks. The essence of the debate boils down to simple questions: Which Americans need help right now? Will they spend the money they get at struggling businesses, which might then bring their employees back to work and get our economy going again?
H&M to Boost Digital Payments For Supply Chain Workers
On Wednesday during International Women’s Day, H&M made headlines in some fashion blogs for the release of its new unisex denim clothing line. But another H&M announcement made on Wednesday could make a far bigger difference: The fast-fashion giant will join the United Nation’s Better Than Cash Alliance.
Lessons from a Very Difficult Year
Life presents us with opportunities to learn lessons every day; whether we choose to take the lessons to heart is up to us. 2020 has provided exceptional opportunities for learning by forcing us to face exceptionally difficult circumstances. The first, most obvious challenge has been a massive global pandemic. But what are the lessons? First, of course, is the lesson the need to listen to the experts who warn us about possibilities of threats.
Shark Tank Star Gets COVID-19 Response Right, So Where Are the ‘Real’ Business Leaders?
In a classic case of fiddling while Rome burns, President Trump continues to ignore pleas for a national plan on a COVID-19 response even as the crisis reaches new heights of destruction. High profile CEOs have so far failed to rally their peers to press for action, but Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary finally set the tone earlier this week, when he deployed his media platform to make the case for coordinated federal action on COVID-19.
Beyond the Pandemic: Lessons from a Very Difficult Year
Whether we chose to take this year’s painful lessons to heart is up to us. 2020 has not only not been an exception; it has provided exceptional opportunities for learning by forcing us to face exceptionally difficult circumstances. The first most obvious challenge has been a massive global pandemic. But what are the lessons? First, of course, is the lesson the need to listen to the experts who warn us about possibilities of threats.
Re-Inventing the Wheel: How CEOs Are Driving the Sustainable Tire of the Future
When the internal combustion engine is phased out and zero-emission electric vehicles rule the road, we’ll still have tires. Lots of tires. After all, there is no substitute for the tire as we know it today — and these everyday objects are more complex than you might think. Of course we’re all familiar with the outer tread made from synthetic and natural rubber, but tires also include , including steel, nylon, polyester and rayon.
A Lesson in Crisis Management: Seven Women on a Life-or-Death Mission to Restore Trust
With more than two months to go before taking office, President-elect Joe Biden has already made fighting the COVID-19 pandemic his top priority, which means that his communications team will play a crucial role in an effort that could save tens of thousands of lives. Given that pressure, it is interesting that Biden has nominated women, who will be tasked often with crisis management, to occupy all seven senior positions on the team.
Companies Can’t Afford to Ignore Forced Labor in China Anymore
The more we learn about forced labor and the human rights situation in China, particularly as it affects minority groups including the mostly Muslim Uyghurs and ethnic Tibetans, the worse it gets. Over the past several years, news has broken about the largest system of concentration camps since World War II, the widespread intentional destruction of cultural heritage, and the jailing of peaceful locals for crimes such as "politically incorrect” ideas in cities like Urumqi (shown above).
Female Entrepreneurs Shine Best When They Tell Their Own Stories, In Their Own Words
In the highly-detailed and purposefully-organized 2020 book, "Female Entrepreneurs: the Secrets of Their Success," authors John Smythe and Ruth Saunders don’t tell the stories of accomplished business women — they let the women tell them. And what we learn from their stories is there is no typical female entrepreneur. Women who go on to start their own businesses have a myriad of backgrounds, motivations and goals.
Rock Climbing has an Opportunity to Become More Inclusive - and More Resilient
The rock climbing industry has struggled during the months of the coronavirus pandemic, with an estimated revenue decline of 28 percent in 2020. Despite the steep drop this year, the industry grew by 3.9 percent annually in the United States over the past decade, Australian research company IBISWorld calculates, and climbing was added to the upcoming Tokyo Summer Olympics.
The BUSINESS Lessons from 2020
In an earlier piece I shared how history is full of examples of entrepreneurs who presciently saw the future and seized the innovation high ground. Today, ‘thanks’ to Covid-19, it doesn’t take a crystal ball — or luck — to identify business opportunities. Use your head. Businesses can learn by listening to scientists to determine where to put their development dollars. It is a matter of demand and supply. Infectious diseases will break out (again).
Business Lessons from 2020: COVID-19 is Only the Start
In a recent post, I shared how history is full of examples of entrepreneurs who presciently saw the future and seized the innovation high ground. Today, “thanks” to COVID-19, it doesn't take a crystal ball — or luck — to identify business opportunities. But do keep the following factors in mind: Use your head. Businesses can learn by listening to scientists to determine where to put their development dollars. It is a matter of demand and supply. Infectious diseases will break out (again).
The Lessons of 2020; for 2020
There is no guarantee that there will be a respite before the next global pandemic or catastrophe. Just ask those living along the banks of the Mississippi River who have faced ‘100-year floods’ two and three times since 2015. Listen to scientists and heed their warnings. Science is not perfect, but it does reflect our best understanding.
Thought Leadership is Overrated
The first problem with so many people focusing on “thought leadership” is the myriad of people (and organizations) who confer the title on themselves — rather than understanding that, to be a thought leader, one must be considered such by others.
Author Blogs-John Friedman - Business Expert Press
‘We want to be a loved brand’ is the charge that marketers and communicators hear every day. And yet there are some fundamental lessons from the dating world that they need to consider if they want to build a sustainable relationship and not just engage in a series of one-night stands. You can’t be loved by everyone – nor should you be. We all know that we cannot be loved by everyone we meet, and yet businesses often aspire to be ‘loved’ brands without consider whom they want to love them and why.
In Praise of Imperfection
In corporate responsibility we encourage full transparency in reporting. By sharing what went wrong and the lessons learned, the argument goes, one earns greater trust. It is not that we are voyeurs, seeking to peek at things that might be embarrassing. Like a teacher that asks a student to ‘show all work’ the logic goes, the lessons learned by one organization or company are transferable to others, and hopefully allow others to avoid having to learn the lesson for themselves.
The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data
The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Michael Stepner, The Opportunity Insights Team NBER WORKING PAPER NO. 27431 November 2020 We build a publicly available database that tracks economic activity at a granular level in real time using anonymized data from private companies.
Dr. Mr. Biden: Five Sustainable Suggestions
Dear Mr. Biden, Congratulations on securing the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Forgive me for the intrusion but I have a few thoughts I would like to share from the perspective of a citizen, a voter and a sustainable business perspective. You have pledged to return the US to the Community of Nations that have signed the Paris Agreement to address Climate Change.
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