Guest: Annie Duke - Special Partner at First Round Capital. Annie Duke is a former professional poker player, author of the bestselling book "Thinking in Bets," and a decision-making consultant for companies. Key Takeaways: Independent Discovery: To improve decision-making, gather opinions independently and asynchronously before group discussions. This reduces bias from dominant voices and ensures diverse input. Pre-Mortems with Kill Criteria: Use pre-mortems to identify potential failure signals and set pre-commitment actions if those signals appear, enhancing decision quality and timing. Shorten Feedback Loops: There is no inherently long feedback loop; identify correlated short-term indicators to assess long-term decisions, such as funding rounds in venture capital. Explicit Over Implicit: Make implicit assumptions explicit to examine and improve decision quality, as intuition can be both right and wrong. Alignment vs. Reality: Avoid striving for complete alignment in decisions; focus on understanding diverse opinions and making informed decisions despite disagreements. Topics Covered: Decision-making frameworks, independent discovery, pre-mortems, feedback loops, explicit vs. implicit assumptions, alignment in decision-making, venture capital decision analysis.
“It's so incredibly necessary in improving decision quality to take what's implicit and make it explicit.”
“By the time you quit, it's probably long after the point you should have quit.”
“Waste is a prospective problem, not a retrospective one.”
