VCs, Decisions, Useless Information

How often do you — consciously or not — delay a decision by gathering useless information? How often do you then skew the decision by overvaluing that useless information.

Will Price in Decision Making and the Venture Capital Process cites some scholarly research on this and relates it directly back to the venture capital decision. Wait for information, delay, receive the information, twist the decision. The skewed decision ultimately justifies the delay. And the beginning assumption is that the extra information shouldn’t have affected the decision, not by delaying, not by affecting, anyhow.

This is definitely worth reading for its impact on venture capital decisions, but also, any management decision. Take it back to your own business, whether or not you’re raising capital: do you do that?

He concludes: “The key take-away is that all of us, when making a decision, need to carefully think through what we absolutely need to know in order to make a good decision, rather than delaying decision making and leaning on the crutch of more time to gather non-essential data that may contribute to a poorer decision.”

Comments

  • Ilya Bodner says:

    Online marketing is proving to be more and more important with each day. During a recent conversation with a customer it was noticed that a website can be compared to a storefront. The comparison went further and we discussed how a caller (from online marketing) is just like a shopper coming up to the cash register or asking to speak with an associate. The trick to online website is to position your business on a prime real state corner, in other words make yourself visible via search engines or community sites. This is not an easy task and is filled with fierce competition. Although a small business owner can do that the fear is that its too time consuming and will pull the owner away from the other responsibilities. Going back to my conversation with the small business owner who was looking for a business loan or some sort of financing we talked about his idea and how market it online. He wanted $100k loan for an “anniversary reminder email service” which would do just that – email a reminder of an anniversary, or any other important date. To him the website was everything but the people he chose to run it were not the best fit. The small business owner tossed and turned for a while during our discussion about his business profile and what we discovered was that he was spending too much time in the business itself.

    In the few minutes of conversing we jumped around from one topic to another (as portrayed in the above paragraph) but the message was loud and clear. He had to get professionals to do the specific job function needed for his business. Whether its online exposure, or building business credit, or building a website – each task has its own professional to utilize.

    As always, I encourage those that search for business credit assistance to simply google “strong business credit” and choose from a variety of services. The same goes for any other task needed for your business.

    Sincerely,

    Ilya Bodner
    Small Business Owner

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