Data Driven Decisions for Startup Success


Bangalore: A startup is born from an idea. But decisions are the one which gives “life” to them. There may be many decisions to take- who should you raise money from? Who should you hire? What features to build next? What should be the marketing strategy and so on. Here comes the role of decision making.

You can either dig into thousands of books which will guide you through the process of decision making and make the decision on the gut –feel or there is another way- Data driven Decisions- which is purely based on the data and will probably work out, in most the cases.

Here is Why Data Driven Decisions Work

Late psychologist Robyn Dawes 1979 paper titled “The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making” clearly explains why data driven decisions always work. The idea put forward by the paper with lot of research background is simple: “even decisions made using improper, ‘stupid’ models are better than expert intuition.

Consider the example of hiring for your startup. You will have to collect the data about all previous hires and come up with a model to find out the top candidate- exactly what Google does. But being a startup, you won’t be having lots of data to make the model. But you can build a simple model, based on the parameters you think are important for the candidates and then use the model to evaluate the candidates.

This process will remove subject biases and eventually lead to better decisions which are powerful.