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Caution: heuristics at work
With enough time and information it is possible to always make the best decisions — to find the optimal solution to any problem.
This is not the World we operate in.
Startup founders are nearly always required to make decisions quickly and with less than perfect information.
In a World like this ‘heuristics’ (or rules of thumb) can be incredibly helpful.
“Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution”
Sounds pretty neat, right?
A decision is better than no decision. And ‘satisfactory’ is surely better than ‘unsatisfactory’.
Great, problem solved, give me the answer…
“We’ve seen this in other companies and they did X”
“Raise your Series A when you have £Xm in revenue”
“Hire a COO when you have more than X people in your company”
“Founders should always have more than X% equity”
We’ve all heard them, we’ve all used them and we’ve all offered them to others.
