Annie Duke is an author, speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space, as well as Special Partner focused on Decision Science at First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund. Annie’s latest book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (https://amzn.to/4goiS7r), was released in 2022 from Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint. Her previous book, Thinking in Bets (https://amzn.to/3TA4VJP), is a national bestseller. As a former professional poker player, she has won more than $4 million in tournament poker. During her career, Annie won a World Series of Poker bracelet and is the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the NBC National Poker Heads-Up Championship. She retired from the game in 2012. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to study Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2023 Annie completed her PhD in Cognitive Psychology at UPenn.

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Show hosts Joe (Eng VP) and Jordan (M&A Deal Lead) worked at various companies from Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Salesforce, Slack, Carta, Splunk, Wealthfront, Adobe, and more.

Chapters

00:00 - Two Ways We Make Bad Decisions
01:06 - Guest Introduction: Annie Duke’s Background and Books
02:35 - Alliance for Decision Education: Mission and Vision
04:52 - Decision-Making Biases: An Overview
06:17 - Resulting Bias and Hindsight Bias in Postmortems
08:10 - How Cognitive Shortcuts Lead to Errors
10:35 - Challenges in Recognizing and Correcting Bias
12:31 - Confirmation Bias: The Value of Outside Perspectives
14:38 - Using Base Rates to Make Rational Decisions
16:22 - Overcoming Sunk Cost Fallacy with Pre-Commitment
18:30 - Setting Kill Criteria and the Role of Pre-Mortems
22:13 - Sales Strategy: Identifying and Exiting Lost Causes
24:52 - Postmortems: Pitfalls and Team Dynamics
27:39 - Team Risk Management and Innovation Stagnation
30:08 - Avoiding Groupthink and Fostering Diverse Input
32:56 - Case Study: Google vs. OpenAI on Risk Tolerance
36:41 - The Remote Work Debate and Organizational Alignment
39:02 - Knowing When to Quit: The Value of Letting Go
43:06 - Slack’s Founding: Pivoting from Glitch to Success
45:37 - Opportunity Cost: Seeing New Paths After Quitting
49:02 - Decision Science for Youth: Empowering Agency
52:53 - Teaching Forecasting Skills to Teenagers
56:39 - Annie’s Upcoming Book: Interpreting Data Accurately
59:14 - Using Comparisons for Better Decision-Making
1:02:28 - Final Thoughts: Practical Tips for Better Choices
1:04:50 - Closing Remarks and Upcoming Content