You Can Take Action with Incomplete Data | Ep 945
episodePreviously titled “You Can Take Action with Incomplete Data | Ep 1003” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
Transcript
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What is the importance of tracking metrics in entrepreneurship?
I don't know what I would do more of because I don't track anything that I'm currently doing. Well, then we have to get the metrics so that we can understand what to do more of so that we can do more of it. This does not mean that you cannot take action without having complete data, because the nature of entrepreneurship is that you will always have incomplete data. There will always be things that you want to know that you do not know. And so probably the vast majority of your decisions will have to be directional or recent from first principles of like, well, I knew these things to be true. And so can I extrapolate that to my current situation? Can I generalize knowledge and apply it to a specific domain?
There are some things that when you have what I would consider irreversible decisions or one-way doors, as Bezos says it, those are the ones that you want to gather a little bit more data around to make your next big bets. How's the morning? Good? Yes? Okay, fantastic.
How can entrepreneurs make decisions with incomplete data?
Hopefully it should make a little bit more sense in terms of why we structure the event the way we do, which is that the first day is all theoretical framework driven. And the main thesis behind that is you're going to have this time with our team who have seen businesses like yours at all different sizes. And you have this short period of time to ask the most meaningful and most impactful questions. And the last thing that I want anyone to do is fly out here, spend that time. And then when you get home, realize that you asked the wrong thing, right? And so who here came in with an idea of what you thought your constraint was for your business? Okay. Who here of the hands that just raised, was it different than you came in with?
Okay.
Right. And so that's why we do the frameworks the first day and then we do the application and the tactics today. So hopefully that was good. Beyond that, I've had the distinct pleasure of talking to a lot of different business owners about the things that are limiting the business. And so as we go through the Q&As, I wanted to show you kind of the visual roadmap of how I think through this. And so it only took like 10,000 calls to figure this out. So here we go. So the fundamental question that we always have to ask ourselves as business owners or entrepreneurs, and I take myself through this exact same reasoning process, is why can't we do more? And the reason that I'm so addicted, you could say, to more is because if you think about, let's imagine you had 100 bricks, right?
you can assemble those hundred bricks if you just hit random on a on like a space generator those random bricks will just keep reassembling it'll pretty much always just look like a mess right but there is one specific instruction of those bricks that becomes a building right or a structure of some kind and so if you think about your business today as a building of some kind there might be some holes in there but largely it stands it has support etc whenever we do something new or change, the likelihood that the one move you make is going to be one of the holes versus one of the infinite other possibilities that does not actually grow the business is actually really high. And so the smaller you are, the earlier in your stage of business you are, the more it makes sense to try new things because the likelihood that your change of it sucks and I changed it and now it sucks less is highly likely.
When nothing is happening, you should do anything because it's better than nothing. But once you have a very good business, a very large business, the likelihood that that change actually makes it worse because you've already had 100 changes in a row that have worked and 500 that didn't. The likelihood that next change, the reason it's the control versus the variant for any of those guys who do split tests in marketing, the control typically beats the variant. And that's because it's had so many iterations to get there. And so if you think about your entire business as a control versus a variant, that is why the changes need to be small.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the importance of tracking metrics in entrepreneurship?
0:02–0:51
2
How can entrepreneurs make decisions with incomplete data?
0:51–4:31
3
What frameworks should be used for effective business decision-making?
4:31–7:41
4
How can businesses identify and address their constraints?
7:41–15:42