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There’s a crisis in the scientific academic world. It’s called the Replication Crisis. Scientists have found that they cannot replicate the results published by many scientific studies. The same thing is happening in the world of business.

Over the last 15 years I’ve read several hundred business books, and I’ve written one. Across those 15 years, one of the most interesting is a book called The Management Myth, which traces the history of management science back to its less than solid origins. The book illuminates the history of scientific management and Taylorism, and supplies evidence that much the original data underpinning these theories was fabricated. I was curious if this was a broader trend, and it may be. I found other cases.

When negotiating your next fundraising round, should you talk valuation in premoney terms or postmoney terms? Premoney is the valuation before the investment, employee stock option pool (ESOP) expansion, debt-to-equity conversion and investment. Postmoney is the value of the business after all that.

As an investor, postmoney is simpler. Despite the improved simplicity, I don’t think the industry is going to move to postmoney anytime soon.

Why are postmoney conversations simpler? Because the valuation of the business is fixed. The value of the business doesn’t float from variables like pro-rata participation, ESOP expansion and debt-to-equity conversion.

A friend suggested that I read the Five Dysfunctions of a Team over the weekend. Though I’m passionate about business books, I rolled my eyes. I had seen this one on best seller lists for a long time, and never thought it would have much to offer. I admit my book-cover bias was wrong. The author has a counterintuitive assertion. Meetings shouldn’t be boring.

The book is a fable, describing the journey of a new CEO, Kathryn, who takes the helm of a struggling high-growth startup. She brings her management team on a series of off-sites. During one of those conversations, she says:

“Evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups.” That’s a shocking statement. Adrian Furnham, a professor of organizational and applied psychology at University College London, said it. It turns out it’s completely true.

Participants in interactive brainstorming groups rated their performance quite favorably…[and] felt that interactive group brainstorming was more productive than individual brainstorming…However, actual performance data [showed] …interactive groups generated fewer distinct ideas.

How quickly do the fastest growing software companies build their teams? The answer is incredibly quickly. In fact, this data bolsters the notion that management team’s top priority is recruiting, especially after the business has reached product market fit and capitalized itself well.

Above, I’ve charted the headcount growth rate for 10 of the fastest growing software companies in recent history. I’ve normalized the years for when all the businesses were roughly at the same headcount - fewer than 50 people. This is a proxy for when the business established product market fit.

There’s a parallel between cryptoassets today and the British colonial period predating the US. In the late-1600s, colonies began to print their own money. Today, we’re seeing many startups coin their own money, creating an explosion in the number of new (crypto)currencies.

States printed colonial money to pay debts to citizens. During tax collection times, the state accepted citizens’ bills as payment and retired the bills from circulation. Citizens would pay each other with these bills. They could also exchange them across state lines, but not at 1:1. Each state’s bills had a different exchange rate.

I’m grateful for all the entrepreneurs who have spent time teaching me how to build their companies. Over these past few days, I have been reading the book Antifragile written by Nassim Taleb. In the book, he writes about many provocative things, but the one that sticks out with me this holiday is about innovation, and it harkens back to the original title of this blog that I started to write nearly 7 years ago: ex post facto.

In the eleventh episode of Masters of Scale, Reid Hoffman interviews Peter Thiel. The episode revolves around the idea that to truly succeed, a startup must not beat the competition, but break free of competition entirely. The episode has many great points, but the one that stood out most to me is the idea of false competition.

You could say that Coke and Pepsi compete very intensely, on the other hand you could say that there’s somehow quite differentiated from a brand so that in practice different people prefer Coke or prefer Pepsi and they’re actually is a much smaller set of people who view them as interchangeable products. And so, I think measuring how much actual competition is happening is not always a straightforward thing to do. transcript

Disagree and commit. I first read about this idea in the 2016 Amazon Shareholders letter. But the idea can be traced back to Andy Grove at Intel. Grove wrote about this topic in High Output Management. Disagree and commit is a management technique for handling conflict. There are two parts to it. First, expecting and demanding teammates to voice their disgreement. Second, no matter their point of view, once a decision has been made, everyone commits to its success.

Founders often describe their unit economics in terms of their LTV/CAC ratio - the ratio of the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer to the Cost of Customer Acquisition (CAC). The LTV/CAC metric can be a powerful metric to unpack the health of the go-to-market team of a company, as Netsuite has shown. But this figure is often meaningless for early stage startups.

Why? Because a company one or two or even three years into sales can’t yet accurately forecast customer lifetimes. If a business suffers from a very high churn rate, then, yes, it’s possible to calculate LTV in just a few years.