About this

1. The concept of hidden evidence

This blog is dedicated to the concept of “hidden evidence” as described by Nassim Taleb in his books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.  This idea has been germinating in my mind since before I read Taleb’s work, but these books served as a catalyst to get me moving.

The concept of hidden evidence is that success is more likely described by randomness than by skill.  In the business world this means that successful business persons and companies weren’t necessarily the best but that they were the ones that luckily succeeded.  For every one crazy success, there were nine failures that tried more or less the same thing.  Successful businesses and people are lionized, and their methods are inspected and treated as gospel for future success.

2. My personal motivations & background

I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, I watched my parents build a successful business, then be forced out due to unethical business partners and unlucky economic times.  I highly value entrepeneurship, but I am concerned that our society expects the entrepeneur to bear an undue burden of uncertainty.  If we could recognize better the role of luck, we could restructure the entrepreneurial equation.

I recently graduated from Harvard Business School, where I read hundreds of cases chronicling successful businesses and people.  All of these suffered from the hidden evidence, hindsight bias, and other problems of human cognition.  Every case we read was a success story, when the world is littered with carcasses of failed businesses.  One would hope a business education would focus on the entire data set and attempt to learn from all outcomes.

3. This blog’s charter

This blog hopes to chronicle the hidden cases - the failed businesses and people that did the right things.  I hope to present these as business cases, to help others learn from the many mistakes made, as well as to expose this much larger data set to the business, venture capital, and entrepreneurial worlds.

I will also use this blog as a platform to discuss related business issues, entrepreneurship, and problems of human cognition (which I find fascinating).

Interested in helping?  Have an interesting story to share?   Contact me!