Mark Davis of DFJ Gotham Ventures posted this nice summary list of six types of risk that venture capitalists typically examine when evaluating a potential investment.
Read the full article here
I had the pleasure of hearing Avinash Kaushik, Google’s analytics evangelist, speak when he came to our CS377W class at Stanford this quarter (the “Stanford Facebook class“). He’s an amazing speaker, really breathing life and purpose into the too-often dry topic of web analytics.
He’s promoting a new way of looking at web analytics, what he calls “Web Analytics 2.0″. Avinash’es central message is that analytics cannot stand alone as a decision driver in organizations; rather analytics need to be considered in the context of additional data (from customers, competitors, and other internal sources) in order to drive rational decisions.
Avinash has a brilliant decision framework, consisting of the five decision inputs that should be considered in order to gain insight into customer behavior and drive optimal decisions. He calls this “The Five Pillars” and here’s the cliff’s notes summary:
“The Five Forces” are Michael E. Porter’s framework for assessing the level of competitive intensity industry participants should expect to see. Highly competitive industries are likely to produce lower average profitability for participants in that market. Useful for rationalizing market entry or market exit decisions. E.g., competitors should seek out markets where the Five Forces are less severe, and exit markets with strong pressure from one or more of the Five Forces.
