Our weekly thoughts and general ramblings about everything related to business – from industries and investments to management and operations.

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Weekly Thoughts: 98 Degrees

Here is something that caught our eye this week: 98 Degrees Just when you think you know something   Anybody with children knows how quickly plans get thrown out the window when a kid wakes up with a fever (for those without, any childcare or school plan is destroyed...rapidly).  So, knowing where your kid is relative to the 98.6-degree cut-off can become quite a focal point. This week we learned that the age-old “normal” body temperature of 98.6 is not necessarily as iron-clad as we thought. The 98.6 threshold became the standard based on research conducted on 25,000 patients in 1869 by

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Weekly Thoughts: N.P.S. BS?

Here is something that caught our eye this week: N.P.S. BS? Turns out, measuring customer satisfaction on a scale of 1-10 isn't a silver bullet   Every time we get comfortable with a “truth”, something happens that throws us for a loop.  Fat was bad, now it’s good.  Profitability was a key driver of corporate value, now it’s irrelevant (to VC at least).  Daenerys was our Rightful Queen, now she’s batsh*t crazy.  It’s hard to keep up. Similarly, we read this week that a core metric used to evaluate corporate performance – the Net Promoter Score, or “NPS” – may not be exactly what

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Weekly Thoughts: We Love Lamp?

Here is something that caught our eye this week: We Love Lamp? We are constantly thinking about how to conduct impactful analysis that will actually deliver improved outcomes, not just doing work for the sake of doing work.  Unlike public market investors who receive audited financials and curated investor presentations to analyze, we are not only deciding which data actually drives outcomes, we are also creating the actual systems and processes needed to capture the data in the first place, which often feels like tedious work with lots of stops and starts.  Thankfully, our reading this week reminded us that we are not

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Weekly Thoughts: Chart or Table?

Here is something that caught our eye this week: Chart or Table? Recently, we have been working on improving our reporting both at the individual company level as well as across the portfolio. As with any reporting initiative, the key objective of our work is to facilitate a repeatable aggregation of an increasing amount of raw data, the analytics of which allows management to obtain key insights into the health of the operations, thereby enabling informed business decisions. As one would expect, this initiative involves focused discussions on what data should be presented, in what format, and at what frequency.

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