Annie Duke

Special Partner, First Round Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

authorathletefounderinvestorscientist@AnnieDuke ↗LinkedIn ↗annieduke.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

A former World Series of Poker bracelet winner and cognitive psychology researcher, she advises executives and organizations on risk assessment and probabilistic decision-making. She is the author of bestselling books including Thinking in Bets and serves as a Special Partner at First Round Capital.

16statements → 3claims → 1claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.12/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 19said about them ↓

0 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 12 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Annie argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

266 words/min while actually speaking · 0.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Annie Duke: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 20 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 7,664 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Annie Duke is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 3/10

pushed back at the host 2/10

setup questions received 45%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 12:08“Can I ask, what do you do in a situation when you don't have the time or the means to have those little iterative steps?” ▶ 28:03“How do you prevent prior success slash failure from impacting future performance and mindset?” ▶ 26:11“I guess like how specific should one be in the pre-mortem and how should one think about like, you just don't know what it could be that could go wrong.”

What they said16 What others said19 Episodes1

Everything Annie Duke said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Duke: Working independently yields better feedback than group discussions

“Nominal groups, which are groups of individuals working alone, tend to do better in terms of eliciting the, Feedback and opinions or even brainstorming than when people actually discuss things as a group.”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 18:56 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Decision outcomes depend solely on luck and information quality

“There's only two things that tell you how a decision is going to work out. One is luck. Can't do anything about it. The other is, is what's the information that went into the decision”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 21:22 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Investors prioritize risk calculation over expected value

“I think the biggest misconception about risk is that, this is going to be kind of weird, is people spend a lot of time trying to calculate their risk, but they don't think enough about whether they actually... Have the expected value, right? Like, are they win…”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 34:01 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Parallel portfolio bets reduce the penalty of individual inaccuracy

“Like if you can do a lot of bets in parallel, then the penalty for being less accurate on any single one of them is lower.”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 12:48 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Duke: 1990s poker required less skill due to wider informational edge

“So the gap between the people who like understood the game and knew the game and everybody else was so wide that as a professional, you didn't need to be nearly as good then as you would need to be now in order to win.”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 7:20 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: De-risk major life decisions by treating them as non-permanent

“I don't think about most decisions that I make as permanent. So that's a way to de-risk, right? Like, if you know, well, I'll see how this goes, and if it doesn't work out, then I can go do something else”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 8:28 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Most decisions assumed to be irreversible are actually reversible

“A lot of decisions that we think are irreversible are actually reversible.”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 9:23 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Move fast when decision reversal costs are low

“If the cost to change our mind is low, then you should just kind of move fast, because it's actually a really good way to build information and actually build those good models, right, is just to interact with the world.”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 11:26 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Rating component parts before overall categories reduces decision bias

“When you break it down into component parts, and you rate those component parts first, before you rate the broader category, that this actually helps to discipline bias and noise”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 17:18 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Duke: About 80% of meeting time is spent discussing existing consensus

“About 80% of meetings get spent on agreements.”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 20:24 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Sunk cost fallacy is the dark side of grit

“Grit is such a great topic, and, you know, sticking to things that are hard and not getting kind of stuck in local minima is a really, really important feature of people who are successful. But the question is, like, you know, there's a dark side to grit, righ…”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 22:47 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Perform a pre-mortem immediately after making an investment

“As soon as you make an investment, you need to do premortem, and you need to say, what are the ways that this investment can go wrong?”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 24:24 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Investors should track lost deals identically to won deals

“Right, if you win a deal or you don't win a deal, it's the same thing, because you wanted to win the deal, so you should treat those companies identically.”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 29:17 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Insight

Duke: Investors must take exploratory meetings on high-failure deals

“You always have to have some exploratory lines open, right? You have to say, I'm specifically going to take some meetings, like I'm going to do some deck reviews, I'm going to take some meetings with people that I think are going to be really bad because that'…”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 29:50 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Disclosure

Duke: My stock portfolio is indexed and angel deals follow leads

“My stock portfolio is indexed because there's people who spend every single day trading in that market, and I hardly think that I'm smarter than them. And I think that's true of venture as well. So I have done angel investing, but it's always a long So I'm rea…”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 35:49 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

Assertion Partly supported

Duke: Research shows people escalate commitment when outcomes deteriorate

“There's really amazing work, some from Katie Milkman and Maurice Schweitzer, which shows this escalation of commitment, that when things are going poorly, we actually escalate our commitment.”

Annie Duke Jan 11, 2021 ▶ 23:29 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions

The other half of the tape: Annie Duke's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 19 times in 13 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 5 Jeff Jordan 3 Bill Gurley 2 Oren Zeev 1 Mike Maples 1 Logan Bartlett 1 Kyle Norton 1 David Frankel 1