Annie Duke
Special Partner, First Round Capital · 5 appearances on the record.
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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.
103statements → 13claims → 10claims resolved → 70%fully supported → 3.96/5average certainty → 2.06/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 66said about them ↓
7 supported 2 partly supported 1 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 13 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
13 assertions · 3 opinions · 87 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 13 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 10 are resolved, and 3 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.
Their most notable supported claim
Duke: Institutional investors underperform random selling by 70 basis points
“When you look at their sell side decisions, they're usually about 70 bips worse than the benchmark.
So if you were to just randomly
Free the capital up from your portfolio.
How would you do?
That's the benchmark.
When you look at their actual decisions, and th…”
Their most notable contradicted claim
Duke: US schools pushed probability math from kindergarten to eighth grade
“So when you look at the curriculum for most K through 12 in 1980, starting in kindergarten, you were learning probability. And now the first point at which probability is introduced in the math curriculum in the United States is in eighth grade.”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Annie Duke on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Annie Duke said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Duke: Managers should fire a salesperson who closes 100 percent of sales
“And then all of a sudden you have a salesperson who's closing a hundred percent of their sales. And by the way, if you can't change that, you should fire them.”
Duke: Institutional investors underperform random selling by 70 basis points
“When you look at their sell side decisions, they're usually about 70 bips worse than the benchmark.
So if you were to just randomly
Free the capital up from your portfolio.
How would you do?
That's the benchmark.
When you look at their actual decisions, and th…”
Duke: Tackle critical bottlenecks before easy tasks to avoid false progress
“When you're approaching a problem, you want to think about what are the bottlenecks? What's the really hard thing that needs to happen in order for me to be able to unlock this problem? And that's the thing that you're supposed to go after first. You're not su…”
Duke: Asking 'would you buy it today' does not improve decision-making
“One of the things that doesn't help, and I think this is very, very important for financial professionals to hear, is one of the things that does not help is saying, just treat the decision like it's fresh.”
Duke: Ron Conway is most proud of coaching founders to quit
“There's a whole long list of things that you might think he's super proud of, but what's interesting is the thing he's the most proud of is actually coaching founders to quit, which really goes against what we think about as Silicon Valley, like VCs who like, …”
Duke: Sticking to things does not guarantee success due to survivorship bias
“I might argue that people are successful at things they stuck to, which is actually very different than if you stick to something, you'll be successful.”
Duke: The idea that angel investors excel at Series C is absurd
“Like the idea that an angel investor would be great at series C is pretty absurd, except that what we see in the moment is that people feel like they are, because it's very easy to convince yourself when you see something in front of you that's really attracti…”
Duke: The Goal of Group Meetings Should Be Informing, Not Consensus
“The goal of a really good group meeting is not to agree. And we think that the goal is agreement. We think that everybody has to walk out of that room on the same page. The goal of a great group meeting, rather, should be to inform, which is very different. So…”
Duke: Successful Leaders Resist Process Improvement Because It Devalues Past Wins
“Particularly when people are very successful, it's particularly uncomfortable for them to imagine that there might be a ways that they could really improve their decision process. And I think that the reason is that then there's all of a sudden you open up a c…”
Duke: Highly intelligent people are better at spinning data to fit beliefs
“They're better at spinning the data to fit their beliefs because they're better with data. Like, who do you put in a spin room? The dumb guy or the smart guy? No, you put the smart guy so that he can data mine for you.”
Duke: High intelligence worsens outcome bias by disguising it as process
“Unless you're willing to examine both sides of the world, how can you actually be process-oriented, right? Then you're really just outcome-oriented with a bunch of process language wrapping around it, which is why I go back to this problem of being smart makes…”
Duke: An opponent's disrespect is a competitive strategic advantage
“I think that everybody has a need to be liked and respected, but there's a time and a place for that, and when you're sitting across the table from an opponent, it is not in any way, shape, or form to your advantage to be, prove that you should be liked and re…”
Duke: High intelligence correlates with manipulating data to support prior beliefs
“It's actually correlated with how smart you are, and it's correlated in the bad way. So the smarter you are, the better you are at kind of slicing and dicing this data to support whatever your prior is.”
Duke: Grit and quitting are the exact same decision, not virtues or vices
“We think of grit as a virtue and quit as a vice, but that's not true. They're the exact same decision. By definition, if you choose to stick to something, you're choosing not to quit it. And if you choose to quit something, You're choosing not to stick with it…”
Duke: Culture glorifies disastrous persistence over rational quitting
“We don't see people who quit. That's sort of the best case scenario, or we see them as quitters, which is an insult. And the heroes of the story are people who had the exact same information, As these three climbers, and yet continued on even so to great disas…”
Duke: Institutional investors beat beta by 100 to 120 bps on buys
“So when you look at expert investors on the buy side,
They're doing really well.
They're generally doing somewhere around like a hundred, a 120 bips or so better than the beta.”
Duke: Investors fail at selling because off-book positions lack feedback
“On the buy side, you're getting constant feedback, because the position's on your book, so you can see it tick up and down every single day.
You have some thesis about what the fundamentals are going to look like, and every day you can compare your thesis to h…”
Duke: Waste is a forward-looking problem, not backward-looking
“Except waste should not be a backward looking problem. It should be a forward looking one.”
Duke: Group Decisions Are Not Better but Unjustifiably Boost Confidence
“What generally happens is that the decisions that come out of a group process are not really necessarily better. It's just that you have much more confidence in them because you have this perception that group decision making is higher quality. And that's actu…”
Duke: Complicated problems like chess are solvable, but poker is fundamentally complex
“So the way I think about the difference between complicated and complex would actually be the difference between chess and poker. So a complicated decision is one that's hard. It's got a lot of levels. It's very deep, but there is a solution. So whatever groun…”
Duke: Decision makers mistakenly treat complex, uncertain problems as merely complicated
“And one of the things that I think that we have problems with as decision makers is that we think things are complicated when they're actually complex. We treat things as solvable and knowable when they're actually not, and we aren't very accepting of the idea…”
Duke: Hedges are cheapest when uncertainty is at its highest
“There's just this true thing about hedges, which is the earlier you get to them, which necessarily means when you're the most uncertain, That's when they are the cheapest to put on.”
Duke: Retail investors trying to beat full-time market professionals is pure folly
“Over time, the market's going to be efficient, and for you to think that you could pick out the very little places where it's inefficient against the people who are literally spending their lives doing it is a folly that other people get trapped in.”
Duke: Frequent feedback does not ensure effective learning in noisy domains
“And despite the fact that when I was in graduate school, I was taught that learning occurs when there's lots of feedback tied closely in time to decisions and actions, I realized, well, poker really tells you that's not true, because people don't play poker ve…”
The other half of the tape: Annie Duke's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 61 times in 27 episodes on Capital Allocators. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 32Steve Kuhn 5Dr. Joe Sweeney 5Renata Quintini 3Sarah Samuels 2Michael Mauboussin 2Jordi Visser 2Scott Bessent 1
Statements about Annie Duke, by other people (5)
Laboy: Hewlett Foundation maintains a documented 'kill list' for every manager
“One of the things that I've done, and we borrowed this from Annie Duke and her book Quit, we've put together what we call is a kill list. For every manager in our book, we have what we call kill lists and key debates.”
Marshall: Hewlett Foundation uses pre-mortem 'kill lists' for manager due diligence
“Not only do we start with a list of concerns, we also, thanks to your great guest, Annie Duke, we started adding what we call a kill list. So think of it as a pre-mortem. Pre-identify places where the firm, the manager style may not work.”
Ted Seides: Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early
“Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early.”
Brandywine rates investments 1-to-5, excluding 3 to eliminate fence-sitting
“We also are really, really believers in using a framework at the end of our process where everyone on the team grades any investment we're doing on a series of criteria that's very, very specific to that investment. On a scale of one through five, not using th…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2024 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 12 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
- Renata Quintini and Roseanne Wincek – Renegade Spin-Out in the Supercritical Stage, Venture is Eating the Investment World 11 (Capital Allocators, EP. 242)
- Year in Review 2022 (Capital Allocators, EP. 289)
- Friends Reunion 2 – Five Allocators Riff on Investing with Meredith Jenkins, Casey Whalen, Brett Barth, Jon Harris, and Ted Seides (Capital Allocators, EP.271)
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 14 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
- BONUS – Michael Mauboussin on the Decision Education Podcast
- Ted with Jenny Heller – Compounding Knowledge and Relationships (Capital Allocators, EP.185)
- Jennifer Heller – Beginner's Mind with Professional Wisdom at Brandywine (Capital Allocators, EP.211)
- Ted with Patrick O'Shaughnessy – Lessons from the World's Elite Money Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.184)
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2019 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
2018 9 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- Michael Lombardi – Leadership Through Football (Capital Allocators, EP.75)
- Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43)
- Michael Schwimer – Moneyball as an Investment Strategy (Capital Allocators, EP.72)
- Peter Troob – Monkey Business in High Yield (Capital Allocators, EP.59)
- Brian Portnoy – From Complex to Simple (Capital Allocators, EP.57)
- Basil Qunibi - Moneyball for Allocators (Capital Allocators, EP.42)
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
Appearances (5)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Annie Duke – The Power of Quitting (Capital Allocators, EP.273) | Oct 3, 2022 | 1h 0m |
| Annie Duke – How to Decide (Capital Allocators, EP.156) | Sep 14, 2020 | 1h 17m |
| Annie Duke – Decision Making in a Crisis (Capital Allocators, EP.132) | Apr 20, 2020 | 25m |
| Annie Duke – Thinking More in Bets (Capital Allocators, EP.76) | Nov 19, 2018 | 35m |
| Annie Duke - Improving Decision Making [Capital Allocators, EP.39] | Feb 5, 2018 | 46m |