I have been intrigued for years that a huge financial sector has continued to rely on intuition while industry after industry has discovered that using analytics give you a better chance to succeed. Moreover, it is a sector that brags about the fact that it fails 99 percent of the time yet fails to embrace … Continue reading “Moneyball finally comes to VC”
I have written several times about Moneyball and many times about customer lifetime value (LTV), so I wanted to bring the two together. Moneyball was the Michael Lewis book turned into a successful film about Billy Beane and how he made the Oakland A’s competitive by relying on analytics over intuition (for more detail, please … Continue reading “Lifetime Value Part 5: Moneyball and LTV”
Everyone probably already knows the clear winner of last week’s US election, it was a resounding victory for analytics over “intuition” and “expertise.” New York Time blogger Nate Silver, who uses statistical models to analyze polling and economic data, correctly projected which candidate would win each of the fifty states (and District of Columbia). Conversely, … Continue reading “Moneyball, politics and social gaming”
Monday night the Oakland A’s gained a playoff berth with a roster that most experts believed at the beginning of the season would not even approach playing .500 baseball. Although most experts in hindsight now see the quality of the A’s players, they are failing to realize their success is again the result of Billy … Continue reading “Moneyball strikes again: How to use analytics for sustained competitive advantage”
Last week I posted about how the book and movie Moneyball provided great lessons for the social game industry (Lessons from Moneyball for the social game industry post). I just came across a post on the Business 2 Community blog (Game Change: Moneyball and the Reality of Social Business)that did a great job of showing … Continue reading “Great Blog Post About Moneyball”
I finally watched Moneyball on DVD and it reminded me how applicable it was to the social game industry. I read the book when it was first published and immediately felt it was applicable to my company, Merscom, as a way for us to gain a competitive advantage despite not having raised as much VC … Continue reading “Lessons from Moneyball for the social game industry”
After 500+ blog posts, I have decided to pivot my blog in a slightly different direction. While I will continue to write about newsworthy items in the gaming space, over the next three years I will primarily document my learnings and journey as I pursue a DBA (Doctor of Business Administration). I recently started the … Continue reading “The next three years of this blog”
Launching new products is vital for the continued success of any game company but surprisingly few have a robust process for prioritizing projects. For a successful game company, new games provide an avenue for growth, as existing games will eventually plateau. Moreover, they mitigate the risk that your current successful game starts to decline. For … Continue reading “Building an analytic-driven greenlight process”
A colleague recently asked me what ten books I would recommend to him and it turned into a much more difficult question than I expected. While it is relatively easy to rank books you read in the last few month or even year, picking the ten most useful at all time is very hard, a … Continue reading “The ten most valuable business books I have ever read”
I have written a couple of times about the dangers of using Powerpoint too much but Ron Shaich, CEO of Panera Bread, beat me to warning people about the dangers of Excel. I have no problems with the quality of Powerpoint as software but it often prevents people from actually thinking and having a conversation, to … Continue reading “Why Excel is just as bad as Powerpoint”
The Business of Social Games and Casino 