Serial entrepreneurship is compared to a monkey's random walk on a cliff edge; each step represents an independent entrepreneur venture. If every move is genuinely random, the entrepreneur will eventually fall - go bankrupt. This situation offers a view of the non-ergodic nature of entrepreneurial systems, where averages across the whole system don't apply to an individual's series of endeavors over time. Effective strategies to prevent ruin include sticking to familiar industries, understanding irreversible decisions, and adopting the Kelly Criterion, which involves cautiously handling resources, grasping opportunities early, and often selling.

Herbert Simon. He might very well have been one of those rare breeds of thinkers that seemingly has no bounds when it comes to fields of expertise. How insatiable he was in knowledge, ironically he was the first to figure out that our brain must have limited processing capacity, and would not be able to …

Continue reading The bureaucrat in our brain

During the past decades, I have been reading hundreds of books on various topics related to randomness, decision-making, finance, entrepreneurship as well as nearly 500 academic white-papers on chaos theory, cybernetics, randomness, probability theory, philosophy, decision-making and neurobiology. I did this because I often was seeking answers when being confronted with challenges in my personal …

Continue reading A Posteriori

The problem of arbitrage opportunity identification can be modelled as finding a negative-weight cycle in a graph. The nodes are the currencies, the edges are the exchange-rate pairs, and the edge weight is -log(r) for an exchange rate r. Using negative logarithms means the sum of weights for a cycle is negative if and only if the product of the exchange rates is greater than 1.