Re-tooling How Organizations Make Decisions

Jad Naous and Frank Chen

In this conversation, which you can also find on the a16z YouTube channel, a16z Enterprise Deal Partner Jad Naous talks with Operating Partner Frank Chen about how decision-making is changing across organizations of all sizes and types, and how this is creating opportunities for startups to re-tool the entire business intelligence data pipeline.

First, what does it mean for “decision-making” to change? We discuss three shifts in how teams are shifting the way business gets done:

  • Decision-making is pushed further down in the organization, empowering everyone in an organization to make decisions rather than waiting for decisions to “flow down from headquarters”.
  • Employees and managers make smarter decisions using relevant, timely insight based on actual data, rather than relying on top-down strategy or static rules or experience or gut instinct.
  • More and more decisions are automated away altogether—think of Amazon continually updating prices for its products throughout the day.

To support this new style of decision-making, organizations need to store, analyze, and report on data in a fundamentally different way.

The good news is that startups and open source projects are starting to enable this new style of decision-making. We describe three categories of startup opportunities: platform tools, “full stack” solutions for specific roles, and “full stack” solutions for specific industries. 

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