I’d like to highlight one email thread that we had at InterviewStreet about a rather important decision:
Immediately afterwards, I get feedback.
And a decision gets made:
This is how startups win
I expanded the first and last email to show the timestamps of each: 2:29 pm for the first email, 2:44 pm for the last. One of the biggest decisions of CodeSprint 2 was made in 15 minutes.
These kinds of conversations happen all the time. Each of the 5 of us here at InterviewStreet have our own domain of control, in which we make a thousand little decisions by ourselves. (Ex: The CodeSprint 2 start time) For big decisions, we seek independent validation. And the funny thing is, when all the facts get laid down, we rarely disagree.
The decision itself is also pretty typical.
- It was a good decision at the time of its making, but new circumstances (opening up CodeSprint 2 to all) have caused it to become a non-optimal date.
- It was made under high uncertainty with incomplete data. Anecdotally, in general, the bigger the decision, the more uncertain the context.
In the end, we decided that the cost of gathering additional information was too great relative to the strength of the hunch that we collectively had. Numerically, this translates to the belief that the number of programmers we would gain by this switch would be greater than the approximately 20% drop in student participation. (The calculation is [1 - 41/51], not [51 - 41]) More than 600 students, assuming the same level of participation as CodeSprint 1 (a bad assumption).
Is it possible that our hypothesis is wrong? Of course. But we’re a startup: Carpe Diem.
