This will make you a better decision-maker | Annie Duke (author of “Thinking in Bets” and “Quit,” former pro poker player)

**Annie Duke** (0:00)
It's so incredibly necessary in improving decision quality to take what's implicit and make it explicit. It's not that intuition is crap, your intuition is sometimes right. If you don't make it explicit, then you don't get to find out when it's wrong.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:12)
When you look at companies that have read your book, what do you find are the frameworks or tactics that really stick?

**Annie Duke** (0:16)
People generally think the purpose of a meeting is for three things, discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:25)
Something that comes up in product a lot is this idea of pre-mortems.

**Annie Duke** (0:28)
So a pre-mortem is great, only if you set up kill criteria. Commit to actions that you're going to take if you see those signals.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
You have a very interesting framework for how to think about decision quality when the outcome is very long-term.

**Annie Duke** (0:40)
There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. And the way you choose to shorten the feedback loop is to say, what are the things that are correlated with the outcome that I eventually desire?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:53)
Today, my guest is Annie Duke. Annie is the author of the bestselling book, Thinking in Bets and also her more recent book, Quit the Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. She's also a special partner at First Round Capital, which we spent some time on and is incredibly fascinating. Prior to this part of her career, she was a professional poker player. She's won over $4 million in tournaments, including winning a World Series of Poker bracelet. And she's the only woman who's won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the National Poker Heads Up Championship. Currently, she spends her time helping companies make better decisions.
In our conversation, we cover the many lessons that she's learned from her friend, Daniel Kahneman, who recently passed away. What simple change she's found has the most impact on a company's ability to make better decisions. How to make better quick decisions when the feedback loop is very long, and also why she doesn't actually believe in long feedback loops. How she changed the way that the partners at First Round Capital make decisions, which is incredibly interesting. Plus, why when you're thinking about quitting, that probably means you've already waited too long and you should have quit a while ago. I learned a ton from this conversation and this is definitely gonna change the way I think about a lot of things. With that, I bring you Annie Duke after a short word from our sponsors. And if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.
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Annie, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Annie Duke** (3:58)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:59)
It's my pleasure. I was telling a bunch of people that you were coming on this podcast and every single one of them was so excited that we were doing this. So I'm quite excited that this is happening. I want to start with a question about Daniel Kahneman.
I know you two are very close. You did a podcast together. I know you grew to be good friends over the past few years. Sadly, he passed away about a week ago at this point.