The Munger Way

2015 is over and my challenge of 2015 was to acquire knowledge outside the software industry. In my opinion the energy sector is the most important sector of all, so I want to understand more of it. Without oil, no warm houses, no fertilizer (= less food), no transport, no travel (beyond a couple of miles). I felt like Alice in Wonderland going deep the rabbit hole and I want to share some of my insights. Grand Canyon First I studied oil history, than fracking oil industry, than the coal industry. Fracking is a very interesting topic by itself. 10 years ago nobody though the US will ever produce > 10M barrels a day - now it does. This is a huge game changer economically and geopolitically. The political debate in Europe to allow fracking made me very interested. Is there an hidden opportunity? Therefore I wanted to understand this (1) fracking revolution as well as (2) its impact on doing business. After the crash of the oil price in August I did research into the market str...

This article is how I came up with a medtech startup idea, which is based on my previous article about filtering ideas Startup Investing: How to build a snowball . How I got an idea Half a year ago I read the high interesting book "Risk Savvy" by Gigerenzer. The book is about decision making under uncertainty and risk. A couple of chapters are about medical decision making for doctors and patients. Basically Gigerenzer promotes the idea of using natural frequencies and fact boxes to communicate risks of a therapy, drugs and illnesses. Natural Frequencies describe probabilities as absolute numbers. Saying "5 out of 100 people get ill" is better than saying "5% of people get ill". The main advantage of saying "5 out of 100" is, that its easier to visualize. A second advantage is that it explicitly says on what the probability refers to and prohibits evil relative probability. Relative probability is mathematically correct, but really e...