Chris Yeh, a partner at Wasabi Ventures just wrote a great piece on the dangers of stereotyping when guessing how an entrepreneur or athlete is going to perform. It was originally published in his blog Adventures in Capitalism, and then also syndicated by PEHub Wire.
The key point he makes that stereotyping only makes sense in the absence of better data. Nobody subscribing to conventional wisdom saw the Jeremy Lin basketball phenomenon coming because he was an Asian player from Harvard, but a group of Moneyball-type analysts with better data knew he would be a super-star because they had studied his stats.
And of course he brings it back to picking entrepreneurs (specifically in Silicon Valley): [Read more…]