Duncan McDowell Joins Decision.io Full Time!

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An image of Duncan McDowell, co-founder of Decision.io

Image is from the original article written by Trish Crompton at the Communitech Hub.

At Decision.io, we do things differently than most startups.

We didn’t go for funding right off the bat. The team worked full-time at incubators and accelerators and came aboard full time as needed. We bootstrapped. It’s not the way you’re necessarily advised to do things in a startup world where a sizable round of VC funding is the holy grail.

Fortunately, we don’t really care. The way we’re doing things has led to the best in class team decision-making platform, and customer service that would blow you away. Oh yeah, people have been more than happy to pay for Decision.io since the beginning of our beta. Unconventional is just fine when it’s working.

The last to make the leap to joining full time is Duncan McDowell, manager of the startup services group at the Communitech Hub in Kitchener-Waterloo. Check out this great Q & A featuring Duncan McDowell, where he dishes out some priceless startup advice and speaks about his ambition to build Decision.io into a billion-dollar company.

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ABCs of Decision-Making Biases – Part 1

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Here’s a scary thought: when we are sitting down to make the best decision based on the possibilities presented to us, we are often choosing from possibilities that have already been subjected to biases. We may even introduce a different set of biases when it’s time to actually make a final decision. This tendency isn’t due to a lack of intelligence or skill, but rather to the fact that we’re human. The idiom, “to err is human”, is an idiom for a reason!

Whether we are foundation or grant-maker reviewing online submissions and applications, a startup incubator or accelerator reviewing online applications and interview notes to decide on our next cohort of entrepreneurs, or a business building a strategy in a boardroom, these biases promise to get in our way!

For now, we will focus on just four of many common biases that may be present while generating and collecting possibilities to be decided on later. We’ll discuss the biases that present themselves during the decision making stage in Part 2 of this series.

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