2 Biases I think about a lot + My Solana Wallet Extractor for Finance Teams
What I'm Up To (My Taxes & Calls), What I Reflected On (Biases), and What's Occupying My Mind (Blockchain Extractor)- all part of Allen's Friday Flights
Hello Professionally Curious One!
Welcome to my Friday Flights, a collection of seemingly random things.
Cheers,
Allen
Past Publications
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: My own financial tax reporting and automation for 2022 & 2023.
The Things
Doing my financials across all the 2022 things. My accountant is going to be pissed. Its me, I’m the accountant.
I FINISHED 30 days of shipping written long-form pieces through the Ship 30 for 30 cohort. It was worth the $599 professional learning expense. Debrief later.
I sat in on a Binance Proof of Reserve demo at 6 am and I realized: Wow I don’t know a damn thing about zk snarks and merkle trees, and the ramification of open source technology from the point of view of something that needs to be independently audited and verified all the time.
I finished “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” by Ramit Sethi, and it’s a book a very action orientated book that I can recommend to anyone that is in college to middle of their career, or needs a book to throw at their child to get them to figure out their own finances b/c you tried but they stopped listening to you, and need an Indian American comedian to tap in.
Thanks to Bridget, I got to meet people from a virtual Seattle-based club. I’d drop in again.
Thanks to Lacey, I get to partake in a Crypto Collective that is eerily reminiscent of my CSULB BAP&AS days.
I have a Chamaedorea Elegans plant from Ikea in my office. Coincidentally, my cats became vegetarians.
I am now reading “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. It’s quite…different and I’m not sure what I was expecting.
Highland Park bowling is LIT and you gotta go there. Good luck on parking though.
I’m low-key looking forward to taxes for 2023.
I peaked with a shoutout from the Web3CFO.club on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Slack, which is based on my reading of the 111 page guide they made. I love the internet.
Insightful Reads
Recommended by Peter W: AI-Fragile Systems: the death of brittle software?
Recommended by me: This VC Is Slowly Automating His Job
Recommended by me: 3 Frameworks to help you make important (Travel) decisions
What’s I Reflected On
TL;DR: There are two biases that plague are reality every day - Survivorship Bias & Availability Heuristic.
Two Biases That Skew Our Individual Career Realities
This week I reflected on two biases:.
Survivorship Bias - Making decisions based on what is visible and filtered out.
Availability Heuristic - The bias where the thing that comes to mind first is the most common and most important
There are two types of super common biases I see every day that significantly warp our perception of reality when it comes to looking at “success”, and “what is successful”.
Survivorship Bias
In World War 2, the US Military conducted a study on their fighter planes, using the remaining airplanes as a basis for the study. They observed that airplanes that came back had on average 2 bullet holes per square foot, where as the engines had only 1 bullet hole per square foot.
The above diagram shows a representation of data where in each red dot is a bullet hole, as surveyed amongst all the surviving airplanes.
The question the US Military wanted to know is this: Where should they add additional armor plating?
Based on the data, the US Military thought they should add armor plating where the holes were.
Abraham Wald, a Hungarian Mathematician at Columbia University, proved decision to be the wrong conclusion and instead asserted that adding armor in the least hit areas (the ones with no holes, no red dots) would be more effective.
Why?
All the planes studied were the surviving planes from combat, and they proved that where they did get shot, they could survive.
All the airplanes that would have a lot of holes in the engine aren’t here to represent themselves as they’d already been shot down, which indicated a major weakness. None of those planes made it back.
That’s survivorship bias.
It’s a common issue when we think about:
Companies & Startups
Careers
Leaders
In public accounting, it’s easy to see “Partners” as the only form of dominant success. The issue here is that the people who aren’t partners, and have left the company, aren’t there to represent themselves to show you a different path you can take.
The other issue is that only the loud ones telling their stories, are the only stories you know (more on that in the next bias section!)
I bring this up because I can come off as someone is successful as a result of taking a career break; except, how would you know of the people who “failed” and “had to abandon” their career break and return to their jobs? How would you know if their story was never told to begin with?
I constantly remind myself of survivorship bias when the opposite side of possibility, whether success or failure, isn’t at all seen in the room.
I bet you can think of many.
Here I’ll give you another one:
Everyone think the music in the 1960s to 1980s is better than today’s music.
Newsflash you think it’s great because you only hear the surviving music that made it to the top, and thus, out of that decade to survive in to the next. Go to any record shop and you’ll realize, wow that’s a lot of junk made back then too.
Availability Heuristic
When you can easily recall infrequent events based on the recency and clarity of it. What comes to mind first = the most important and only thing you need to know before refuting, shutting down, or making a decision on a topic.
When we think of career stories, stories that are told the most, and told well, are the ones that define what we think would be successful. At some point, their story is the only story known to masses.
That is, until you introduce more stories.
Another availability heuristics bias is the one around Tesla. “Teslas are dangerous” and “Teslas catch on fire” are common things people say. “Teslas aren’t safe.” is the conclusion.
Why is this the case?
Because Teslas are extremely easily to spot and have revolutionized how we see electric vehicles as something other than a god ugly block of metal. You can easily tell a Tesla out because it stands out. Their coverage is insane, and thus they are on a pedestal to be examine at every move. What you don’t hear are other manufactures when things go wrong there.
You’ll always know when something is wrong with Tesla based on news. You’ll never realized that everyone else has a lot more problems (some brands exponentially more):
21,000 Volkswagen ID.4 potential fire & stalling issues,
142,000 GM’s Chevy EV Bolt recall due to the risk of catching fire at 100% charge
63,000 Jeep Wrangler Hybrid 4xe recalled due to engine turn off (and a stop sale issued)
16,000 BMWs i-series might cut out power during driving
And that’s just EVs. Don’t get me started on regular cars. That’s just a slaughterhouse.
To recap:
Survivorship Bias - Making decisions based on what is visible and filtered out.
Availability Heuristic - The bias where the thing that comes to mind first is the most common and most important
Here’s the best part: Those two usually come together.
Enjoy these bag of biases.
Awareness of the bias and when it happens is most of the battle to getting around it.
What’s on my mind
TL;DR: A NEW BLOCKCHAIN DATA EXTRACTOR HAS APPEARED!
See this cute little thing?
It’s Tokebi, a dead-simple Solana Wallet Address to Excel generator made for your tiny Web3 finance and accounting functions of your company, and professional services alike.
Anyone can use it. Here’s how:
Put a Solana address
Example address mentioned at endDownload the CSV
Screenshot the page for completeness and accuracy!
Up until now, this had one purpose for me:
Help me do my job as a CFO Consultant as I work with different Founders and CFOs and figure the recurring protocol to accounting data extraction challenges. It heavily plays on to the “if I have to learn another app, I will hurt you” energy.
I’ve been working with a fantastic team in putting together a self-service back-end service that is able to query past 300 transactions, and 5,000 transactions, in one go without timing out.
You can get started with the same tool today!
100 transactions or less are free
If you need more than 100, like 75,000 (which is what I had it created for), DM me.
If you want me to do your Mass-Data Solana Extraction, or gear it toward another blockchain, you can also pay me to do that too.
Here’s a random sample wallet you can try: ACzcgz7gq2qiKKaCxvGCPB3DU4Hne2CztqH1sDuYWsfF
Here’s the link to interact and use it.
You can respond directly to this email if you’re interested in more.