John Lilly on Evidence and Start-up Companies

Mozzilla COO John Lilly wrote a comment in response to my post on "evidence-based everything," which is quite insightful as he points out the "instrumentation" and responding to the numbers has become a core part of running an Internet business. He mentions YouTube and Google as examples, and I know that gathering and responding to hard evidence — and doing it as a way of life — also happens at eBay and Yahoo! In addition, I was at a Stanford d.school gathering last year where John argued that, because evidence about customer behavior is so easy to gather on the web, the way that an Internet start-up is pitched to venture capitalists has changed dramatically since boom in the late 1990’s.  Check out this attached article that Pfeffer and I wrote called Why Managing By Facts Works. It starts out with a great example from John about why having just a great PowerPoint based talk isn’t enough these days — you have to show that people actually want what you’ve got.