Professor Steve Blank Follows the Data

Great entrepreneurs follow data.  They don’t project their intuition or their wants onto the face of data.  An idea starts with intuition, but execution later follows the data you get from talking to, experiencing and learning from customers and the market.

Markets are incredibly powerful things.  We underestimate the power of markets.

Professor Steve Blank is at Stanford and one of the best-respected entrepreneurship professors in the business.  I have never met him but if I was at Stanford no matter what my major I’d try and take a class from him.   He wrote a blog post that will resonate with anyone that has been reading my blog since late February early March.  Click over and read the whole thing.

He writes,

We’ve spent the last 50 years working to not discriminate for age or disabilities so it’s hard to acknowledge what, if these number are correct, or even in the ballpark, the data seems to say that people over 60 are 30-180 times more likely to die of Covid-19. And ~1/3rd of those U.S. deaths have been in nursing homes.

  Age           Relative Death Rate
18 <40             0.07%
40 <50             0.31%
50 <60             1.00 (reference)
60 <70             2.09
70 <80             4.77
80+                  12.64

Compounding the age risk factor are chronic health problems (i.e. heart disease, high blood pressure, asthma and other respiratory diseases, obesity and diabetes.) In addition, racial and ethnic minorities seem to have been at greater risk.

Our public policy hasn’t followed the data nor has it listened to the data.  Policy got totally political early.  It was a chance to get Trump, and it was a chance to set in motion long loved policies that certain politicians wanted.  The stimulus bill proved that and the follow-on stimulus put forth by Pelosi shows that.  By the way, the Pelosi stimulus bill ought to be rejected summarily. The best stimulus to the US is to open up.

The lockdown has been debilitating. If you are wondering about some data here is the data on Sweden. The hypothesis of the model is the top line, the bottom line of actual data is Sweden.

https://t.co/uHRyf3rJT6

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) May 21, 2020

In case you are living in fear, the CDC came out today and said the virus doesn’t get transmitted from surfaces.  We already knew that the virus couldn’t live a long time outside.  I don’t have a clue why parks and beaches are not open across the country.

You might also recall that I said the virus would die down by May.  Guess what day it is?