David Oram, the co-founder of Luca Theory, shares his insights on the importance of having a consistent, scalable process for decision-making in the fast-paced world of startups. He discusses how Luca Theory aims to improve collective intelligence by correcting cognitive biases and creating strong alpha for select communities. Oram also shares his personal routine for getting into a flow state and reducing decision-making fatigue. Listeners will gain valuable insights into the startup world and how to make better decisions using collective intelligence.

In the fast-paced world of startups, decision-making is a crucial skill. David Oram, an AI founder, knows this all too well. In this episode of the podcast “Who Are These Startups,” he shares his insights on the importance of having a consistent, scalable process when making investments and starting companies.

Oram is the co-founder of Luca Theory, a platform for sharing insights and predictions about the future and being rewarded for those predictions. The idea for the platform came from Oram and his co-founders’ struggle with making group decisions due to cognitive biases. They wanted to build tools and technologies to improve their collective intelligence and make it more widely available.

Luca Theory’s goal is to create strong alpha for select communities and environments where they want that alpha. They aim to track insights and perception over time and help users understand who to trust in certain domains. The platform aims to correct for cognitive biases such as the follow-the-leader effect and the Dunning Kruger effect.

Oram believes routine is paramount for getting into a flow state, and it looks different for everyone. For him, having a consistent breakfast and coffee in the morning and reading before bed helps ground him and reduce decision-making fatigue. He also acknowledges the importance of dealing with the volume of complex decisions and keeping an even keel.

When asked about the call to pause AI development, Oram was caught off guard. He believes in adapting to new technologies and thinking critically about their values for individuals and companies. He supports regulation and strong frameworks to manage AI, but does not believe in stopping its development altogether.

Luca Theory’s website, lucatheory.com, explains their ideology and showcases their work. Oram and Luca Theory’s founding team profiles are available on their website and LinkedIn. They also use Telegram to stay connected.

Overall, Oram and Luca Theory’s mission is to help individuals and communities make better decisions using collective intelligence. Their focus on correcting cognitive biases and creating strong alpha is a novel approach that could have far-reaching implications. As the startup world continues to evolve, Oram’s insights and expertise will undoubtedly be in high demand.

Links:

• Luca Theory Website
  
• Luca Theory on Facebook
  
• Luca Theory on Instagram
  
• Luca Theory on TikTok
  
• Luca Theory on LinkedIn
  
• David Oram on LinkedIn
  
• Next AI
  

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Automated Transcript of Luca Theory – Who Are These Startups Podcast

The Startup Coach
Welcome to Who are the startups. Podcast shorts featuring founder interviews of Canadian startups

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Welcome back to who are the startups. I’m the startup coach, founder of TorontoStarts and with me today is David Orem, co founder of Luca theory. Welcome, David.

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Thanks for having me.

The Startup Coach
What does Luca theory do?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
We quantify human perception. And we’re on a mission to track 1 billion predictions over the next five years,

The Startup Coach
who is Luca theory for?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Luca theory is for anybody who wants to share their insight about the world and where they think it is going. And to be able to be rewarded for those predictions and learn along the way to see how their knowledge of the future evolves. And then they can use the insights generated by themselves and the community to make better decisions.

The Startup Coach
What is your startup story,

David Oram of LUCA Theory
We had a decision making problem amongst the co founders of the company, we were getting into business together, we were looking the best ways to invest some of the money we’ve made, made some recruiting decisions and things like that. And we realized that making group decisions was very hard. It was fraught with cognitive biases. And we were very easy to get caught up on the wrong things and not really articulate exactly what we thought would happen in a certain market or idea. So we wanted to build tools and technologies to build our own collective intelligence. And then we decided we wanted to make those more widely available.

The Startup Coach
Is Luca theory trying to build a business Oracle for every business?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
No, we want to create really strong alpha for select communities and environments where they want that alpha. So if you’re looking at some very early stage crypto investments, or you’re looking to gain an edge on your football predictions, or you really want to get really strong at predicting interest rate changes, whatever your community really wants to hone in on, and it is a portion of your company’s overall knowledge that we can track those insights and that perception over time will help you understand who to trust in certain domains, who not to trust in certain domains, when your team has been really hot recently, maybe when they’re not doing so well. And we can evolve and grow with you in that type of environment.

The Startup Coach
You talked about cognitive bias, can you tell me a little bit about how you catch that or take it out of the equation?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Great question. Yeah, this is one of the first things we really started working on, and there’s so many of them, you’re never gonna be able to catch all of them, and you’re never gonna be able to be perfect. So for us, it’s just being better all the time at it. And I think to which we find help a lot frame up this ideology. And then we can unpack more kind of when we get deeper with people. One is with regards to, I always say like a follow the leader effect. So oftentimes, the most senior a loudest person in the room speaks. First, they have a really dominant voice that everyone else will kind of just follow in order, and not necessarily challenge that outcome. But one thing we like to do is when we’re doing large prediction sets, is we don’t show whose thinking was either individual or the group before we let other people see what they’re predicting. So that they can have a chance to be able to really share their all novel insight, because people are very easily manipulated. So this is one biases that we find can really hamper teams getting a better broad set of opinions and ideas out there. And then we can call it later. It’s sort of like we’re trying to find diverges, but that’s what we find helps, and then another is trying to correct for the Dunning Kruger effect. This is the one that made everybody and COVID expert after two weeks in March. This is why it makes everybody an expert right now on AI is that when you first learn a subject, you get really confident and you think you’re over the moon and you know so much, but you have a sharp drop off in your knowledge and you’re actually perceived perception, and then eventually it plateaus. So figuring out a way to correctly wait new people because that new people aren’t always wrong. And sometimes they have great initial insights. But how we correctly wait how much credit to give to new people to an environment when they haven’t been exposed to predicting the outcome of a UK election or something like that. We need to know how much we should trust people’s perception there and how much we should trust people that have had a proven track record in similar environments are the exact same type of prediction. So that’s just two we like to look at but obviously there’s very many

The Startup Coach
Using Luca theory inside a company is the goal to weight the decision making process to either know who the best expert to make the decisions in this area are order weighted overall. So as a collective team, you’re bringing to the top what you think is the most likely outcome?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Both, because some things we can do very quickly without a lot of historical knowledge and evidence of the way that this team or a subset of this team has made decisions in environment. But the best use case is knowing over time, who to trust in certain domains and waiting those people more so than everybody else. Because realistically, one hand one vote is not the best decision making environment whatsoever. And this is a big piece we’re actually starting with Next AI is if we’re looking at Super forecasters that have proven that they can predict what interest rates are going to be versus people that are just getting going versus people that have been good at predicting just general things overall, how much do we wait, each of these different buckets and the subset of the communities? How much should we wait those people over the general consensus, and we can do a lot of study on that the backcast some of our models, but yet again, for us is always that forward looking perception side of things,

The Startup Coach
what drives you?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Really want to be less wrong when I’m making decisions, and is a big challenge when you’re making investments or starting companies, and having a really strong scalable, consistent process where I can learn from my own knowledge evolutions, I can learn from my team’s knowledge evolution, and we can build more tools for that so we can make better decisions overall, I feel like that’s going to be a great success for ourselves, our community and our clients.

The Startup Coach
And how would you define success?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Happiness is always the key to success, and being able to realize that at the end of the day, you’re feel recharged right away, we were having this conversation with a lot of sub maybe some of our interns earlier in their career is like you don’t want to go to a job that drains you. At the end of the day, you’re hoping to wake up recharged, like we gotten to the point now is where we want to feel like at the end of the day, we feel as equally satisfied and ready to go and looking forward to the next day and tackling the problems we want to work on working with the people we’re really passionate about working with, and continue to evolve that and having that success go across the community, not just an individual piece is all about the people you’re doing it with. I mean, it’ll lift everybody up throughout the program process,

The Startup Coach
What is your biggest learnings along the way,

David Oram of LUCA Theory
it’s definitely centered around the degree and volume of complex decisions that you’re going to have to make over and over and over and constantly being able to have to deal with sometimes in the same days, not as in the same hour, the best news you had for your company a long time and the worst news you’ve had for your company a long time. And being able to kind of keep an even keel and respect that not get too high with the highs not going to low with the lows. And appreciate that you’re going to constantly have to make these very tricky decisions all the time.

The Startup Coach
What’s your favorite productivity tool or AI tool?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Productivity tool would definitely be OneTab, too many times have sat with people and you’ll look at their browser and they have like 50 tabs open. And they might have three or different three different browsers go and try to keep all their tabs open. And it just ruins their machine and makes them unproductive. And there’s just one button you can click saves all those in a easy place where you can pick back up your research and your work. Exactly the topic opened up all the same windows in the same way. That’s one tool I’ve used for like a decade now. And it still shocks me how so many people still just have like infinite tabs and bookmarks. It’s just not a great way to live your life. And on the AI side, the Notion integration with chatGPT has been my one that has been the stickiest for me over the past six months, let’s say as I’m learning how to have some memory with the AI, it knows I’m talking about my company when I’m doing business plans when I’m doing proposals when I’m doing social media. It knows my company now a little bit. So the recommendations and insights it gives back are much more tailored to my niche. And it does not like when I’m starting chat like the normal chatGPT and start from scratch every time where I have like a new memory bank when I’m in notion. It allows me to work with my existing institutional knowledge that I’m given the AI and it feels much more powerful for me now.

The Startup Coach
You’re in the Next AI program right now. Can you tell me anything about that?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Yeah, it’s one of the top if not the top founder and company development program in Canada for early stage AI companies. It has great connections with the universities and the startup ecosystem. owns around Canada. And it really allows us to get access to incredible knowledge and mentorship, the latest trends in AI. So when we’re making some of these very fundamental decisions in our companies, about how we want to design our models, how we want to structure our data, and how we want to prepare ourselves for success, they help us do that. And it’s quite, it’s quite powerful.

The Startup Coach
Do you have any tips for founders?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Routine is paramount,you need to have a consistent set of ways you can get yourself in flow state. And what that looks like for everybody is completely different. But you you need that, for me, I’m a big first thing in the morning. Last thing at night guy is almost always the exact same for me, in terms of what coffee and breakfast I’m having to like read a book before bed and these things is ground me at the start and end of days. So I don’t need to have an additional decision making environment around those. Because as I alluded to earlier, you have so many decisions to make all the time. If you’re struggling with these more simple ones on a daily basis, that should be pretty consistent, I find that you get decision making fatigue much faster. And then you can’t make that really strong point that well thought of decision, you know, some of those on the spot.

The Startup Coach
As an AI founder, what is your reaction to the current call to pause AI development and the fear around it?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
It definitely caught me off guard when I first heard it come out, to be honest with you, as someone who has been exposed to new technologies my whole life I’d grown up you know, with the newest video games, with the newest social networks with the newest forms of internet currencies with Bitcoin, and the newest now AI bots, it just you learn to adapt to them, you learn to understand what they are, and you learn to think pragmatically and critically for yourself and where you think they fit in and what those values could be for you, your company or like Not at all. So when you see a group just call for stopping something I find that just pushes things to the shadows. And then it just ends up with a whole different version of its evolution, where then you got to go back to the way we used to use like torrenting networks and stuff like that, it’s like pushing it to the brand is like is not going to stop it. It’s just going to evolve it in put it in a different set of players hands rather than be like, let’s be more open about everything we’re doing for the next six months instead of trying to stop it. So there’s another thing Why are you trying to stop it? Are you behind? Are you not as far as long as you thought you’re gonna be? If someone else has a competitive advantage that you wish you had? Um, what are you really trying to get at here? I’m all for regulation of all four strive frameworks and policies and ways to manage this stuff. So people don’t get exposed to bad financial advice or bad health advice. These things are important, but you don’t just say stop it because like is, you know, moving too fast, I don’t think

The Startup Coach
Where can our listeners connect with you and Luca theory online?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Lucatheory.com will get you to the website. And that will explain much more about AI our ideology around collective intelligence, around quantifying perception, see some of the things were growing and doing there. So always happy to connect there. And then each of our profiles for the founding team is on there to LinkedIn. I’m David Orme, on LinkedIn, always a great way to stay connected on the professional network side. And then we like you know, telegram is always good to stay up on the latest. They ever hit me up elsewhere, I’ll be able to get in touch.

The Startup Coach
Thank you, David. I really appreciate you taking the time today to give us your insights and be a part of who are these startups?

David Oram of LUCA Theory
Thanks, Craig. Great to be here. And we’ll be happy to be back.

The Startup Coach
This has been Who are these startups? Find out more at whoarethesestartups.com and check out our live events at Torontostarts.com/events