How often do you — consciously or not — delay a decision by gathering useless information? How often do you then skew the decision by overvaluing that useless information.

Will Price in Decision Making and the Venture Capital Process cites some scholarly research on this and relates it directly back to the venture capital decision. Wait for information, delay, receive the information, twist the decision. The skewed decision ultimately justifies the delay. And the beginning assumption is that the extra information shouldn’t have affected the decision, not by delaying, not by affecting, anyhow.

This is definitely worth reading for its impact on venture capital decisions, but also, any management decision. Take it back to your own business, whether or not you’re raising capital: do you do that?

He concludes: "The key take-away is that all of us, when making a decision, need to carefully think through what we absolutely need to know in order to make a good decision, rather than delaying decision making and leaning on the crutch of more time to gather non-essential data that may contribute to a poorer decision."