a-walker

Stop estimating. I have analysed every team I have been on that use estimation. Those teams have been 99% incorrect. In my experience, it does not work. If you need dates, I would recommend a more modern approach like forecasting.

What's the difference between estimating and forecasting? Seems very binary as written, but at some point don't you have to look forward and make some assumptions on complexity/effort required to solve a problem and the general time it takes to solve them in order to do a forecast?

That hologram looks real.

Love this. Been a consistent pain for us just to make as simple map you can toss out to someone for a report and then forget about. Will be interesting to see how it plays out - arcgis recently launched a sort of consumer oriented mapping service - wonder how far they're wanting to go.

I'd imagine the audiences are quite different in their needs. We focus on the real estate of data centers and I think see multiple angles.

We have sales people and analysts that just need to make a basic map, call out some data points, and make it look good. Feels like Felt is a great tool for that.

We have larger needs where we need to do more complex analysis and visualize the relationships of larger data sets geographically - that's what we're looking to ArcGIS for.

It's been a bit of a search to find an affordable tool for the first use case and am glad to see someone in the space doing it.

I've always wondered this myself. I ended up taking a course on financial valuations. My novice takeaways were there were two approaches:

1. An intrinsic, detailed "bottoms up" approach by projecting future cash flows and discounting their value back to the present day. There might be 2 stages, the first years of explicit growth assumptions and the second along some kind of long term growth rate.

2. A market based, "top down" approach where you find comparable transactions and make adjustments for different levels of investment, leverage, to try to get an apples to apples comparison.

In either case, you also factor in gains you'd get from a strategic acquisition like eliminating redundant departments. Compare this to an acquisition by a PE firm, that doesn't do anything other than buy and sell equity in companies.

What I realized was it wasn't a science. Sure it deals mainly with numbers. And from an outside party you think it's this really rigorous, matter of fact assessment. But there's lots of areas where there are just guesses, albeit with a lot of money.

Did you do this in a product or agency environment? What was the typical talent bar for a green new hire and what was your financial arrangement with them?