One of the most insightful questions on my recent Stanford research newsletter: Research Review - 08   came from a reader who commented in Canada Startups group. Her comment: “ Fascinating framing, the idea that optimal pivots follow predictable variance thresholds has deep implications beyond startups. In transformation programs, governance maturity comes down to the same principle: knowing when to adapt strategy versus scaling execution. The “single optimal switch” mirrors

Startups are often portrayed as chaotic journeys of intuition and iteration. Yet a seminal Stanford study by Zhengli Wang  and Prof.   Stefanos Zenios   (2020)  reframes entrepreneurship as a quantifiable drift-variance diffusion control problem . In their model, a venture’s evolution follows a Brownian motion , where the entrepreneur strategically adjusts the drift  (expected progress) and variance  (uncertainty) through costly, controllable actions. The Model in Plain Langu

Introduction: The Puzzle of Safe Asset Dominance Why does the U.S. dollar continue to dominate global finance when China’s economy is nearly as large? Why has the euro held its ground despite repeated crises in the Eurozone? And why do other major economies - Brazil, South Africa, fail to graduate into the elite club of reserve currency providers, no matter how much they grow? At first glance, the answer should lie in fundamentals: GDP size, macroeconomic stability, deep capi

Every week, headlines announce that another startup has joined the unicorn club . The press release says the company is “valued at $1 billion.” Investors tweet congratulations. Founders pop champagne. Employees start calculating what their stock options might be worth. But here’s the inconvenient truth: that headline number is often far from the real economic value of the company. The Problem With Post-Money Valuation In venture capital, the most common way to value a startup