The Power of Forward and Backward Chaining in Startups

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In software, you can either forward chain from your understanding of your code base and say, look, I'm pretty sure that these specific things are the bottlenecks in our code. Or a sort of more empirical approach would be to start profiling your code in those use cases and work backwards from there. The way I think about it in the context of a startup is that I'm trying to find sort of these points on the graph where we need to learn the most. In some cases, that's learning about what the customers want, as we've discussed. And then in other cases, like curing all cancer, right? We know customers want that.

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What is risk-driven development? How should we weigh advice, best practices, and common sense in a domain? What makes some feedback loops better than others? What's the best way to take System 2 knowledge and convert it to System 1 intuition? What are forward-chaining and backward-chaining? When is it best to use one over the other? What are the advantages and disadvantages of centralization and decentralization?

Satvik Beri is a cofounder and head of Data Science at Temple Capital, a quantitative hedge fund specializing in cryptocurrency. He is a big believer in the theory of constraints, and he has a background helping companies find and eliminate major development bottlenecks. Some of his interests include machine learning, functional programming, and mentorship. You can reach him at satvik.beri@gmail.com.

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