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Welcome back to Who Are These Startups.

I'm the startup coach founder of Toronto Starts and with me today is David Orham, co-founder of Luca Theory.

Welcome David.

Thanks for having me.

What does Luca Theory do?

We quantify human perception and we're on the mission to track one billion predictions over the next five years.

Who is Luca Theory for?

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.

What is your startup story?

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.

Is Luca Theory trying to build a business oracle for every business?

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 if it is a portion of your company's overall knowledge, then we can track those insights and that perception over time.

We'll 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.

You talked about cognitive bias.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you catch that or take it out of the equation?

Good question.

Yeah, this is one of the first things we really started working on and there's so many of them.

You're never going to be able to catch all of them and you're never going to be able to be perfect.

So for us, it's just being better all the time at it and I think two, 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, we say like the follow the leader effect.

So oftentimes the most senior or loudest person in the room speaks first and 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 who's thinking what either an 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 own novel insight because people are very easily manipulated.

So this is one biopsy 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 if sort of like we're trying to find diverges, but that's when we find helps.

And then another is trying to correct for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This is the one that made everybody a COVID expert after two weeks in March.

This is what 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 then you have a sharp drop off in your knowledge and you actually perceive perception and then eventually it plateaus.

So figuring out a way to correctly weight new people because that new people aren't always wrong and sometimes they have great initial insights, but how we correctly weight 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 or the exact same type of prediction.

So that's just two we like to look at, but obviously there's very many.

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 or to weight it overall.

So as a collective team, you're bringing to the top what you think is the most likely outcome.

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 an environment, but the best use case is knowing over time who to trust in certain domains and weighting 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 studying 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 weight each of these different buckets in these subset of the communities?

How much should we weight those people over the general consensus?

And we can do a lot of studying on that.

The back has some of our models, but yet again for us is always that forward-looking perception side of things.

What drives you?

Really want to be less wrong when I'm making decisions.

And it's a big challenge when you're making investments, you're 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.

And how would you define success?

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 some, 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 got 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, it's all about the people you're doing it with and being able to lift everybody up throughout the program process.

What is your biggest learnings along the way?

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, sometimes in the same hour.

The best news you've 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 and not get too high with the highs, not get too low with the lows and appreciate that you're going to constantly have to make these very tricky decisions all the time.

What's your favorite productivity tool or AI tool?

The productivity tool would definitely be one tab.

Too many times I've sat with people and you look at their browser and they have like 50 tabs open and they might have three different browsers going trying 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 an easy place for you.

You can pick back up your research and your work exactly in a topic open 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 chat GPT has been my one that's 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 chat GPT and start from scratch every time where I have 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.

You're in the next AI program right now.

Can you tell me anything about that?

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 ecosystems 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 powerful.

You have any tips for founders?

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 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, reading a book before bed.

These things just ground me at the start and the 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 at well thought decision, sometimes on the spot.

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

It definitely caught me off guard when I first heard it come out to be honest with you as someone who's been exposed to new technologies my whole life.

Growing up 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, you learn to adapt to them, you learn to understand what they are and you learn to think pragmatically and critically for yourself on where you think they fit in and what those values could be for you, your company or 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 have to go back to the way we used to use like torrenting networks and stuff like that.

So pushing it to the brim is not going to stop it.

It's just going to evolve it and 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 a lot of things like why are you trying to stop it?

Are you behind?

Are you not as far as you thought you're going to be?

Is someone else at a competitive event?

Is it you wish you had?

What are you really trying to get at here?

I'm all for regulation.

I'm all for strong 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 it's moving too fast.

I don't think.

Where can our listeners connect with you and Lucatheory online?

Lucatheory.com will get you to the website and that will explain much more about our ideology around collective intelligence, around quantifying perception, see some of the things we're growing and doing there.

So I always happy to connect there and then each of our profiles for the founding team is on there to LinkedIn.

I'm David Orm on LinkedIn.

Always a great way to stay connected on the professional network side.

Then we like, you know, Telegram is always good to stay up on the latest there, but if you hit me up elsewhere, I'll be able to get a touch.

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.

Thanks, Craig.

Great to be here and we'll be happy to be back.

This has been Who Are These Startups?

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