Business Insights and Analysis

Mike Maples, Jr is one of the most successful startup investors in history. He's worked with more early-stage startups than almost anyone alive, and with his fund, Floodgate, helped pioneer seed-stage investing as a category. He's been on the Forbes Midas List eight times and has made early bets on transformative companies like Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, and Okta. In his new book (coming out this Tuesday!), Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future, he shares the three common elements he's uncovered that separate startups (and founders) that break through and change the world from those that don’t. This research is rooted in his decades of notes, decks, and founder relationships, and is unlike anything I've seen elsewhere. In our conversation, Mike shares: 🔸 The three elements of breakthrough startup ideas 🔸 The importance of founder disagreeableness 🔸 Why you need to both *think* and *act* differently 🔸 How to avoid the “comparison trap” and “conformity trap” 🔸 How to apply pattern-breaking principles within large companies 🔸 Mike’s one piece of advice for founders 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 - YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gPjw8RXk - Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gAUbgGxz - Apple: https://lnkd.in/g6t367uY Some key takeaways: 1. Get out of the present: Instead of just thinking about solving current problems, you need to immerse yourself in the future. Look for emerging trends, technologies, or shifts in behavior that suggest where the world is heading. Great innovations often stem from individuals who immerse themselves deeply in a niche or cutting-edge area. 2. Great startup ideas share three elements: a. Inflections: External shifts that create potential for radical change in how people think, feel, and behave. b. Insights: A unique understanding of how to harness these inflections and enable a future that the company believes in. c. Founder-future fit: An alignment between the founders and the future they envision, including their skills, motivations, and network. 3. Three things that successful founders do differently: a. Movements: A movement aligns early believers around a higher purpose, leveraging their emotional commitment rather than just pragmatic benefits. b. Storytelling: Frame your startup’s story as a hero’s journey. Position yourself not as the hero but as the guide (like Obi-Wan Kenobi) who invites customers (the heroes) to embark on a transformative journey toward a better future. Tailor your narrative to resonate with different stakeholders—investors, customers, employees—by emphasizing how they can achieve their aspirations through your vision. c. Disagreeableness: Founders who challenge the status quo often appear disagreeable because they defy conventional norms. They drive change by questioning existing patterns and persuading others to embrace new ways of thinking and acting.

Reporting is NOT delivering insights. Unfortunately, many data & analytics professionals think it is. Reporting dashboards show WHAT's happening and enable basic slicing and dicing, but fail to deliver WHY. Example - "Performance is down 15% WoW" This is just stating the obvious. It's not a real insight. It's not actionable. This leaves many business leaders frustrated. When business stakeholders ask for more dashboards, what they are ultimately trying to achieve is "I need to know what's impacting my key business metrics and what I should do to improve it". Adding 15 more charts/views/slices won't help much to understand what's impacting the key business metrics and which actions should be taken. The key to REAL INSIGHTS that can move the needle? ROOT-CAUSE ANALYSIS to find the WHY (i.e., DIAGNOSTIC analytics) This is the most effective way to drive change with data & analytics. This can make the data & analytics team a TRUSTED ADVISOR and get a seat at the leadership and decision-making table. Insights need to be: 🟢SPEEDY: business stakeholders need quick insights into performance changes to make decisions before it's too late 🟢PROACTIVE: don't wait for business stakeholders to ask. Monitor key metrics and proactively share insights to become that trusted advisor 🟢IMPACT-ORIENTED: focus on the key drivers that drove most of the change and communicate accordingly 🟢EFFECTIVELY COMMUNICATED to drive the right action #data #analytics #impact #diagnosticanalytics

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗮𝗯𝗶𝘀. 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗕𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝗵 𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 Start with the Patient, Not the Plant Medical cannabis is medicine, not wellness or lifestyle. Your product must serve a real need consistently & safely, backed by data. Understand patient journeys, work with clinics & doctors, & embed yourself in the healthcare system, not outside it. Build GACP First, Then EU GMP or Equivalent Too many try to chase EU GMP without mastering GACP. Good Agricultural & Collection Practices are about how you grow. EU GMP is for post-harvest processing & pharma-grade quality control. Get the basics right, document everything, & then scale. Make Regulation One of Your Strengths If you don’t understand the regulatory landscape, you don’t have a business. Know your country’s cannabis laws, narcotics classifications, export rules, & patient access pathways. Compliance is not a department, it’s part of your product. Never Outsource Your Integrity There will be pressure to cut corners, overpromise, or take shortcuts. Don’t. One contamination, one false claim, one deal with a bad distributor and your business collapses. In cannabis, reputation takes years to build and seconds to lose. Trust the Local Team If you operate in another country, listen to the people on the ground. Local growers, engineers, regulators, and logistics teams know more than a remote HQ ever will. Many failed projects stem from ignoring local intelligence. Control the Supply Chain Medical cannabis isn’t just about growing. It’s about controlling drying, processing, lab testing, packaging, export clearance, & more. Own your chain or verify every part of it. You cannot afford surprises with patient-use products. Avoid Chasing the “Next Big Thing” There’s always a new hype, CBD for pets, infused snacks, luxury creams. These trends rarely survive strict medical regulation. Stick to your core business. Deliver clean, consistent, compliant flower or extract. Then grow. Document Everything This industry runs on traceability. You need clean SOPs, batch logs, validated results, cultivation records, & patient outcomes. If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen. If it’s not auditable, it’s not exportable. Raise the Right Money Work with investors who understand the timelines and risks. You need partners who can handle a 3 to 5-year return horizon and still back compliance over short-term revenue. Misaligned finance will kill your project faster than pests. Know When to Say No Sometimes the smartest move is to walk away. If the laws are too grey, your partners untrustworthy, or the facility isn’t ready, pause. Medical cannabis must be built with discipline and maturity. Forced projects fail. Focused ones succeed. Please ask me how to build or fix your cannabis business if you are unsure, stuck, or scaling. I’ve worked in this space for 9+ years, and I have seen what works and what wrecks good ideas.

After 25 years in the #BusinessAnalysis field practicing, consulting, teaching, writing, and basically devoting my career to the betterment of business analysis; I see some common things organizations do that severely compromise success. 📍 Using requirements documents as the "system documentation". 💥 Requirements documents, user stories, and information should not become the system documentation. These are very different artifacts and very different purposes. It leads to poor requirements quality as BAs have the wrong focus on tech/system details. Requirements should be agnostic of the system details and implementation. Then requirements are durable and reusable. System documentation is created for many reasons and uses, and needs to be suited to those uses and audience. 📍 Locking the requirements documents and artifacts in a hidden folder no one can access. 💥 Requirements information should be reusable and an asset teams can and should look back on. If it is locked up for "compliance and audit" and no one has access to it, this severely compromises other teams work and pace when looking to identify what previous team worked on, the context, and user impact. 📍 Assigning BAs to a specific application and focusing their training on "how the system works". 💥 Business Analysis is about analyzing the business goals, user goals/actions/scenarios, not the system. Most user actions encompass many applications. Assigning BAs to an application compromises the analysis and focusing on system knowledge negates the goal of a BA overall. They will learn the system(s) naturally as they work to focus on the user's needs and processes. It is better to focus BA training on the analysis skills and techniques agnostic of the system and business process. Good BAs use the analysis techniques to learn what they need to learn quickly about the users, data, and systems. 📍 Assigning BAs to projects based on application knowledge. 💥 The more complex the project is, the more BA skills agnostic of the system knowledge are needed. Knowledge of the system or business operations cannot replace analysis skills and techniques to do god business analysis when complexity and risk are high. A experienced and well trained BA with strong BA skills will outperform a subject matter expert as a BA on any complex piece of work impacting many users. Best is when both can work together! 📍 Not guarding the intent of the BA role and allowing every other role to tell the BAs to produce artifacts that compromise quality, value, and time. 💥 Many BAs experience developers, business teams, PMs, and Testing teams giving them loads of tasks to do that compromise the intent of the BA role. Good BAs know how to create far less artifacts and meetings that serve all these audiences well. Untrained BAs and BA Teams fall victim to creating artifacts for everyone. What are you seeing? Comment below 👇

Master the art of Financial Storytelling 🧑🏫 Your numbers tell a story, but are you telling it right? 👇 Numbers without context are just digits on a page. The real power comes from transforming those numbers into insights that drive action. ➡️ COMMON MISTAKES IN FINANCIAL REPORTING Let's start with what NOT to do when presenting financials: 1️⃣ Dropping raw numbers without context Raw data overwhelms your audience. When you say "Revenue grew to $100K," what does that mean for the business? 2️⃣ Reading slide content word-for-word Your presentation should add value beyond what's written. Share insights that aren't visible in the numbers. 3️⃣ Rushing through without pausing for questions Financial data needs time to digest. Create moments for discussion and clarification. ➡️ BUILDING A COMPELLING FINANCIAL STORY Here's how to transform your financial presentations: 1️⃣ Start with the fundamentals Always begin by establishing context. What's normal? What's exceptional? What benchmarks matter? 2️⃣ Connect data points to strategy Show how financial results link to business decisions. If working capital improved, explain which specific actions drove that improvement. 3️⃣ Use comparisons effectively - Period over period changes - Budget vs actuals - Year over year trends - Industry benchmarks 4️⃣ Structure your narrative - What happened? - Why did it happen? - What does it mean for the future? - What actions should we take? ➡️ COMPONENTS OF GREAT FINANCIAL STORYTELLING 1️⃣ Clear Dashboards Start with a clean, focused view of KPIs that matter most. Don't overwhelm with data. 2️⃣ Strategic Context Show how financial results connect to company goals and market conditions. 3️⃣ Forward-Looking Analysis Use current data to paint a picture of future opportunities and challenges. 4️⃣ Action Items End every presentation with clear next steps and decision points. ➡️ PRACTICAL TIPS FOR IMPLEMENTATION 1️⃣ Know your audience CFO needs different details than the marketing team. Adjust your depth accordingly. 2️⃣ Use visual aids Graphs and charts can illustrate trends better than tables of numbers. 3️⃣ Practice active listening Watch for confusion or disengagement. Adjust your presentation based on real-time feedback. 4️⃣ Create discussion points Plan specific moments to pause and engage with your audience. === Remember: Financial storytelling isn't about making numbers sound good. It's about helping stakeholders make informed decisions. What techniques do you use to make financial data more engaging? Share your thoughts in the comments below 👇

I am happy to co-author this article with Beatrice WEDER DI MAURO, President of the CEPR - Centre for Economic Policy Research, reflecting on the urgent need to engage in collective thinking and action to adapt our response to the challenge of insurability in the face of escalating climate risks. This article, which captures key convictions from our joint workshop hosted at Collège de France by the AXA Research Fund and CEPR - Centre for Economic Policy Research, couldn't have been more timely.   Devastating floods in Valencia, the wildfires in Los Angeles, the typhoons in Mayotte and La Réunion... These recent climate catastrophes show a clear reality: climate risks are intensifying and the protection gap for local communities and economies are becoming evident. Global economic losses from extreme weather events reached $320 billion in 2024, while in Europe, only 25% of economic losses were insured - leaving individuals, businesses, and communities vulnerable.    To address this, we need to enhance risk-sharing mechanisms and promote partnerships between public institutions and private companies.   Ensuring insurance accessibility and effectiveness is crucial. This can be done through: ➡️ Hybrid models, combining market mechanisms with public-private partnerships, to help ensure broad coverage and affordability. France’s CatNat regime and Switzerland’s hybrid model offer valuable insights. These models can be adapted to regions facing extreme exposure, such as sea level risks. ➡️ Greater investment in prevention and risk-sharing mechanisms. Initiatives like local municipal risk assessments can help small municipalities assess and mitigate local climate risks. ➡️ Impact underwriting, where insurers incentivize policyholders to adopt risk-reducing measures in exchange for lower premiums. ➡️ Public education on climate risks and stronger coordination between insurers, governments, and consumers to ensure preventive measures are taken seriously.   As we move forward, it's clear that policymakers, insurers, and society must work together to strike a sustainable balance between affordability and fiscal viability. This is not just about who pays the bill. It is about how we manage risk in an increasingly uncertain climate landscape. Let's continue to foster collaboration and innovation to close the protection gap and build a resilient future. 👇 https://lnkd.in/er6BkrtZ

It is the most random insights that click and help companies unlock better customer experience. This is something I have learned time and again while working with Policybazaar. So, interesting story - We noticed that the group health insurance claims were going very high for our customers. At first glance, this seemed normal. People get sick, accidents happen, right? But when we dug deeper, we found a pattern: a lot of these claims were coming in because people had no idea something was wrong until it was too late. I don’t know why, but for some reason getting routine medical checkups is not common in our country. A lot of us don’t know what is going on in our bodies. We might feel fine, but health issues like high cholesterol, blocked arteries, or a weakening heart don’t always come with a warning sign. By the time something serious happens—boom—an insurance claim. So, we thought, why not catch these issues before they turn into emergencies? That’s exactly what we do now, making it easier for companies to care for their people. Whether employees are working from home or in the office, we help them understand their health through annual checkups right at their workplace. We’ve partnered with health providers to run these checkups, and our team brings the doctors and support staff, ensuring employees get their results quickly and can take action if needed. Let’s look at an example to understand how this helps: Someone finds out during a regular checkup that their cholesterol is high, or maybe an ECG hints at a potential heart issue. With that knowledge, they can take simple steps. Maybe lifestyle changes, or medication - before things escalate into a situation where they’re in a hospital bed facing something as frightening as a heart attack. Prevention is, after all, far better than cure. It’s not just about reducing claims. It’s about showing care and making sure people don’t have to wait for a crisis to know what’s going on with their health. Because when we understand our health better, we can live better. And that’s the kind of impact we want to have. #grouphealthinsurance #preventivehealthcare #employeebenefits #PolicybazaarforBusiness

Most insurance companies don’t have a product problem. They have a 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦. Trouble shows up early for customers… and late for leadership. McKinsey’s 2025 analysis shows that only a small fraction of insurers capture meaningful value from AI and the reason isn’t model quality. It’s because 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐬 across underwriting, claims, support, and policy servicing. Another study highlights that predictive analytics when actually integrated can reduce loss ratios, speed up claims, and improve risk accuracy. But most insurers never reach that stage because their systems can’t surface early patterns. So what happens? A spike in confusion calls. Customers misusing features. Renewal expectations not matching policy reality. Claim friction rising quietly for weeks. By the time these signals hit dashboards, the damage is already in motion: lower NPS, rising churn, operational load, regulatory exposure. This is why insurance needs an 𝐈𝐂𝐔 - 𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐭. A team that: 1. Connects disparate data into a single, queryable layer. 2. Builds early-warning models for churn, fraud, sentiment, and claims delay. 3. Flags mismatches between expectation and experience in real time. 4. Routes insights directly into underwriting, ops, and customer teams. When insights arrive early, transformation doesn’t arrive late. And in insurance, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐰𝐢𝐧. #InsuranceIndustry #DataAnalytics #CustomerExperience #PredictiveAnalytics

Over summer, one of my Coreo team members was evacuated twice –  first for fire, then for flood – in the same week, in southern Victoria. In that same week, fires burned an area in Australia more than 50 times the size of Singapore, while flash flooding dropped 170–180 mm of rain in just 5–6 hours, enough to fill 70 Olympic swimming pools. After checking that my team member and her family were safe, I couldn’t help thinking about insurance. Why? Because insurance markets don’t debate climate risk, biodiversity loss, or system fragility. They price it. And right now, they’re sending clear signals. Across the world, insurers are: – Withdrawing cover from flood- and fire-exposed regions – Raising premiums faster than wages or inflation – Tightening exclusions where risks are no longer “insurable” This isn’t ideology. It’s actuarial reality. Once risk is visible, priced, and comparable, behaviour changes. Yet most organisations continue to push systemic risk visibility and mitigation downstream, prioritising quarterly targets, margin pressure, capital expectations, and near-term performance instead. The result? Resilience is consistently underfunded. When risk is priced properly, resilience stops being optional. And systems thinking stops being idealistic, and starts being inevitable.