Annie Duke

Author of Thinking in Bets (2018) and Quit (2022). Special Partner at First Round Capital, where she has spent five years building structured decision rubrics and feedback systems for the partnership’s investment process. Former professional poker player with over $4 million in tournament winnings; winner of a World Series of Poker Bracelet; the only woman to have won both the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the National Poker Heads-Up Championship. Co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit working to embed decision-making skills in K–12 education. Teaches a decision-making course on Maven. Runs the Thinking in Bets Substack. Close friend of Daniel Kahneman. Based in the United States; mother of four.

Key ideas

• Nominal Group Technique — discover independently, discuss only, decide outside the room
• Kill Criteria — pre-mortems become useful only with pre-committed actions
• Make the implicit explicit — the master move behind better decisions
• Feedback loops are as long as you choose; quit before it ‘isn’t a decision’

Episodes

• Annie Duke on Better Decisions, Kill Criteria, and When to Quit — Lenny’s Podcast
• Annie Duke on Poker, Probabilities, and How We Make Decisions — Conversations with Tyler, Ep. 99: resulting, expected value, hedging against identity, process and happiness, and what separates the very best players