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What Is Triangulation?

I’ve wanted to write down information about the subject of “triangulation” for some time because it seems to be one of these things that is used in the investment banking and management consulting areas, but it is something that I have found used much less frequently when working with operating companies. It is also something that I have a hard time finding information about on the web or in books (for like the past 10 years!). I even had to manually confirm my definition with some investment bankers that I know because I couldn’t find any referenceable information on the net. Note according to Wikipedia triangulation is “…the process of finding a distance to a point by calculating the length of one side of a triangle, given measurements of angles and sides of the triangle formed by that point and two other reference points”, but this definition does not suit what I am thinking about.

My working definition of triangulation is “the systematic process of using multiple methods to gather a range of quantitative estimates for either an unknown or debatable value.”

Perhaps the least controversial, high-level example of triangulation exists in the investment banking area surrounding how the value of a company can be estimated. A classic example of how one could triangulate the value of a company is as follows:

  1. Estimate value of company using a multiples method of company value based on revenue (e.g., value of company equals 2.5 times revenue). Use market comparables to determine right multiplier (or low and high range of multipliers).
  2. Estimate value of company using a multiples method of company value based on profits (e.g., value of company equals 6.0 times EBITDA). Use market comparables to determine right multiplier (or low and high range of multipliers).
  3. Use discounted cash flow (DCF) method (e.g., adjusted present value [APV]) to estimate company value. This method involves taking current financials and projected financials (pro-formas) to value the company based on the free cash flows thrown off by the business.
  4. Layout the all of estimations on a “football field” type chart. Here the horizontal axis is the method used (so there are three points signifying multiples method #1, multiples method #2, and DCF method). The vertical axis is the valuation of the company. The plots would be floating bars with the high and low end of the bars signifying the high and low estimates for each valuation technique. (Sort of like how daily stock charts are plotted using a low, high, and close pricing data.).
  5. Apply any weighting technique you may have developed. Sometimes a company or practitioner may have methods of weighing one technique more than the others.
  6. Come up with your final range of estimates for the low, high, and average based on the football field.

The methods of triangulation are useful in many situations. In start-ups looking to raise capital, it can help one to be not only more rational about valuation but also more sophisticated when it comes to negotiating. Triangulation methods are not restricted to company valuations, and triangulation can be valuable in general management areas. For example, these methods can be used when trying to estimate a prospective channel partner's product demand, guesstimate job loading on a workforce, or analyze the potential penetration and growth rate of a competitor in a particular market).

In any case, although triangulation can be a bit of a mundane topic, it can be a powerful friend. Triangulation skills are something that many management consulting firms test for during the interviewing process. It takes some conscious effort to make it a habit, and it takes some creativity to come at things from different angles, but that keeps you on your toes too.

Steve Shu

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Update 2/12/09: Here is another triangulation example (with graphic).

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Fordham’s Graduate School of Business Starts Mini-Course on Business Blogging

Charlie O’Donnell, analyst for Union Square Ventures (yes, the firm was part of the recent investment round in del.icio.us via Fred Wilson), is going to be another pioneer in the business blogging area at Fordham’s Graduate School of Business. Charlie will be teaching a mini-course there, and he has a course overview posted here (note: Word document). Also noteworthy is that del.icio.us (one of my prior posts consolidating info on del.icio.us is here) will be part of the course. I would guess that Charlie may have some good leverage to get a couple of guest speakers in that area …

Also noteworthy is that Fordham will be using to blogs to help build alumni relations. I think this is a great idea. Alumni networks are natural communities, and universities should consider blogging as a way to connect with their alums outside of traditional magazine, local event, and fund raising/telemarketing activities.

Update (4/25/05): Charlie’s full post about the Fordham course is here. Sorry I forgot the original link the first time around.

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Understanding Wine Better Makes Me Demand Wine More

I’m no wine connoisseur, but if you are looking to
understand French wine better, a book that has helped increase my knowledge is
Windows on the World,
a book named in parallel with and connected to the restaurant on the 106th
and 107th floors of the former World Trade Center.
From the link I provided:

Until 8:48 a.m., on September 11,
2001, [Window’s] sold 10,000 bottles a month and had 1,400 bottles on its list.
Now, 78 of 450 employees are presumed dead. Others are out of work. A
50,000-bottle cellar is atomized.

… On Windows’s final business day,
its $37 million annual revenue made it America’s top-grossing restaurant.
Stuffy types shunned the dining room, calling it a corral for Midwestern
tourists, but democrats enjoyed the non-elite style and Executive Chef Michael
Lomonaco’s imaginative menus.

Now I only happened to read through the French red wines
section of the Windows book (an earlier version of the book that my wife picked
up back in college during the eighties). The book puts a nice, quick, and layered
structure around how to tackle wines. The layered structure allows one to dive
deeper as needed and as your brain capacity will allow. I’ve tasted hundreds of
wines. Never really had a way to hone in on what kind of wine to buy after all
of that drinking other than by type of wine (e.g., Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel).
Now I have much more of a structure for appreciating red wines from this region
of the world.

The Windows book has helped to formulate in my mind *very
rough* mental shortcut maps for French red wines (note the maps are rough and
not precise) such as the following:

  • Bordeaux – Blends of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, or Cabernet Franc grapes
  • Burgundy – “100%” Pinot Noir or Gamay grapes
  • Cote du Rhone – Blends of Syrah or Grenache grapes.

As an example of how the information is layered, if one looks within the Burgundy wine
family, one can get a proxy for quality (e.g., where other designators are not
there) by using some simple, but powerful shortcuts on reading the labels (listed
from higher quality to lower quality) as opposed to memorizing geogrpahy or every single wine and vintage:

  • Grand Cru wine – only the name of the vineyard is on the label
  • Premier Cru – both the village and the vineyard is on the label
  • Village wine – only the name of the village is on the label.

In any case, by understanding how to select French wine
better, it has increased my demand for French wine more. (Of course, being in France right
now also increases my demand, but that is beside the point!)

I still think I prefer California over French wines, but the
Window’s book has really helped me to appreciate the depth of the French wines
and their history. I now contemplate things like why it is that French wines
and California wines (or US wines in general) taste so different to me. In the hundreds of
wines I have tasted, it only hits me now that I have never had a California
wine that tastes like a French wine (if there is such a thing as a wine being in
the French style). As the climates don’t seem too divergent to me at a gross
level, it seems as though it might have more to do with the grapes then. I
would think that the wine-making process itself is much easier to replicate
(say if a French entrepreneur wanted to start a business in California) than carrying over the vines and
grapes. Perplexing to a layman.

In any case, I am thankful for the opportunity to discover
the Windows book. The book, in the context of the significance of World Trade
Center events, also gives
me moment to reflect on the knowledge captured within.

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Inside Acknowledgements

Wanted to put up a quick post to acknowledge some of the bloggers associated with business schools that my wife (Suzanne Shu) and I are directly connected to. The business schools are INSEAD (France), Southern Methodist University, and The University of Chicago. Haven’t met any of the bloggers here at INSEAD yet, but perhaps that time will come for me.

More business school blogs can be found at The League of MBA Bloggers.

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21Publish Launches New Pricing Model

As I highlighted in a prior post, 21Publish, a niche provider of blog software for turnkey blogging communities, has launched a new pricing model. The pricing model supports 100 free users with 2MBs of space for each user. A free model should be quite attractive for non-profits, alumni groups, ad-hoc organizations, and the like.

Disclosure: I am a consultant to 21Publish.

Update (4/21/05): Torsten Jacobi’s post reminds to link to some blogs developed using the 21Publish platform:

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Dream Interpretation As It Applies To Business

An increased amount of attention has been brought back to
the decision-making field of research with the release of Malcolm Gladwell’s book,
“Blink”. Gladwell’s book focuses on the power of the subconscious and tacit
knowledge in decision-making processes (while conscious). The book is available here at the bookstore at the business school at INSEAD, and his other book, "The Tipping Point" is part of the reading material for one of the courses on organizations (similar to how positioned at the University of Chicago business school to my understanding).

Completing the "Blink" book made me remember a book I read many
years ago on dream interpretation (note Gladwell’s book did not cover deep sleep dreaming, daydreaming, nor spontaneous thoughts that appear during the day). A key motivator for the book was this … wouldn’t it be powerful if one could gain additional benefits
from the activity that we spend one-third of our lives doing, i.e., sleeping?

The book was not Freud-style dream interpretation, where
Freud advocates (to my understanding) literal
interpretation of dreams. Instead, the book I read offers up the notion to the
effect of that each person has their own
data dictionary – dreams are a way of the subconscious communicating with
the conscious mind using images. The meaning of images in a dream (which are frequently
severely exaggerated) can best be understood by reflecting upon the dream as a
whole and the feelings the dream imparts and then determining what feels right
and comfortable as an explanation.

As an example, a woman described a dream where she was
murdering her husband by bludgeoning him over the head with a vacuum cleaner.
Also noteworthy was the fact that the husband appeared as an animal in the
dream – specifically a pig.

Freud might argue the dream literally – that the woman was
at risk of murdering her husband. Reminds me of the Tom Cruise movie, “Minority
Report”.

The book I read offered a different explanation. The
exaggerated nature of the dream was simply an artifact of dreams trying to
communicate with us. Here, the woman had some hard feelings toward her husband
because she felt he was restricting her in the home. The vacuum cleaner
represented “domesticity,” and the pig reflected feelings towards the husband
as a “chauvinist pig”. Murdering only meant that there were strong feelings
that the woman and husband should try to resolve (before things got out of hand).

When working with the executive team at my prior employer to
bring in a corporate venture capital round, I recall many tense discussions
surrounding negotiating terms for the new investor class with respect to angel
investors. I would dream about some of the issues during my sleep, and I would
wake up with the tenuous items popping into my head. Sometimes these cues would
trigger me to go back and talk with an angel investor or founder on specific
points. At other times, dreams simply reflected anxiety or feelings of
happiness as to how a client project for me was going. Much like a subconscious
reminder that pops into one’s head during the day that you should call someone
you haven’t talked to in awhile, pursue someone for a job opportunity or
project, etc., I would sometimes find subconscious cues important to
prioritizing personal action items, raising my sensitivity to other parties, and
recognizing my own feelings better.

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Some Thoughts On Hugh Hewitt’s Book, “Blog”

I finally got around to completing Hugh Hewitt’s book,
“Blog”. I can’t say that I recommend this book for people looking to understand
business blogging or blogging at a practitioner-level. That said, Hugh does a very nice job of both
highlighting the legitimization of the blog in the context of specific
political events and detailing specific blog and mainstream media events around
the “fall” of Senator Trent Lott, stumblings of presidential candidate John
Kerry, and flurry surrounding the Dan Rather/CBS/Bush National Guard forged
documents.

A couple of interesting things the book touches on:

  1. Hugh draws a very interesting analogy between the invention of movable type printing press and the reformation surrounding the Catholic church and distribution of the Bible. Note that movable typesetting brought down the cost of books more than 400 times, thus enabling knowledge to be dispersed through sub-communities very rapidly. Aside from Hugh’s book, I find it interesting to think about the name of Six Apart’s non-hosted blogging software, “Movable Type” and the how cost of content management software, traditionally thought of as enterprise software, has come down (arguably tens to hundreds of times, where some of the mid-range content management products are in the tens of thousands of dollars range versus blogging at hundreds of dollars [clearly not comparing apples to apples though]).
  2. Using the uber reach of Hugh Hewitt, Hugh writes something to the effect of how he plans to highlight the blogs of up-and-coming and young Republican bloggers to ensure that the next generation of Republicans to defeat the Democrats is in place. He highlights the talent gap on the side of the Democrats, especially given that most of the uber political blogs are all Republican. Interesting tactics to say the least given the Democrat lean of mainstream media, and the recent announcement of Fox News to supporting blogging.

To be frank, I don’t follow political blogs that closely,
and I haven’t followed the rise of talk radio. Perhaps as a consequence, I
don’t follow Hugh Hewitt that closely. I am not sure if Hugh is center right or
far right. He characterizes himself as center right. That said, some of the
accounts in his book strike me as a bit one-sided. Perhaps not nauseating
one-sideness like Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11, but you may need to look past some of Hugh’s zeal to get through
this book if you are not a Republican.

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Wists and Visual Bookmarks

Om Malik is blogging about Wists, a visual bookmarking service and a potential competitor to del.icio.us. In my prior post that commented on the del.icio.us venture investment, this what I was referring to in terms of del.icio.us investors getting another look sometime down the road and seeing what other industry markers play out (e.g., what innovations occur, who enters the space). In Fred Wilson’s recent post, Fred does hint that the user base for del.icio.us is very large. What the full range of competitive advantages will be (and how strong barriers will be) is yet to be seen.

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