Resulting: Why You Should Judge Decisions by the Process, Not the Outcome

Resulting is a poker concept that DHH applies to business and predictions. It means evaluating your decision solely on the basis of the outcome. In poker, the math is explicit: if you have an 87% hand and go all in and lose, you made the correct decision. If you convince yourself you should not have played that hand, you will start making worse decisions going forward.

DHH uses his own infamous "Facebook is not worth $33 billion" blog post from 2010 as the case study. VCs love to pull it out to dunk on him. His response: your entire business model is being wrong nine out of ten times. VCs have gotten tremendously rich being right only 10% of the time. Everyone misses shots. Not one shot, but hundreds, thousands, millions over a career.

The deeper analysis matters too. When DHH wrote that post, Facebook had no monetization strategy. He pattern-matched their traffic to sites like Blue Mountain, which had tons of traffic that turned out to be worthless. What he did not foresee was the alchemy of surveillance capitalism, which could turn aimless browsing into gold-level ad targeting. Nobody else saw it either, or they would have bet the house at $33 billion.

The application is to separate your process from your outcomes on a longer trend line. Remind yourself of your wrong calls regularly, as DHH does at least yearly. But do not let a bad outcome convince you the reasoning was flawed. That is how you end up playing 16% poker hands because you won the last three.