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Cofounder Here: Happy to see this on hnews again. Update: Matthew (the other cofounder) and I got Guesstimate to a stage we were happy with. After a good amoun

Cofounder Here: Happy to see this on hnews again. Update: Matthew (the other cofounder) and I got Guesstimate to a stage we were happy with. After a good amount of work it seemed like several customers were pretty happy with it, but there weren't many obvious ways of making a ton more money on it, and we ran out of many of the most requested/obvious improvements. We're keeping it running, but it's not getting much more active development at this time. Note that it's all open source, so if you want to host it in-house you're encouraged to do so. I'm also happy to answer questions about it or help with specific modeling concerns. Right now I'm working at the Future of Humanity Insitute on some other tools I think will compliment Guesstimate well. There was a certain point where it seemed like many of the next main features would make more sense in separate apps. Hopefully, I'll be able to announce one of these soon.

cheez 8y ago
Hey this is super cool, looking forward to your future tools to complement guesstimate. I'd imagine an Excel plugin to do something similar would be valuable.
stanislavb 8y ago
Seems like you've put some solid work here. Who would you name your top competitors?
- social_quotient 8y ago
  Maybe kaggle but different?
  - make3 8y ago
    this has nothing to do with Kaggle, which is a competition platform
- ozgooen 8y ago
  On the question of "what are other ways of doing MC analysis", there are two approaches. The first is to use Excel apps like Oracle Crystal Ball or @Risk. These are aimed at business analysists. They're pretty expensive, but also quite powerful. The other option is to use probabilistic programming languages. Stan and PYMC3 are probably the best now, but hopefully, some others will become much better in the next few years. That said, this is a pretty small space. The main "business competitor" is probably people just using google sheets or Excel without distributions to make models. Crystall Ball: https://www.oracle.com/applications/crystalball/ https://www.oracle.com/applications/crystalball/ @Risk: https://www.palisade.com/risk/default.asp https://www.palisade.com/risk/default.asp Stan: https://mc-stan.org/ https://mc-stan.org/ PYMC3: https://docs.pymc.io https://docs.pymc.io
andrei_says_ 8y ago
I’ve used the product to “guesstimate” a few things like quality of life with a higher paying job with longer commute (not worth it!) and starting a business. Love how intuitive and clean the UI is and how it puts probability estimation at my fingertips, in simple, human language. Thank you!
- social_quotient 8y ago
  Curious what was the result specifics?
- winrid 8y ago
  Can you share what you found?
smallnamespace 8y ago
Are you able to apply global correlations to all the variates? One of the triggers for the financial crisis in '08 was that the Monte Carlo pricers assumed the various risks were much less correlated than they actually were. For example, they largely assumed that it was unlikely for many mortgages or underlying MBS securities to simultaneously default (low correlation). This is how many AAA rated CDO securities ended up trading at 50%+ discounts. IMHO, any multivariate Monte Carlo analysis that doesn't show your sensitivity to correlation is essentially useless, since your answers may change completely. In the second example model (https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/316 https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/316), Fermi estimation for startups, you would expect many of the inputs (deals at Series A, B, C, amount raised per deal) in real life to be highly correlated with each other since they all depend on 'how well is VC in general doing right now?' The final estimate of 'Capital Lost in Failed Cos from VC' has a range of 22B to 39B, this seems way too low. The amount of VC money lost during a crisis (like in '01) can easily be an order of magnitude more.
- DINKDINK 8y ago
  >any multivariate Monte Carlo analysis that doesn't show your sensitivity to correlation is essentially useless This rational is why this tool shouldn't be used for anything consequential -- like business decisions that can sink you company.
  - ozgooen 8y ago
    In my experience, many consequential business decisions aren't even made with probability distributions, let alone probabilistic models with realistic correlations. I would generally encourage people who are comfortable with more advanced probabilistic systems to use them.
- m101 8y ago
  I would really like to know the answer to the correlations question. It's essential for doing some of the things we do at our company. Also, are we able to adjust the distribution of each variable? EDIT: I think you can actually manually create correlations on sheet so it should be fine
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gimili 8y ago
Great work; this looks awesome. I am wondering what products would look like, if hardware engineers applied this to the modeling of future products. At my startup valispace.com for now we only allow for a simple propagation of worst-case values (gaussian distribution or worst-case stacking), but I think that specially for early design phases it would be of huge help and foresee problems in complex projects early on. Do you know of anyone using guesstimate for hardware engineering purposes?
Breza 8y ago
When this was originally on HN, I was impressed and signed up as a paying subscriber. Over time, I noticed development had stopped and the tiny things that I used to work around started to annoy me more. It's still a neat platform but I cancelled my subscription last year.

cheez 8y ago

Hey this is super cool, looking forward to your future tools to complement guesstimate. I'd imagine an Excel plugin to do something similar would be valuable.

stanislavb 8y ago

Seems like you've put some solid work here. Who would you name your top competitors?

social_quotient 8y ago
Maybe kaggle but different?
- make3 8y ago
  this has nothing to do with Kaggle, which is a competition platform
ozgooen 8y ago
On the question of "what are other ways of doing MC analysis", there are two approaches. The first is to use Excel apps like Oracle Crystal Ball or @Risk. These are aimed at business analysists. They're pretty expensive, but also quite powerful. The other option is to use probabilistic programming languages. Stan and PYMC3 are probably the best now, but hopefully, some others will become much better in the next few years. That said, this is a pretty small space. The main "business competitor" is probably people just using google sheets or Excel without distributions to make models. Crystall Ball: https://www.oracle.com/applications/crystalball/ https://www.oracle.com/applications/crystalball/ @Risk: https://www.palisade.com/risk/default.asp https://www.palisade.com/risk/default.asp Stan: https://mc-stan.org/ https://mc-stan.org/ PYMC3: https://docs.pymc.io https://docs.pymc.io

andrei_says_ 8y ago

I’ve used the product to “guesstimate” a few things like quality of life with a higher paying job with longer commute (not worth it!) and starting a business. Love how intuitive and clean the UI is and how it puts probability estimation at my fingertips, in simple, human language. Thank you!

social_quotient 8y ago
Curious what was the result specifics?
winrid 8y ago
Can you share what you found?

smallnamespace 8y ago

Are you able to apply global correlations to all the variates? One of the triggers for the financial crisis in '08 was that the Monte Carlo pricers assumed the various risks were much less correlated than they actually were. For example, they largely assumed that it was unlikely for many mortgages or underlying MBS securities to simultaneously default (low correlation). This is how many AAA rated CDO securities ended up trading at 50%+ discounts. IMHO, any multivariate Monte Carlo analysis that doesn't show your sensitivity to correlation is essentially useless, since your answers may change completely. In the second example model (https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/316 https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/316), Fermi estimation for startups, you would expect many of the inputs (deals at Series A, B, C, amount raised per deal) in real life to be highly correlated with each other since they all depend on 'how well is VC in general doing right now?' The final estimate of 'Capital Lost in Failed Cos from VC' has a range of 22B to 39B, this seems way too low. The amount of VC money lost during a crisis (like in '01) can easily be an order of magnitude more.

DINKDINK 8y ago
>any multivariate Monte Carlo analysis that doesn't show your sensitivity to correlation is essentially useless This rational is why this tool shouldn't be used for anything consequential -- like business decisions that can sink you company.
- ozgooen 8y ago
  In my experience, many consequential business decisions aren't even made with probability distributions, let alone probabilistic models with realistic correlations. I would generally encourage people who are comfortable with more advanced probabilistic systems to use them.
m101 8y ago
I would really like to know the answer to the correlations question. It's essential for doing some of the things we do at our company. Also, are we able to adjust the distribution of each variable? EDIT: I think you can actually manually create correlations on sheet so it should be fine

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gimili 8y ago

Great work; this looks awesome. I am wondering what products would look like, if hardware engineers applied this to the modeling of future products. At my startup valispace.com for now we only allow for a simple propagation of worst-case values (gaussian distribution or worst-case stacking), but I think that specially for early design phases it would be of huge help and foresee problems in complex projects early on. Do you know of anyone using guesstimate for hardware engineering purposes?

Breza 8y ago

When this was originally on HN, I was impressed and signed up as a paying subscriber. Over time, I noticed development had stopped and the tiny things that I used to work around started to annoy me more. It's still a neat platform but I cancelled my subscription last year.