Author
Udit Gupta
Udit Gupta is an engineer by education & product designer by profession. As Head of Product at Zomato - he oversaw the food delivery product. It involved acquiring new customers through non-traditional channels, launching new product lines and improving the overall customer retention of the product. Prior to food delivery, he also launched the Zomato Gold subscription product and led its growth to a million user customer base. Udit has been an early member of the Zomato team since joining it in 2013. In early 2020, he co-founded his own company with Akarsh Sanghi and raised initial seed capital from Y Combinator.
Sociable's Podcast
Brains Byte Back interviews startups, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders that tap into how our brains work. We explore how knowledge & technology intersect to build a better, more sustainable future for humanity. If you’re interested in ideas that push the needle, and future-proofing yourself for the new information age, join us every Friday. Brains Byte Back guests include founders, CEOs, and other influential individuals making a big difference in society, with past guest speakers such as New York Times journalists, MIT Professors, and C-suite executives of Fortune 500 companies.
The ostrich effect explains why some of the smartest founders ignore bad news until it's too late. In this episode of Brains Byte Back, host Erick Espinosa sits down with Dr. Atif Ansar, an Oxford researcher and co-founder of Foresight, to break down the psychological bias that makes teams bury uncomfortable information and keep dashboards green long after a project has drifted off course.
Dr. Ansar has spent years studying thousands of the world's largest projects, from dams and railways to today's AI data center boom. He explains why optimism bias hits founders and entrepreneurs harder than anyone, why a project gets more dangerous the closer it looks to ”done,” and how a little self-deception quietly turns small delays into major failures.
You'll learn:
What the ostrich effect is and the behavioral science behind it (Kahneman, Tversky, and Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Why organizations can be even more irrational than the individuals inside them
How to establish an honest baseline with emotional neutrality, without guilt or blame
Why you should question the ”green” metrics and support the ”red” ones
The final 10% problem, and why heroic delivery fails
Whether you're running a company, a startup, or a side project, this conversation is a practical guide to beating the optimism bias that sabotages your goals and to learning how to look at your numbers before they look at you.
🎧 Listen now
Find out more about Dr. Atif Ansar.
Learn more about https://www.foresight.works/
Reach out to today's host Erick Espinosa – [email protected]
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