“Moneyball” is a film about Billy Bean, head of Oakland Athletics, who introduced data baseball to the US Major League in the early 2000s. The main character, Billy Bean, feels that a change of perspective is necessary in order to overcome his weakness as a weak team with a limited budget and win the championship. In the process, I came across the “Moneyball” theory, which makes decisions based only on game records and data analysis, and unusually applies it to team management. However, since the coach's judgment and scouters' perspective acted as absolute standards at the time, recruiting players and formulating game strategies that relied only on data faced strong backlash.
The point of criticism is that field records cannot capture everything that happens at the baseball field, and that statistical analysis can never match the experience and wisdom that baseball experts have built up over decades. However, Billy Bean focuses on the fact that consideration of non-essential factors such as a baseball player's reputation, impression, and personality is a source of pollution that causes the value of a specific player to be overestimated or underestimated, and forms a team of players step by step based on data. In the end, Athletics miraculously won over and over again and set a record of 20 consecutive wins. Since then, other clubs have accepted Billy Bean's philosophy, and data utilization and power analysis have become essential elements in modern baseball.
I think discovery, analysis, and investment activities in domestic ventures and startups are also areas that require data-based transformation and upgrading. Many investment auditors explain that the competencies and will of representatives and management are key issues in investment decisions. However, personal evaluation methods cannot cover the entire rapidly expanding startup ecosystem, and it is difficult for subjective judgments to demonstrate expertise in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where new technologies are rapidly evolving. In an investment environment where complexity is increasing, I think it is essential to use objective data as a means to examine more companies and select promising companies.
Many people think that data on individual startups doesn't exist or will be limited, but this isn't true. Not only is it integrated into the Financial Supervisory Service's electronic disclosure system like listed companies or organized neatly in the form of analyst reports, information on unlisted companies is also provided in the form of public data. For example, by using the Patent Information Utilization Service (KIPRIS PLUS) of the Patent Office, it is possible to check the status of patent applications to verify the direction of technology development for each company, and to identify the recruitment status and organizational growth scale of companies on a monthly basis based on the Kookmin Pension Application Program Interface (API). Financial results can also be checked through various disclosure sites. In this way, anyone can access information about “if you only sell products.”
The volume of investment in ventures and startups continued to increase, surpassing 7 trillion last year, and the participation of individual investors is expected to increase further in the future. This is because innovative investment platforms such as the Seoul Exchange Private Exchange are becoming active, and the individual investment window for startups is expanding as venture capital-fill (VC) ETF products are being launched. If the Corporate Growth Investment Collective Organization (BDC) system promoted by the Finance Committee is introduced in the future, the amount of individual investment may increase by leaps and bounds.
Diversification of investment channels for venture startups is certainly welcome, but there are also causes for concern. This is because the growing number of venture investment funds is concentrated on a small number of highly recognized startups rather than spreading to many promising companies, a so-called “fugitive buyibin” phenomenon may occur. Data is the key to eliminating this bias in investment funds. I hope this will be an opportunity to rediscover promising innovative companies that existed outside of investors' interest and had no choice but to pass by. I hope to build an ecosystem where more “hidden pearls” can be discovered by changing the investment perspective based on data.
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Article source: https://news.mt.co.kr/mtview.php?no=2022052009142689516&type=1
