Exposing Fake Research

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All it takes is a few clicks for you to make a difference . Welcome to the future and welcome to the Shadow Network with KP Ready .

They stirred the pot a little bit sometimes , and I have the opportunity to come here every week and say , hey , kp , what were you thinking when you posted that on LinkedIn ? And so , if you have no idea what I'm talking about , if you're not following KP Ready on LinkedIn , which is K Period , p Period , ready R-E-D-D-Y on LinkedIn , you should be .

This is where you find out what's going on in the VC world , what's going on specifically in investments , in innovation , around the AEC and CRE world . That's just what KP talks about . Many times , several times a day , he's posting over there .

So make sure you're following KP over on LinkedIn , and this is our opportunity to get together and unpack some of those posts . So , kp , if you're ready , I've selected a post for us to talk about .

I mean , I know you feel that way because it's true , but what's the red flag , or what are the red flags that you see , and what inspired you to go through and post this on LinkedIn ?

That's maybe 5% to 10% of the world . The mid-market really has to depend on third-party resources to make decisions . So in the broad enterprise world you have folks like Gartner that you pay a lot of money to and they analyze and vet and all that , and their model is less pay to play , it's play to promote . They will independently research things .

This is my understanding . I've never worked there . They will independently research things . They'll put you on a chart and if you're a market leader and you're the Gartner Magic Quadrant of products , then they publish the report .

Now , if you're that software company and you want to tell the world that you were on the Gartner Quadrant and use their logo and branding , they charge you for that . So we're going to pick the winners . And if you want to use our branding to promote your product and its validation , that's cool . You have to pay for that . So that's their business model .

But research and advertising , much like the newspaper industry , is separate . You have journalism and all that and you have advertising . They're two separate businesses and these paths shall never cross . Ideally and , by the way , there's the flag of who's providing the research .

But when there's not a lot of detail , I'm fortunate that I've spent some time in my career in the academic research world and you'd go to painstaking efforts to communicate in your appendix , like the sample sizes , and sometimes it's even disclosed to the questionnaire . I've done this research work for large corporates too , where part of the report is .

Here's what the questionnaire was . Here's the questions we asked . Here are the type of firms we reached out to , and here's who responded , and it's interesting that none of that is disclosed .

He's like well , we only had 12 people respond to the survey , or something like that . And then I published it . And then why not disclose that ? Like , why don't you tell me more about it ? And so I think it's disingenuous . And then a lot of that has shifted to pay to play . Hey , we're doing a survey of top XYZ software products .

If you want to be considered , pay us $1,500 to be in it , and so like so a well-funded startup pays to play , and maybe a less , you know , or just based on ethics . They're like no , like we're not going to do that . And the problem is there's not full disclosure to the consumer of the product . That is is that this is a sponsored product .

You know , if you , I actually like , if you pull up . You know , I still like getting the ENR magazine to my house , you know . And so I like flipping through it . So I flipped through it and there are sections that at the very top it says sponsored section . And it's three to five pages . It's an advertorial on a product , so it's like it's great exposure .

You know they're paying for that exposure , but it's very clear that this is an advertorial . It's not been vetted , it hasn't been fact checked .

Then you bring all that data back and then it's charts and graphs , charts and graphs . Right , that should all be very pragmatic , of no opinion right Now your findings and conclusions . Then you get to maybe insert a little bit of editorial aspect to it .

I'm not excluding people because I didn't invest in them . I even put people under that I don't particularly like , but I'm not giving people an opinion of this one's better than that one . I'm just saying this is the landscape .

These are all the companies I've been tracking in a particular segment , and here's a bunch of logos and here's some info about them , and so I think it's all about disclosing how you approach it and why you do it like , why you're doing it .

And this is an area where I think I've been having a lot of conversations with academics that do this stuff . They do it for a living and they have these methods right . They're academics . This is what they do for a living . And one thing I think is super important is you have to have some oversight .

Someone asked , someone commented on the post and they said well , what do you suggest ? I'm like you should have .

Just like you have an editorial board or anything else , there should maybe be an advisory board of people with deep reputation that aren't going to let something go out without it being you know , without it being right , one without it being correct , two without it being biased . So I think it's you know , I think it's a you .

When you have influence right , whether you're an events company right or venture capitalist or an individual like me , and you have some degree of influence in a market , I think there is a responsibility to make sure whatever you say , you know , is taken at face value and has some criteria , and I think that's what I believe , and I think that's what I believe ,

and I think that's what I believe , right , yeah .

So if , if you're one of those people and you know and you mentioned the different tiers , right If you're in one of those lower tier that doesn't have access to you , know some of the other things , or maybe you're a startup founder , that that needs the research or needs the information , how do you go about getting that in this landscape of fake research ?

What's the what's the best methodology ? If I'm starting something , or if I'm the CTO or CIO at a smaller firm , I'll just say it that way how do I go about getting the information that I need , knowing that that landscape is the way it is ?

So you want to . So , I think , having great trusted peer groups that maybe have already looked into it and are sharing it . There's a lot of these informal peer groups that exist . So I think that that's one way that it happens .

But , you know , the problem is like I was talking to the Chief Innovation Officer of a big engineering firm this morning and he was like yeah , you know , I get a lot of calls from small , much smaller engineering firms saying , hey , what do you think ? And he's like yeah , we've already .

We went through that process five years ago , right , we already and so I'm able to offer some support and advice . So I think that's really all you can do is , you know , talk to the people that you trust , talk to the people that you know don't have . You know they don't have anything in it for them , and hopefully they give me some good advice .

And generally , I think reference checking , reference calls , is a good process and I think asking questions about the plug . You know , no product is perfect . It's all about is it a good fit ? Right , everything is about fit . It's not good or bad , Everything is fit .

And I think a lot of what you have to do is ask great questions about hey , here's what we plan on using it for , here's the size of our firm , blah , blah , blah . And then a customer of the product might say you know what , based on what you're doing , I don't think it's a great fit . Man Like , I think you should look at something different .

So I think it's super important to really focus on fit and I think you know having these trusted networks is super important . I think , you know , on our platform we try to post stuff . You know people try to post stuff . Some of it's biased .

You know , if someone and our platform is to see is the founder of the company and they post something about their product , you know it's all disclosed . It's yeah , it's the founder of the company , so obviously they love their product and it's a perfect fit for everything .

Oh great , like you know , you become that guy and reputation matters , and you know it's pretty detrimental . And so I think a lot of times if you're highly risk averse , you just don't do anything right . You do something you weren't well-informed , you get smacked around for it , or you don't do something and then you know we continue to be a laggard industry .

So I think a little bit of truth in advertising , so to speak , becomes important .

That can be a huge disruption in my whole process and systems , affects my profitability or lack thereof , like you said , affects my reputation . Client thinks oh , that project didn't run very well . Well , yeah , we tried this new thing .

You know we're gonna take some of the blame with that , certainly because we weren't up to snuff with it and the project didn't run well . But it was the risk that we took on that new tool or that new platform or something that's real real in the industry in terms of the risk .

Ibm and I'm like I've even Like it's there's so far behind , like there's nothing innovative happening there , like yep , well , we'll get fired for it , though we hire . I am and I think you see that same pattern in our industry . You're not gonna get fired for buying stuff from Autodesk or pro core or Bentley .

Sure all any of the other incumbents software companies but how often is that product really the right fit for you ?

right , and you know you were talking about the , the , you know your peer networks and , of course , is a great place for me , for me to plug some of the things that we've got going on , but I have for a long time been a huge proponent and believer and participant in mastermind groups for exactly those reasons .

You know you can jump in to this group of people that you've gotten to know in a close relationship in the mastermind group say , hey , what do you use for this ? Do you have an example of this ? You know I have a version of this and in , like you said , you get honest feedback .

Right , hey , we use this , but our firm is focused on this or we're this size I'm not sure that's the right fit for this focus or that size Etc .

And just yesterday you and I were both with our innovation leaders mastermind group and there's there's plenty of of that type of conversation that's going to be happening inside these mastermind groups , for the innovation leaders are Director of innovation , cto , cio , that that type of title , that type of job description .

I guess it's gonna be lots of trading of information like that .

And you know they say the difference between investing , reinvesting , in a company that you already an investor in versus investing in a net new company is the benefit of information asymmetry , which just basically just means , like I know something you don't know , right .

So if you're already an investor in a company , you know everything about the personality of the founder , the plus , like you know so much about the company .

That Versus a net new company , when you're thinking about , okay , I'm gonna write a check for two million bucks , that's 15 this company in that company , well , this company I've already invested in and I know them . There's a lot of information asymmetry .

So I think one of the big benefits for these Whether it's us or trusted networks of people build on their own , the goal should be To build information asymmetry to give yourself a market advantage , and I think people like the whole I know something you don't know which is like my elementary playground .

Everything you learned on an elementary school playground , I guess , flies in business . But that one you know , that one does right . I know something you don't know seems to be a difference maker .

You know , ask better questions and I think , as consumers like anything else right , as consumers of anything , when we start to ask better questions , the product changes .

My name is Jeff Eccles , I'm Senior Advisor at Shadow Partners and , as always , I'm here with KP Ready , its CEO and founder of Shadow Partners and Shadow Ventures . Follow KP K-Period , P-Period , Ready , R-E-D-D-Y on LinkedIn to find these posts that we're talking about Many of them , quite thought-provoking .

I don't have all the metrics pulled up on this particular post , but there are , as I'm looking at it , well over 50 people engaged on this one post that you just posted a day or so ago . It reads the amount of fake research about startups in the built environment is astonishing .

It's all such pay-to-play Sample , sizes are small , methodologies are non-existent and the conclusions are biased . So what I get to do is come to these sessions with KP and say , hey , what were you thinking , meaning ? What inspired you when you wrote that and posted it on LinkedIn ?

So we spent the last several minutes , KP and I , unpacking that , understanding the inspiration and the reality of fake research in the environment in the industry of AEC and CRE the built environment , as always . Thanks for unpacking this for us and we'll do it again next week . And for those of you out there that are watching us live , join us again next week

. We're going to keep doing this live . The recording will go to the podcast , but you have the opportunity to view this live and even ask questions , I believe , as we go . So we'll be back again next Wednesday at 11 am Eastern for the next KP Ready Impact . Thanks for joining us today .