Knowing What You Know, Learning What You Can, and Acting Under Uncertainty in Entrepreneurship
The source for Make the Call, a practical book on entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty — a disciplined alternative to "fail fast," built on learning and judgment rather than luck. Read it at https://mc.nilehatch.com.
The book walks a decision from a question in the fog to a call you can stand behind, through five gates:
- Frame — what are we really deciding?
- Prior — what you already believe, and why you can't ignore it
- Evidence — gather what exists, test what doesn't
- Sense — is it credible, and what do you now believe?
- Call — is it enough, and which way?
Two framing parts bracket the gates — Into the Fog (the terrain and the method) and Becoming (someone who navigates the fog) — and a companion Method Layer turns the reader's AI into a gate-aware partner.
Requires Quarto. A handful of figures are drawn in R (ggplot2 / ggforce).
git clone git@github.com:nilehatch/make_call.git
cd make_call
quarto preview # live local preview
quarto render # build to _book/
Figure results are cached in _freeze/ (execute: freeze: true), so a normal build does not re-run R. To refresh a figure after changing its code, render that one file — quarto render <file>.qmd, which always executes — then commit the updated _freeze/.
Published at https://mc.nilehatch.com via Netlify.
Deployment is automatic: every push to main triggers a GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/publish.yml) that renders the book and deploys _book/ with the Netlify CLI. Because figures are frozen, CI never installs R. Do not run quarto publish by hand — the Action owns deploys, and a second path would race it. (_publish.yml is retained only as a manual-publish fallback.)
Public working draft, under active revision and open for friendly review. To collaborate, contact @nilehatch.
Made with Quarto.