Andy Cunningham - Mother of the Chance Economy

By Dr. Sam L. Savage

Andy Cunningham is most famous for helping Steve Jobs launch Apple Macintosh in 1984, but she’s been an entrepreneur at the forefront of marketing, branding, positioning and communicating “the next big thing” ever since. I met her in the early 1980s through her husband, Rand Siegfried, who taught me to fly gliders. I then worked with her myself in 1986 when she did the PR for my What’sBest! software product. 

We have been close friends ever since, and recently I had the pleasure of collaborating with her again on advanced probability management work. I started out by reading her book, Get to Aha! Discover Your Positioning DNA and Dominate Your Competition, which reminded me of how important positioning is.

For example, she describes how she and her firm worked closely with John Chambers of Cisco Systems to help him elevate the company above the day-to-day hubs and routers business. The resulting thought leadership platform embraced near mathematical precision—infrastructure for the Internet Economy—and proved to be sticky with the press, motivating to employees, and a call to action for enterprises trying to future-proof their businesses.

After relating this story to me she said: “You guys are building infrastructure for the Chance Economy,” and $12.17 later I had purchased ChanceEconomy.com at GoDaddy."

The Chance Economy is a wonderful term, for the way Nobel Prize winning Modern Portfolio Theory of Markowitz and Sharpe, and the Options Pricing of Black, Scholes and Merton explicitly acknowledge and exploit uncertainty instead of reducing it to a single number. Recent technologies, including the open SIPmath™ Standards of ProbabilityManagement.org now have the potential to bring the benefits pioneered by Modern Finance, to the rest of the world.

ChancePlan.AI: playing Red Hat to SIPmath’s Linux

Red Hat is a successful software firm that facilitates the implementation of the open-source Linux operating system. I had been stewing over a concept I called ChancePlan.AI to do the same for the Open SIPmath Standard. Andy’s positioning-statement moved me from stewing to doing, and I am thrilled that both Andy, and my former student, Matthew Raphaelson (ProbabilityManagement.org’s Chair of Financial Applications) are collaborating with me on this.

So, what is the infrastructure for the Chance Economy? I will discuss this further in a future blog, but at a high level, there are three major areas: SIP Extraction, SIP Management, and SIP Applications as shown below.

Visit ChancePlan.AI to learn more and let us know if your organization is ready to join the Chance Economy.

Copyright © 2025 Sam L. Savage