Imagine an award-winning dance instructor watching a dance on stage between two people who have no rhythm, and then being forced to witness their lovemaking as the crowning achievement of their match.
In seriousness, there are many annoyances on both sides of the fundraising equation, as the subpriming of much of venture capital creates a dense fog of false positives and false negatives one has to wade through to find a diamond in the rough. The ongoing legacy of the wrong people having been given the keys to the kingdom of innovation arbitrage for too long.
This very dense fog is on vivid display in Silicon Valley where the subpriming of innovation arbitrage has become self-induced by wealthy former corporate wannabes and me-too rookies straight out of business schools with access to other people’s money who lack the only meaningful differentiation a great venture capitalist has to offer; the alignment of foresight with an outlier of innovation.
So, what annoys me most is what the subpriming of venture capital has done to the very compass of innovation that breaks the norm, now overwhelmingly enchanted by downstream sub-optimizations of an existing and stale normalization of truth designed to produce advertising clicks.
Innovation that is not and lacks renewable socioeconomic value the rest of the world cares about and for that reason, with the exception of a few one-hit wonders with high temporal and deflating value post IPO, fails to produce renewable venture style returns to limited partners and is completely out of sync with the remaining massive Greenfield of technology adoption.
Both parties and sides of this subprime dance have become extremely unpleasant to watch. Venture capital, annoyed with the fog it created, now treats entrepreneurs like dirt. And conversely, all people with ideas automatically believe they are entrepreneurs by calling themselves such.
Meaning, venture capital as the arbitrage of innovation, chockfull of risk aversion, and risk diversification has become by choice incompatible with finding the outliers of innovation with the propensity to break the norm.
I can write a book about all the things I noticed as a (part-time) venture partner hobnobbing with my newfound peers on Sand Hill Road, earning my rite of passage after I sold a company I led from zero for triple million digits under perhaps the most difficult of circumstances. As such, I witnessed the inside of the kitchen. I know all too well what venture capital should do, not quite what 99.4% who fail do. The 99.4% of desperate arbitrage you as an entrepreneur will undoubtedly run into, and assume as your trusted guide not knowing better.
I decided to set up a masterclass specifically for entrepreneurs to indirectly teach venture capitalists a lesson (err, lead them to a better path). By showing entrepreneurs how to conjure up and deliver a genuinely disruptive proposition that attaches to a new and better normalization of truth to yield outlier value to society.
A lesson in natural evolution that ensures you as the entrepreneur remain in control and continue to lead the dance of unprecedented foresight of prime to spawn how we enrich not just our own but other people’s lives for generations to come.
I would be happy to teach the class on-premise for a pool of entrepreneurs you select.