A reader commented on my answer to the question: What do we need more of – entrepreneurs or investors? In which category is there more of a shortage?
Love your thinking on the subject. Really interesting conclusion to your article – making a case for a system that can churn out “inevitable” solutions to business problems, and therefore a guaranteed healthy supply of successful startups.
Come to think about it. Science thrives in a system that was built for it to flourish. At its foundation is the rigour of the scientific method, which kinda ensures that our groundbreaking discoveries are “inevitable”. If we go on a quest to find scientific solutions using the scientific method, we’re far more likely to succeed than using guesswork, superstition, and all the other stuff practised before science.
Now suppose the startup world had a foundation of sound “methods” or principles which all the players understand. And suppose those players (investors, entrepreneurs and all) employ those principles is seeking solutions to business problems, is it “inevitable” that great successful startups will be churned out?
And my answer:
Frankly, our government is responsible for establishing the type of gameplay to protect our collective evolutionary interests from a vile-maxim of personal interests. In the same way, the gameplay of soccer can only be secured by establishing and enforcing the rules of soccer. We have failed to implement the rules of humanitarian gameplay and thus our game is failing.
We, in the US, have never established the rules of our evolutionary game, not in the least because 63% of Americans do not believe in evolution. A scary thought, and responsible for the lack of leadership that allows us to develop the excellence of humanitarian systems we first and successfully apply to ourselves.
Without the rules of our evolutionary game established, the quest for innovation will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, inflated by a mind-numbing chase for advertising clicks leading to pump-and-dump IPO schemes.
We must expand the fractal of human ingenuity and capacity to establish and maintain a dynamic equilibrium with nature, as adaptability is key to the survival of any species on earth.
The expansion of freedom developed by prime innovation arbitrage will dramatically widen the standard deviation of merit available to entrepreneurs. And thereby dramatically decrease the fog of false-positives and false-negatives inevitable to subprime innovation arbitrage.
Or in the words of Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital Management, the key to successful investing is to avoid the losers, as the winners will take care of themselves.
And prime innovation arbitrage correlated to the expanding fractal of human ingenuity and capacity, incorporating the verifiable discoveries of science, will make meaningful success much more likely, if not evitable.
