Terry Jones

It’s new year’s day. I never make new year’s resolutions. But today I’ve finally taken a step I’ve been meaning to take for a while, and it happens to be Jan 1st, so there you go.

Over the last 2 months I’ve spent lots of time running around talking to people and not producing any code (or much of anything else).

I’ve also found it increasingly hard to get anything useful done (by useful I almost always mean “code”).

I’m going to try cutting myself off a little more. But I need to be online – to read docs, to receive/send some mail, to test code, etc.

I’ve just made some changes to my email setup. Now all my mail, with about 15 exceptions, will go into a separate file that I’m only going to look at once a day (more likely I’ll write a little program to send me a summary). If you’re one of the lucky 15 your mail will still go straight into my inbox and I’ll see it pretty quickly.

I get about 550-700 mails a day. 300-500 of them are spam and are caught as spam by my filters. But that still leaves hundreds of mails a day that pop up in my mailbox all the time.

Quite a lot of those are from mailing lists and some spam that slips through. Of the rest, from actual people, hardly any need to be read or replied to straight away. So I’m going to file them out of sight and read them once in a while. If I remember.

I’m planning another blog post on my email setup. It’s heavily customized. That’s good and it’s also why I figure I’ll probably never switch to another email setup – the bar is just too high and too personalized.

I’m also planning to blog less, to twitter less, to stop reading RSS streams, etc. If I don’t I’m going to turn into one of those trendy knowledgeable tech people who generate a lot of hot air and not much else. I don’t want to be like that.

I’m in Paris for the Le Web conference. Tonight is the party, at La Scala, which looks like exactly the kind of place I hate. I never understand why people go to loud clubs.

So instead, I went out wandering and found a pizza place, ordered a margarita, drank a couple of Italian beers and took my time savoring more of Orwell. It’s such a pleasure, as with Gore Vidal essays or Proust, to read his thoughts on all manner of things. I’ve been taking my time, slowly working through the 4 volumes of Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (that link is to volume 1).

Here’s the last piece I read tonight, the May 19, 1944 As I Please column. Maybe you wont find it extraordinary, but I do. It probably helps to have the context, to have read the previous volumes (I’m in the middle of vol. 3).

I’ve been out talking to people about raising money for Fluidinfo.

Over the last 7 years I’ve read literally thousands of articles on talking to potential investors, pitching, raising money, angels, VCs, dilution, control, rounds, boards, strategies, valuations, burn rates, equity, etc. I’ve bought and read dozens of related books. I’m a regular reader of about a dozen VC blogs and the blogs of several entrepreneurs. I’ve swapped stories in person and learned lessons from probably a hundred other entrepreneurs. I was CTO of Eatoni Ergonomics, a startup that raised $5M in NYC, and I sat on the board for 4 years.

I like to analyze things, to sit around thinking, to generalize, to look for lessons, to find patterns, etc. So I reckon I have a fairly good idea of what creating a startup and raising money is about.

Some aspects of doing that are relatively formulaic. But others have significant variation.

For example, what should you put in a business plan? You can spend many months working on business plans. It’s hard work to write well and concisely. Then you show it to VC A and they tell you they’d also like to see X and Y and Z, that are not in your plan. So you put them in. You show it to VC B, and they tell you the plan is way too long! That you should take out P, Q, R and S. That leaves you with a wholly new-looking plan and when you show that to VC C, they’ll tell you it’s incoherent and doesn’t flow and look at you like you’re some kind of innocent child who doesn’t even know how to structure its thoughts. When you tell them you actually already know all that and that you agree, they’ll think you’re even weirder. And so it continues.

Thinking is changing on the business plan front, though. Some entrepreneurs and some investors have realized that creating or insisting on a business plan too early is probably a waste of time. Everyone knows the market numbers and the financial projections are probably rubbish. People expect the business and the plan to change, etc., etc.

When someone asks me for a business plan, I (politely) tell them I don’t have one or intend to write one. I tell them I’m looking for someone who wants to understand what I’m doing and fund it, without needing to see a formal written business plan. I suggest that if I reach the stage of looking for someone who wants the comfort of a better-thought-out plan that I will get back to them.

I think that’s a good change all round. You have to push back a little. A tiny engineering team focused on building a product probably shouldn’t stop, or be stopped, to write a business plan. I’m certainly not going to do that. I could spend that time writing code, working with people I’m paying to create more of a product, to get more online, to have more to point to, etc.

Elevator pitches

There’s definitely been a change with respect to business plans.

And now to the meat of this post, to a place where a similar change has yet to penetrate: the blind insistence on having an elevator pitch.

Almost universally, potential investors will want or expect an elevator pitch. Tons of VC sites will advise you that if you can’t describe your idea in a couple of sentences, it’s probably a non-starter. If you don’t have a compelling elevator pitch they wont talk to you, wont reply to email (even if you have been introduced), and they certainly wont read any materials.

Some even go so far as to tell you that without an elevator pitch you wont be able to communicate your ideas to your employees to motivate them! Uh, excuse me? Since when did the intelligent, driven, dig-in, curious, thoughtful, dedicated people who join startups acquire the attention span of gnats?

Listen. Some ideas can’t be summarized and/or grasped in a two-minute elevator ride. Sometimes you don’t even know yourself what the outcome will be. The history of science and innovation is full of examples. Imagine what the world would be like if, in order to get seed resources to push a new project along, all ideas had to be pre-vetted, each in 2 minutes, by a fairly general audience (I’m being polite again).

Entrepreneurs have to push back—where necessary—on the demand for an elevator pitch.

I’ve tried to put my round ideas into the square hole of an elevator pitch for long enough. I haven’t managed to do it and I don’t want to spend any more time trying.

Until tonight I’ve just been telling people I don’t have an elevator pitch, sorry. I’ve even told them (hi Nivi!) that instead of robotically insisting that I shape my ideas to their expectations that they try being more open minded about the process and try working on their expectations.

From now on, I’m going to give the following elevator pitch:

Here is a list of people. Each of them has had the curiousity, time, and patience to listen to my ideas for at least an hour. Ask them if I’m worth talking to further.

(See below for my list.)

If that’s not ok, then I agree that 1) if I reach the stage where I need to talk to people who really need an elevator pitch, and 2) you’re still interested, then I’ll try again to work on getting you what you need. Same goes for a business plan.

Up to this point I’ve tried to only talk to people who are willing to put the time in, to listen and think, to talk among themselves and draw their own conclusions. But I’ve still run into a bunch of people who wont do that. That’s ok, of course. I also know what it’s like to be busy.

Here’s my list. I’m very happy and very thankful to have recently spent at least an hour, sometimes much more, with each of the following:

Bradley Allen,
Art Bergman,
Jason Calacanis,
Dick Costolo,
Daniel Dennett.
Esther Dyson (now an investor),
Brady Forrest,
Eric Haseltine,
David Henkel-Wallace,
Jim Hollan,
Steve Hofmeyr,
Mark Jacobsen,
Vicente Lopez,
Roger Magoulas,
Jerry Michalski,
Nelson Minar,
Roger Moody,
Ted Nelson,
Tim O’Reilly,
Norm Packard,
Jennifer Pahlka,
Andrew Parker,
Scott Rafer,
Clay Shirky,
Reshma Sohoni,
Graham Spencer,
Stefan Tirtey,
Mark Tluszcz,
David Weinberger, and
Fred Wilson.

That’s my new elevator pitch.

If you buy it, let’s talk properly sometime soon. If you don’t, but you’re still curious, talk to some of those folks. Take your pick.

And if you don’t know any of those people, maybe you should be sending me your elevator pitch.

I can’t take it any more. I can’t handle the pace of blogging every day. The honeymoon is over, barely a month after I got the blogmobile back on the road. I just don’t have that much to say.

Actually, I do. There are things I am dying to write – for example about how I think the current debate about data ownership and privacy and control could be resolved. But those thoughts say too much about what we’re building for my taste right now. It’s very hard to know how to balance letting information out for the sake of attention with keeping information in for the sake of competitive advantage. I don’t know the answer to that one.

I have a list of things I could easily write about – it’s just that I don’t really feel like it.

Tomorrow I have a couple of meetings in LA and then I’m heading up to the Bay area until Friday.

I have much better and more important things to do than hack on my ideas for measuring Twitter growth.

But a man’s gotta relax sometime.

So I spent a couple of hours at JFK and then on the plane hacking some Python to pull down tweets (is this what other people call Twitter posts?), pull out their Twitter id and date, convert the dates to integers, write this down a pipe to gnuplot, and put the results onto a graph. I’ve nothing much to show right now. I need more data.

But the story with Twitter ids is apparently not that simple. While you can get tweets from very early on (like #20 that I pointed to earlier), and you can get things like #438484102 which is a recent one of mine, it’s not clear how the intermediate range is populated. Just to get a feel for it, I tried several loops like the following at the shell:

Most of these were highly unsuccessful. I doubt that’s because there’s widespread deleting of tweets by users. So maybe Twitter are using ids that are not sequential.

Of course if I wasn’t doing this for the simple joy of programming I’d start by doing a decent search for the graph I’m trying to make. Failing that I’d look for someone else online with a bundle of tweets.

I’ll probably let this drop. I should let it drop. But once I get started down the road of thinking about a neat little problem, I sometimes don’t let go. Experience has taught me that it is usually better to hack on it like crazy for 2 days and get it over with. It’s a bit like reading a novel that you don’t want to put down when you know you really should.

One nice sub-problem is deciding where to sample next in the Twitter id space. You can maintain something like a heap of areas – where area is the size of the triangle defined by two tweets: their ids and dates. That probably sounds a bit obscure, but I understand it :-) Gradient of the growth curve is interesting – you probably want more samples when the gradient is changing fastest. Adding time between tweets to gradient gives you a triangle whose area you can measure. There are simpler approaches too, like uniform sampling, or some form of binary splitting of interesting regions of id space. Along the way you need to account for pages that give you a 404. That’s a data point about the id space too.

I often notice little things about how I work that I think point out value. One sign that a piece of UI is right is when you start to look for it in apps that don’t have it. For example, after I had started using mouse gestures in Opera I’d find myself wanting to make mouse gestures in other applications. When mice first started to have a wheel, I was skeptical. Support of the mouse wheel was not universal across applications. When I found myself trying to scroll with the mouse wheel in applications that didn’t support it, I knew it was right.

Tonight I came home and went to my machine. The first thing I did was to check what was going on in Twitter. That’s pretty interesting, at least for someone like me. I’ve been sending email on pretty much a daily basis for 25 years. It’s pretty much always the first thing I look at when I come back to my machine. Occasionally these days I find myself first going into Google reader to see what’s new, but that’s pretty rare and I might be looking for something specific. Tonight, I think for the first time, Twitter was where I went to – and not just for the general news, but for communications between and about people I know or am interested in. Much more interesting than looking through my email.

I’m one of those that thought Twitter was pretty silly when I first signed up (Dec 2006). I only used it once, and also found it intolerably slow. But it’s grown on me. And I find definite value there.

A few examples:

1. I’d mailed Dick Costolo a few times in the past. Then I saw him twittering that he was drinking cortados. So I figured he must be in Spain. I mailed him, and he was. As a result I ended up at the FOWA conference in London the next day and met a bunch of people.
2. On Tuesday I went out and bought a Wii in Manhattan to take back to my kids in Spain. I twittered about heading out to do it. I got an email a bit later from @esteve telling me to take the Wii back as they are region-locked. So I did.
3. A week or so ago I was reading some tweets and noticed that someone had just been out to dinner in Manhattan with someone else that I wanted to meet. So I sent a mail to the first person and was soon swapping mails with the second.
4. I’ve noticed about 5 times that interesting people were going to be in Barcelona and so I’ve mailed them out of the blue. That’s really good – people on holiday are often happy to have a beer and a chat. I’d have had no idea they were going to literally be outside my door were it not for Twitter.

Over the years I’ve found little tricks to keep myself working efficiently.

For some reason I have it in mind that people think it’s good to finish off tasks before taking a break or heading to bed. I find that that’s a really bad strategy. If you finish what you’re doing before you stop, then when you re-start work, you’ll have to look for a next task to begin. There’s overhead in that no matter when you do it. But when you go back to work you have less momentum. It’s harder to begin on something new from a cold start.

I find I’m much more efficient if I leave tasks incomplete before taking a break. That way when I come back to them I just pick up where I was. So I’ll leave a line of code only half written, or open a quote and not close it so the syntax coloring in my editor looks wacky. Or I’ll simply stopping writing in the middle of a sentence. With code you have the advantage that you can leave it syntactically incorrect, so there’s no chance you can forget to fix what you were doing.

If you’re heading to bed, it’s best to take your task to the point where what remains is just mechanical. That way you don’t continue to think about a problem when you should be falling asleep.

Right now, in another window, I’m running a bunch of unit tests. When I finish this blog entry I’m not going to go look at them, I’m going to bed. I’m pretty sure they’ll run successfully. In the morning I’ll have to do a few mechanical things – fix any failed tests and re-test, merge my changes, re-run tests, close a ticket, and remove a completed branch. By the time I’m done with that I’ll be in the swing of things and starting a new task will be easy.

Fred Wilson stirred up the entrepreneurial blogosphere 6 months ago with a series of posts wondering about the influence of founder age on startup success. I wrote one of my typically long comments.

Today I was making myself a coffee, and thinking about how fast/slow I can move, and how that’s changed over the years. When I was 24 I perhaps had more energy, but I often acted in a quite unfocused way. Now I’m 44, and I still have tons of energy. E.g., I was up coding last night until 6:30am, and then got up at 10am this morning and continued, so I’m not exactly loafing around with slippers and a pipe reflecting on my glory days. But I also have 3 kids, and other things going on. I have to act in a much more focused way or I couldn’t do the things I want to do.

But….., I then thought, the life of your average VC probably has some strong similarities. A couple of kids, insanely busy when working, regularly carving out quality time for family, needing to stay very organized and on top of things, needing to keep multiple balls rolling, etc. Those thoughts led me to reconsider Fred’s posting, but in the context of VCs.

Might it be that the best VC general partners would actually be a bunch of 24 years olds? Of course they could have some older guys as analysts. What do 40-50 year old VCs have that 20-30 year olds don’t that makes them more qualified and better as VCs? If you want to argue that experience makes the older better, you probably need to argue that for entrepreneurs too. If you want to argue that the energy of youth makes for a better entrepreneur, you might need to argue that for VCs too. If you want to argue that young founders have unique insight into what products will be successful, you might think the same would be true of young VCs — if there were any.

It takes a massive amount of work to create and build a startup. Unless you’re a superstar, it’s also a huge amount of work to get funded. You have to go begging and scraping, on bended knee, hat in hand, to make mature and otherwise sober people with a lot of money believe in you. And that’s all done against a background of very steep odds. Similarly, it’s a massive amount of work to raise a venture fund. You have to make even more mature and more sober people with even more money believe in you. And you have to do it in a much less forgiving environment, also against steep odds.

Thirty or even twenty years ago, most CEOs would probably have scoffed at the idea that a 20-year-old could start and run a company, and sell it for tens or hundreds of millions, or even a billion, or take it public. We now know that that actually happens, and the idea that the very young can do it, including getting financial backing, is no longer foreign. Might not the same one day be true for fund managers? When will we see the first VC fund run by a couple of twenty-somethings? Will they exhibit a marked preference for funding older founders?

Back when Fred was posting, I pointed Howard Gutowitz to one of the postings. A couple of days later, Howard told me that he’d talked about it to his brother:

Robert made what is actually an interesting suggestion: get a figurehead 26 year old to be the CEO. Turn the old game around.

I think that’s pretty amusing.

Maybe Andrew Parker is actually running Union Square Ventures. Turn the old game around.

I’m not good at working away from my home setup. I like my Kinesis keyboard, my big flat-screen monitor, and even the convenience of an external mouse. I don’t really like working without them.

But I’m learning to deal with being away. For the last few days I’ve been sitting in talks at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. There’s wifi and the speed is quite good. So I sit here checking out code, writing and running unit tests, and generally getting a few things done. I’m also surprised at how easy it is to work but also keep one ear on the presentation. The most obvious manifestation is when a speaker asks for a show of hands – I am surprised to find my hand going up (or not), without my really being very conscious of what’s going on. Before I hear the question, I’d have thought I wasn’t really listening. But it seems that I am.

That’s all good. One reason I don’t much like going to conferences is that they’re mainly down time. The talks are not good enough or fast enough or don’t have enough content, so if you sit in one it’s often frustrating. But in a way, lightweight talks are good, because they let you work in parallel. And if the talk does happen to be good you can always pay more attention.

Did I forget to blog today?

No.

My company is fueled in large part by 3 ingredients: cereal, coffee, and bread. Mainly cereal.

In my kitchen there are 6 empty boxes of cereal stacked end to end. Kelloggs All Bran Fruta y Fibra if you must know. Nuts, dried fruit, sultanas. It’s crunchy. I like my milk super cold, I use tons of it, and I eat it fast (can’t stand soggy cereal).

I’ve eaten cereal pretty much every day of my life since I was probably ten years old.

Hmmm….. let’s say 50 spoonfuls of cereal per bowl (I have big bowls). Say 3 bowls a day. Say 350 days per year. 34 years. That’s about 1.8M spoonfuls of cereal.

While this blog was out of action July-September 2007 I made some apparently “long” comments on other blogs. I’m going to pull them and post them here. While a comment in someone’s high-traffic blog is probably going to get more attention than a top-level posting here, I want to have my own thoughts in one place, not spread thinly over the blogosphere. Or, if you know me at all, I want them in both places at the same time.

Hence Fluidinfo.

Last night I dreamed that Peter Roebuck, my cricket coach in 1981, had written an extremely long article about me, full of color pictures. Weirdly though, he had spelled my name “Terry Jun”, and so there were all these people trying to find out who the hell Terry Jun was.

What does this mean?

Roebuck had captained the Somerset county side, opened the batting, and was rumored (at least among our bunch of 17 year olds on the other side of the planet) to be under consideration for the England XI. He played with Viv Richards and Ian Botham and was full of stories.

Later I played with him in a local side. Other teams were always thrilled and despairing to hear that we had a borderline international batsman in our line up. In one case, this time not a dream, we played a side containing the then-famous Australian playwright Alex Buzo. As it turned out, Buzo was mad keen on cricket and had been long looking forward to the day when he might bowl to the famous Peter Roebuck. In the meantime, I had been looking forward to the day when I might bat against Alex Buzo, and was determined to hit him out of the park.

I prevailed, hitting him for consecutive sixes (yes, of course I tried for 3 in a row) and finishing the game – before Roebuck had a chance to bat! I was delighted, in fact am still delighted, that Buzo later wrote an article in a widely-read cricket magazine describing the time he almost bowled to the great Peter Roebuck. But, he wrote, the other team had sent in a “pocket battleship” who had given no quarter and denied him his chance.

Now I read with sadness that Alex Buzo is dead, and I wish things had been a little bit different. Maybe just one six, then a quick single, and then he could have bowled Roebuck for a golden duck.

Today I resurrected as many of my old postings as I could find. I think I have about half. I’m still saddened by the loss of all those words. I can never believe it when I hear of writers who burn things, throw them away, etc. I even keep scraps of paper from 20 or more years ago that I wrote on. I don’t know why I place such value on simple words, but I do.

Anyway, I missed my blog. I miss some of the postings that are now gone forever.

I’m going to blog every single day, at least for today. Watch me.

Well, I’m back.

The previous instantiation of this blog was washed away in a storm in early August. A server got hacked and in my hurry to have it decommissioned I forgot to pull out the MySql database for my blog. I’m still annoyed at myself – partly because it’s so public and basic an error, but mainly because I care so much about words and now all those words are gone. A recovery operation using google cache and the wayback machine got me about half of the posts back. I may add them here at some point. I’m pissed that I lost so much stuff, and there’s no-one to blame but myself.

A weird thing happened to me this morning.

I needed to call someone in Portugal. I reached for the trusty land line, checked for a dial tone (so old fashioned), grabbed the number, and went to dial. Then I realized I didn’t remember the prefix to dial to get out of the country!

That’s pretty amazing. I’ve been living “overseas” (whatever that means) for over 20 years, and I’ve made plenty of international calls in that time.

I’ve been using Skype for international calls almost exclusively for at least 2 years.

Concepts like “dial tone” and “international dialing prefix” are soon going to appear extremely quaint.

I took my kids to a flea market a couple of months ago. We ran across a rotary phone. Although they knew it was a phone, they couldn’t figure out how you were supposed to dial. Why not just push a button? Dial tone? Access code? Why not just push a (mouse) button?

Here’s another thing I’ve had enough of: The graphic design bandwagon of which this image is a perfect example:

This technique is like a rash all over the web. It’s one thing to jump on the bandwagon and make your site look all cool and Web2.0-esque, but there’s another thing about these images that bugs me.

I don’t understand them.

There’s something about them that just doesn’t work for me. When I look at an image like the above, it somehow doesn’t sit right in my mind. I mean, where’s the light coming from? That’s not a shadow, it’s a reflection. It’s bouncing off that nice shiny black highly-reflective surface. So I guess the solution is that there is a bright light somewhere behind me and above my head. Is that it?

Images that have a shadow next to them or behind them are so much easier to deal with. But that was the bandwagon 10 years ago. Now we have the Web2.0 effect in full color, not boring gray. It’s romantic, it’s engaging, and it’s coming right at you, like, like, yes like a perfect reflection on a cool and glassy alpine lake.

And it’s….. everywhere.

There are a few things that bug me on the internet.

One is that people often warn each other that articles are long, or apologize for writing long blog entries. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. When it turns out though that these items are just a couple of screenfuls, you start to wonder what we’re all coming too. And yes, I know, it’s the 21st century, we’re all living at internet speed now, who’s got the time, etc.

OTOH, a word like “long” can be used to convey information. You can look at the word “long” and form some idea of just how long the long thing might be. And these days, it ain’t very long. Maybe we’re in the middle of a transition in which a word comes to mean its opposite.

Marc Andreessen recently began to blog, and the blogosphere is all abuzz. He writes tolerably well, and he’s got interesting comments on many things, but there’s a real down side: his posts are really long. Here’s a random example of someone who agrees.

That’s weird.

From where I sit, if someone writes well and is interesting or otherwise provocative, you wish they’d write more, not less. You want it to be long. Half a dozen web pages is not long. I read In Search of Lost Time last year. It took me 6 months and at 4300 pages or so, I think it qualifies as long. I’m reading Orwell’s letters, essays, and journalism. At 2200 pages, it seems fairly long too. I wished Proust was longer. I’ll probably wish Orwell was longer too. I tried reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (3500 pages), but the 7-volume “leatherette” set I bought stinks of old cigarette smoke and I couldn’t bear it.

How did we get from “long” meaning something like War and Peace (1100 pages) or Anna Karenin (850 pages) all the way to a 6-page (single narrow column) blog posting (with plenty of white space)?

What word should we now use for things that are longer than 6 pages or that require more than 5 minutes to read? Epic?

I like George Orwell. A tired fool got me started on the four-volume collection of Orwell’s essays, journalism, and letters. It’s great. Among many things I could say, one is that you know you’re reading someone damned good if you’re fascinated by their thoughts on something you formerly had no interest or experience in. There’s the essay on Dickens that I mentioned earlier, essays on cheap vulgar postcards, boys magazines, and much else besides. Gore Vidal is similarly compelling, and I think I would take his collected essays even over those of Orwell. Christopher Hitchens is similarly provocative but not in the same class as a writer. Very few are.

Today I was reading an Orwell review of three T. S. Eliot poems. I’m not into Eliot and I’m not into poetry. Like Gore Vidal’s, Orwell’s reviews are wonderful – balanced and surgical skewerings. Anyway, I came across the following, which I enjoyed enormously and decided to post:

But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on ‘despairing of life’ into a ripe old age. One cannot go on and on being ‘decadent’, since decadence means falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards life and society. It would be putting it too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines. There are other deaths besides physical death, and there are other sects and creeds besides the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, but it remains true that after a certain age one must either stop writing or dedicate oneself to some purpose not wholly aesthetic. Such a dedication necessarily means a break with the past:

every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Apart from the fact that I am much too impatient to read poetry, one of my problems is that I never have any idea what it’s about. But at least the above is clear. It wonderfully captures the inevitable progression from the troubled search for meaning of existential youth to the amorphous struggles of the serial entrepreneur.

At some point I read a description of why entrepreneurs pitching VCs is a bad mix: because you have people who can’t explain anything meeting people who can’t understand anything. That’s unfair all round of course, but still…. Having done some of this and had people just not “get” it, you can’t but wonder why they don’t get it. Of course part of it can be about the pitch itself, the presentation, etc etc. But even if you suppose everything is ideal, investing (both as a founder and as a financial backer) are both an act of faith.

There’s lots of evidence for this. To begin with, if it were a science and there were quantifiable measures, those things would presumably be known and you’d have a lot fewer startups and a lot fewer investors, simply because failure would be rare.

Until recently I thought there was more of a lack of vision on the investor side. But now I’m not so sure. For example, the Google guys were apparently running around search engine companies trying to sell their idea (vision? early startup?) for $1M. They couldn’t find a buyer. What an extraordinary lack of….. what? On the one hand you want to laugh at those idiot companies (and VCs) who couldn’t see the huge value. OK, maybe. But the more extraordinary thing is that Larry Page and Sergei Brin couldn’t see it either! That’s pretty amazing when you think about it. Even the entrepreneurs couldn’t see the enormous value. They somehow decided that $1M would be an acceptable deal. Talk about a lack of vision and belief.

So you can’t really blame the poor VCs or others who fail to invest. If the founding tech people can’t see the value and don’t believe, who else is going to?

I usually enjoy Paul Graham’s essays. In a recent one, The Hacker’s Guide To Investors, he says:

Risk is always proportionate to reward. So the most successful startup of all is likely to have seemed an extremely risky bet at first, and that is exactly the kind VCs won’t touch.

Which is also pretty interesting. In some ways it’s like a horoscope – appealing to every dreamer who believes they’re sitting on a billion-dollar idea. But if the always is true in the above quote, then if it happens that you are in fact sitting on something that will bring huge rewards, then it by definition must appear hugely risky.

If you throw in the initial observation that even the founders cannot assess value, then I think you get three things. One: a feeling of taking huge risk is a necessary part of building something that’s hugely rewarding (i.e., if you don’t have that feeling, then you’re probably not building such a thing). Two: even if you are building such a thing, you cannot know it. You just have to believe. Three: if you cannot know it, but can see huge risk, you can’t expect investors to see things any differently. So to get them to invest you really have to make them believers too.