A cousin of this is what one researcher in the field of evolutionary machine learning called "dullwashing" to me in a conversation about academic funding.
If he wants to do some really interesting somewhat outside-the-box work, he often has to find some way to make it look incredibly dull and inside-the-box and incremental in order to convince some funding bureaucrat to fund it.
Most money is dumb and flows in a herd-like manner into things that look superficially like things that have been successful in the past. This includes stock market money, government money, and yes even VC money. You often have to trick the world into funding genuinely interesting or productive work. Without a bit of marketing money will just chase the latest bubble or fad. It's like you have to save money from itself. If truly creative and productive people don't lay on the marketing, money will instead flow to charlatans who do... see also WeWork, Juicero, etc.
> Most money is dumb and flows in a herd-like manner into things that look superficially like things that have been successful in the past. This includes stock market money, government money, and yes even VC money. You often have to trick the world into funding genuinely interesting or productive work.
The last few decades of US economic policy has been based on the idea that private investment is more effective than taxing and redistributing money. But as it turns out, it's not just the government that's dumb -- all large investors behave in this dumb, herd-like way. And at least governments are more comfortable spending money without expecting a return.
Yeah the supposed genius of private markets has been massively oversold.
I really think the power of capitalism lies not in some magical ability of markets to make good decisions but in the freedom it affords to route around bad decisions and the bureaucracies and corporate institutions that make them.
In a vertically integrated Soviet-style economy a single bad bureaucracy results in the total failure of that industry. It's not really possible to sidestep it; there is no "permission free innovation." In a free market those big dumb slugs still exist but it's at least possible for some people to go around them.
i.e. basically what Taleb mentioned repeatedly in his books: The power of capitalism lies in its capability to allow people to freely explore all sorts of potential ideas. Many, or even most of them will fail, but some of them will get lucky and hit the mark. Many inventions/breakthroughs throughout the history were achieved "by accident" instead of intentionally/in a planned manner.
I'm not sure why this is getting voted down except for maybe your tone because this is my experience in so many different things. I've worked for several marketing firms in the past and the quickest way into investors' hearts is to pitch them your idea reframed as a combination of things that are already successes. For example, we worked with a video game developer and their pitch was "It's like GTA mixed with Call of Duty" or for TV show pitches it's always "It's like The Good Place meets Dexter" or some permutation of already existing properties. Investors don't ever (or at least almost never) want to go for the risky ideas. They want to go for the things that will make them money and the easiest way to win them over is to compare it to something that's already made money.
If he wants to do some really interesting somewhat outside-the-box work, he often has to find some way to make it look incredibly dull and inside-the-box and incremental in order to convince some funding bureaucrat to fund it.
Most money is dumb and flows in a herd-like manner into things that look superficially like things that have been successful in the past. This includes stock market money, government money, and yes even VC money. You often have to trick the world into funding genuinely interesting or productive work. Without a bit of marketing money will just chase the latest bubble or fad. It's like you have to save money from itself. If truly creative and productive people don't lay on the marketing, money will instead flow to charlatans who do... see also WeWork, Juicero, etc.