How To Bring Understanding To The Startup Funder – Founder Relationship
Updated: Jan 23, 2024
Written by: Mil Williams, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
When you decide to become a startup FOUNDER, the first thing is that you don't decide it: you slide into it. And then when you realize you can choose, you also realize – whatever you call yourself, it doesn't make much difference if you see yourself as a founder, CEO, president, or the chip's main carer – the choice is always already made for you.
Startup funding processes don't take or focus on a problem that is hurting everyone: they take or focus on one problem, always. This is how to eliminate all possible potential pain for investors.
Whilst this is understandable, in doing this they commit the crime which everyone who embarks on lean journeys commits – even the best qualified and longest-serving. This crime involves jumping to a solution before the problem is fully sketched out and agreed upon. Tech people are often hugely intelligent, and therefore immensely impatient. Lean, to work well, needs everything but impatience. In lean, some of the most vocal practitioners usually preach cogently – but often neglect to deliver the practice as assiduously as they should.
Implications
The implications of this are as follows:
1. When a founder (CEO, president, chip's main carer) brings a real-world problem of substantial real-world pain to the table of a potential funder, the first instinct of the funder is to declutter by removing as many elements as possible to achieve just one.
Noted (I): this is not how the real world works – nor how it generates its pain. The real world is only real when accepted as messy. Any attempts to understand it better by eliminating the more complex strands of the tapestry will, inevitably, increasingly, leave behind the threadbare, never the full picture.
And it has happened to me on numerous occasions. People have come to me regarding intuition capture and validation, and have said things like: "What a complex machine. Let's work together and extract its essence."
They never understood how its essence lay precisely in its complex nature: and complex doesn't need decluttering in this way if we are to avoid losing the aforementioned essence. The complicated may need simplifying for us all to understand more easily. The complex, meanwhile, just needs all of us who come up against it to develop more sophisticated brains and thinking patterns. In this way it may be – precisely this! – understood properly in its entirety, instead of understood easily, but then incompletely in its incompleteness.
2. When funders decide to focus on their potential for pain, above, beyond, and before the nature of the real-world pain that is being brought to them, when they move increasingly hastily to how we should implement a decluttered element – a cog or camshaft, or pulley, or cylinder – rather than develop a full-blown engine to move the vehicle of humanity in useful ways, they critically emasculate the capability of any individual to propose the bringing into being of a shift of market, sociocultural and sociopolitical forces: a shift which otherwise would change radically for the better – even where uncomfortably – what, to date, has made it possible for startup funders to remain comfortable.
Noted (II): because of all the above, paradigm shifts – things that upturn the apple carts of society in positively evolutionary but nevertheless unstoppable ways – happen much less often than they should.
The excessive incrementalism of startup processes is leading everyone to think more about how to continue feathering our own existing nests than build intelligent skyscrapers to house billions in newly acquired and utterly glorious freedoms.
Solution
3. The solution, then? Multitudinous, obviously. Varied and multi-velocity, undoubtedly. But in our case, the case of intuition validation and the intuition validation engine we have scoped and described in our previous article on Brainz Magazine, the solutions are quite singular too. A template of a tapestry, of a rug for every household and workplace, that – once laid down in your sector and field of human endeavor – will allow us all to apply intuition, arationality, high-level domain expertise, thinking without thinking, and gut feeling to the wider experience that will be the printing press of all the latter: the Gutenberg of intuitive thinking.
Noted (III): some links and further reading to be getting on with:
historical introductory whitepaper – augmentedintuition.com
whitepaper on the first in a series of operating-system innovations – platformgenesis.com
developed use-case whitepaper – crimehunch.com
portal whitepaper of several associated projects – omiwan.com
risk-free repurposed human-supporting ai
Noted (IV): just to underline, we are talking about repurposing existing ai not in order to continue to automate human beings out of easily monetizable procedures, but – rather – to industrialize us, as per the 20th-century movie industry, back into an increasingly brilliant and unpredictably creative utility.
Just this.
Noted (V): the conclusion being, if you want to promote the genius that comes from leaps of intellectual and emotional faith, don't look to the incrementalisms of the startup world – nor, even, those of studied and pauseful academia.
Noted (VI):
startup funder/founder integration project – startuphunch.com
my core company website – betterbizme.com
Mil Williams, Founder – Better Biz Me Ltd, including:
betterbizme.com
crimehunch.com
omiwan.com
the philosopher.space
www.secrecy.plus
Mil Williams, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Mil Williams is a founder working in the field of repurposed IT tech. He wants to industrialize people back into workplace relevance, instead of continuing to automate them out of it. He's also an inveterate coder, whose coding language is English. He has at times been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but actually suffers a bad case of nonconformism. He's been working on intuition-validation projects since 2016, with applications in practically all areas of human activity. Yes, the magic bullet you never believed you'd see. He's now designed a special intuition-validation project for the readership of Brainz Magazine to collaborate on: startuphunch.com
