A couple of months ago I ran across two LinkedIn articles. One disturbed me; the other one made me proud. The first article was about a kid, a science whiz, who got an internship at a private equity firm and somehow managed to publish that fact to the entire world. The second article was mentioning Peter Gomel (name changed to protect privacy); a very talented scientist whose research includes solar energy harvesting among others.

I have met Peter trough a mutual friend at MIT poker club in 2006. Every Sunday, a bunch of us will get together at one of the MIT Physics Department rooms for a tournament style game. I remember these days as one of the most exciting periods of my life. There was no money involved; we were playing for our pride. A bunch of nerds going nuts when an improbable hand wins. Here I’ve met David Lin (fictitious name as well), a brilliant physicist who just like Peter was finishing his dissertation. After getting their PhDs, David, like many other MIT scientists, moved on to work on Wall Street, while Peter continued his research first as post-doc, then as a professor.

The solar panels have been in existence for more than 60 years. Peter’s work on optimizing their efficiencies might only have contributed to incremental improvements so far, but he indeed would be on a forefront of a breakthrough. David, on the other hand, is a successful hedge fund manager who, if we talk probabilities, is far away from making any discoveries for the benefit of our society and the world. Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against hedge funds or asset managers in general. Their ability to generate wealth indirectly increases charitable donations or in the case of university endowments, the amount of scholarships distributed to the talented students, not to mention the number of high-quality jobs they create.

Walt Disney once famously said, “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.” In today’s world, dominated by globalization, optimization, and standardization, it is very easy to deviate from who you are and whom you destined to be. Peter Thiel writes very well about this in his book “From Zero to One.” He calls this “an indefinite optimism.” David is an excellent example of this, he chose Wall Street and “guaranteed” prosperous future for himself; it is just not clear what kind of future it is? What is David, a genius, going to be remembered by? Peter, on the other hand, knows what footprint he will be leaving and has the courage to pursue his dreams rather than “wealthy” indefinite optimism.

In the era of globalization, we started to care more about the bottom line than realizing dreams and missions. As a society, we have regressed towards mediocracy and became a culture without a mission. We tend to optimize everything and control progress by inventing patterns and methodologies. One example of such approach would be Agile. It was developed to improve the way we plan and predict release cycles. However, by many, Agile is perceived as some miracle worker without which software development is just insurmountable. The methodology itself does not create a product. It does not replace a human brain. It merely helps us to get from point A to B faster and in more predictable manner. If not used correctly it could be a significant inefficiency for an organization. For example, at one of my previous employers, at least 20% of people were “hiding behind the process,” i.e. they cared about methodology and nothing else. These included many engineering and middle management staff.

Lack of mission and uncertainty in our society was a frequent topic of discussions with a good friend of mine Justin Wolfe, an elaborate thinker with definitive ideas. Since both of us are engineers, technology was a frequent topic of our discussions. The tech we were constrained into at work was nothing more than a mediocre. We were lagging behind by some years and for a technologist that could be desolating. I could see only two choices moving forward: find a job in a company with modern technology stack or do something of your own. The first option did not appeal much since technology becomes outdated rather quickly and both of us value loyalty more. The second option appealed very much since it would give us complete creative freedom. The only problem was, what to create? We decided to tackle the rather serious problem of loneliness. We wanted to use technology to connect like-minded people in nearby coffee shops. We have even been calling our new project “a coffee app.” Eventually, we settled on the name SipLink, aka “sip your coffee and link up with people.” We did not know the market; we did not follow the process; we were clueless about the marketing plan. What we had was the creative freedom to produce something and that was enough to get us going. For us, connecting lonely people was the mission and using the latest technologies to do so was an important part of the motivation. For us connecting just two lonely people was the definition of success and we did much more than that. Later I learned about various apps which aimed to connect people, most of them failed naturally after securing the first round of funds and failing to deliver. SipLink has never raised any funds and will never do so. Raising money implies some level of responsibility and operation which could potentially diverge us away from our mission.

In July of 2015, my family and I have relocated to San Francisco Bay area. The mecca of creative thinkers, superstar entrepreneurs, and great weather was the motivation behind the move. We have settled in beautiful Marin County and largely forgot that there are parts of this world where it is cold and snows a lot. Soon after relocation, I have joined Founder Institute, a local accelerator program. Besides picking up all obvious cliches on entrepreneurship (thank you to HBO’s Silicon Valley for correctly pointing them out and making fun of them in the most thorough style), I have learned about the idea of “Lean Startup,” which originated after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. The idea here is to push a product to the market as soon as possible, get customer feedback, and iterate over and over. Founder Institute with their “Lean Startup” agenda made sense at first. It was not clear however how this “ad-hoc” way of delivering a product to the market coincides with missing and long-term strategy to achieve a monopolistic position in your niche. Furthermore putting something out there for the whole world to experience will create analogous products and this will result in what economists call a “perfect competition,” which is book smart for “forget about profits.” I found Founder Institute to be useless from my perspective and left the program few weeks in.

Over time I got acquainted with many creative thinkers and entrepreneurs. It was important for me to meet these “dreamers,” to talk and exchange ideas. I have had a pleasure to meet very engaging people, as well as a disappointment to see a herd mentality dominate not only the investment community but the entrepreneurial community as well. One guy was particularly impressive; he started a company in virtual reality space and now was looking to enter into personal finance space. What’s wrong with this picture? Yes, no mission! VR and Fintech at that point were the hottest sectors VC money funneled into.

It is someone with a mission who indexes the entire internet, puts a computer into a palm of our hands, creates electric cars faster than a Ferrari, sends rockets into space. It is those men and women whom we will cherish for centuries to come. It is my wish to have people like David spend more time in the lab thus generating public wealth versus figuring out how to increase investment alpha while decreasing beta to expand wealth that is private. As a society, we have to create conditions for whiz kids to continue with their passions, to break the boundaries of what’s possible instead of choosing monetary benefits and perhaps enormous hidden risks of definite optimism.