When Galahad Met Trump…
Roy Bahat is clearly one of the most thoughtful investors around. Today he writes Early startup pitches are like movie pitches, not business pitches.
- “In a movie pitch, the one-liner of the concept is impossibly little grist for feedback. Some of the best-performing movies sound absurd when all you have is the concept.”
- “The plot is less the focus than the emotional arc of the story, the reason to care about the characters.”
- “If you have yet to make a film, maybe you show a reel, or have a short… what little piece of this have you made, and does that make an investor excited to see the rest? That’s one reason demos are so important. It’s a piece of the thing, vs. a description of the thing.”
- “Novices tend to… get caught flat footed on that age-old movie and startup question… why now?”
The NewGov fable involves scrappy senior archeologists, raiders really, who find the deeply buried Narrative Ark, a democracy engine hidden in plain sight.
My dialogue with Roy started with his Who will find the first silver unicorn, pointing to the huge market serving high-functioning seniors, inspiring me to respond directly to his challenge with There’s Still Music in Us:
Most seniors I know are outraged by the Trumpster Fire and are even more compelled to act now than kids like Roy and Sara. Who knows when we’ll start buying our bananas one at a time?

We instantly care about Harriett & Sally, who answer “Why now”.
I included some dialogue that reveals the drama when the Resistance discovers that every issue’s oversight committee can be swung with about 2% of Americans, but you need the right ones. As the saying goes, the future’s already here, but they’re not evenly distributed:

Mike Bloomberg’s interests seem relevant:

The plot tension is familiar but as compelling as ever. The self-important pundits and NGO mailing list managers have zero influence on policy but will rub out any of the little people who know that only constituents affect policy.
Barney Frank at 24:17 of Take the Money and Run, (This American Life):
“If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money’s rear end any time. I’ve never met a politician who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district, and a number of campaign contributors, doesn’t go with the district… No one has ever said to me, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got a big contributor I can’t offend.”
To frame our Senior Co-op Bloomberg Beta Challenge, I commissioned a demo reel, There’s still music in us.

I was too vague. I said,
Seniors have done a lot more resisting than everyone else, so here’s my counter-challenge to Roy: I’ll contribute the NewGov Foundation’s impressive portfolio of IP to a Senior-led Co-op for the resistance movement if he’ll advise and, maybe, invest along with the rest of us.
I’ll be more direct. We don’t need just advice. We’ve got all the film in the can, but not the segues–the code to link our clips together–and now we need to hire the editor and distributor to put it out there.
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FWIW, I’m surely not Galahad, but I’ve had my moments.
