Do You Choose Ideas Or Persons When Funding Ventures #II ?
Ideas or persons when investors consider funding any project is a perennial concern for all entrepreneur investors. Yet, one cannot decide at the early stage of product or idea development to cast away the idea originator for obvious reasons of tinkering and testing and retesting that are necessary components to idea-take-offs.
Many have suggested that entrepreneurs should not seek outside investors for their projects; that it is best to self-fund. That is fine and dandy if, 1) one has the capital; 2) if one is liquidity fluid; and 3) if the idea or project is self-sustaining. But hardly are there projects that can fund themselves. Entrepreneurs always have to rely on outside sources of finance to execute large and major projects.
In a 1945 presentation on the prospects of ideas and their connection to national growth and security, one of the most intellectual curators of America’s innovation, Vannevar Bush wrote:
“ New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade. Advance in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for earning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”
Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier. National Science Foundation, July 1945, p.10
Obviously, Bush here was advocating a culture of idea development, incubation, and the transference of ideas to products and services. He also noted very earlier on, the connection of ideas to collective sustainability in trade and personal growths and in the end, national security and prominence.
It must be noted that a group of ideas men and a few women catapulted the United States to the world stage in idea incubation, maturation, production, and dominance. Ideas matter.
In my article on transforming ideas to real products and services I delineated twenty stages ideas go through from conception, in that early state of ‘eureka moment’, to the final product or service and/or policy.(See my article, “How to Convert Ideas to Real Objects and Things That Solve Real Human Problems.”)
In this post I am pondering over the mechanics of that proposition.
The most vital link toward product development which often constitute the bottle neck that delays project take-off is always funding.
The questions many entrepreneurial enthusiasts always ask include: Should I fund the project by myself? Should I go borrowing? What of my personal creativity in the final product? Would I be sidelined and etched out of the idea because I do not have the capital to “foot the bill?
These are serious concerns that need be resolved before one embarks on the journeys to actualizing one’s ideas.
As is often the case, one cannot really separate the ideas from the idea purveyor for several reasons. One, the idea ‘owner’ is the one who thought and framed the idea in his or her head. Two, the idea originator has the mental maps or the intellectual curiosities that motivated the idea and as such should be afforded the space to tinker with it to maturity. Three, the idea owner has an emotional-intellectual investment and interest in seeing the birth of the idea. Four, the idea originator with the intellectual and emotional involvement is most likely to be at the forefront of “crusading” and “evangelizing” the ideas . And finally, having the idea innovator as connectors, mavens, and salespersons, according to the classification of Malcom Gladwell his book, The Tipping Point, makes it easier for prospective investors to put the face and the ideas together when considering their financial commitment.
So, at the earliest stage in ideas transformation, it is most advisable that the originator of the ideas be allowed total control and access to the processes of tinkering and nurturing to maturation.
The case of the Wright brothers comes to mind here, where their emotional ties to airplane inventions was in the end a distraction, and thus causing serious delays in the take-off. The brothers held their ideas too close to their chests. They disallowed others to come in to input and help expand the possibilities of early take-off for fear of others stealing their ideas from them. There was the famous rivalry between the brothers with fellow pioneer Glenn Curtis.
In the minds of most Americans, these are this self-made Mid-western humble weird whiz kids with the technical know-how and chutzpah from Dayton, Ohio. They even dropped out of high school.
But they had unbending belief. This is what I refer to as true believers who their ideas as non-negotiable; and would mobilize all resources to actualize them.
Many ideas persons do run into this problem of over-protection.
The other problems all ideas persons face is the threat of competitors. That explains their paranoid styles in relating and relaying their ideas.
Everyone thinks their ideas are the best. They become idea huggers. They do not trust anyone else to run these ideas by them. Many fear to even share anecdotally the ramifications of these their new concepts for fear of pilfering and thievery.
Steve Jobs was a maverick. He slept and walked his ideas. He found an early partner in Steve Wozniak, with whom he bounced ideas and tried the circuit designs. Remember Jobs was not as good an engineer as Steve Wozniak. So was Bill Gates. And so had others. They were all afraid of the competition.
But at some point in their “craziness” they collaborated with others, companies, technocrats, financiers, and other facilitators to help their ideas materialize.
Gates’ father, for example, was a successful attorney with connections in the city they lived in Washington State, in the United States. He shepherded his son’s ideas. But Bill Gates also found a partner in Paul Allen. Both formed the Lakeside Programming Group.
One can easily be tempted to say that this was a sophisticated version of gangs, formed by elite whiz geeks from privileged backgrounds.
So, while poor kids form gangs that kill and cause mayhem, elite kids from higher to super high upper class neighborhoods in the 1970’s formed intellectual gangs that would later change the world. Jobs grew up in the same community where many of the residents in the neighborhood were engineers. His environment influenced him [Walter Isaacson (2014) The Innovators: How A Group of hackers, Geniuses, And Geeks Created The Digital Revolution. MI: Gale/Cengage Learning and Thorndike Press].
Isaacson writes on the characteristic traits of ideas men of the likes of Bill Gates and Paul Allen or Steve Jobs,” “One trait that differentiated the two (referring to gates and Allen) was focus. Allen’s mind would flit among many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial observer.”) 2014, p.548
Even Paul Allen, Bill Gates co-founder of Microsoft, agreed to the benefits and abilities to remain focus longer on an idea:
“Where I was curious to study everything in sight, Bill would focus on one task at a time with total discipline….You could see it when he programmed — he’d sit with a marker clenched in his mouth, tapping his feet and rocking, impervious to distraction.” (Paul Allen(2011), Idea Man: A Memoir by the Co-founder of Microsoft, New York: NY Penguin Books/ Amazon-Kindle, p. 511].
Even if the above is his version of the earlier years with the founding of Microsoft and the current Bill Gates, the fact remains that it is the person, the individual, the originator(s) of the ideas that mark the beginning of great inventions.
It still takes the individual to be able to ‘sell’ his or her ideas to the right persons and institutions. What I mean by institutions here is not exclusive to governmental institutions. There are twenty other inclusive and expansive institutions beside the government, that can facilitate the growth and maturation of one’s ideas.
Anyone with ideas has the responsibility to devise methods and means to communicate such to those who would listen, support, sponsor, and help make the ideas a reality. There is an African saying that a tree does not make a forest. In the forest of trees, some are taller than others. But they are all trees in the forest.
We are products of our environments — starting with our families, schools attended, social and cultural affiliations, and the other institutions that make our dreams possible[See my article on “ Men + Women = 21 Institutions Men and Women Invented.”].
Summing Up
Ideas persons have to be funded with their ideas inclusively. One cannot separate the persons from the ideas, else one is courting disaster.
Sometimes, according to Steve Jobs, some ideas can be stolen and whisked away from their originators and made to climb the top of adoption. Even that too is dependent on the nature of ideas.
Usually, most ideas are pilfered by hackers, or rogues at the tinkering stage, where the blueprint has already been formulated by the idea originator.
In my on-going series on how to communicate ideas, I had started from the individual up to the stages of various kinds of presentation skills, necessary to share one’s ideas to make them known, seen, and understood by others.
Communication skills, in all its iterations, ramifications, multiplicities, simplicities, and complexities still remain the indispensable tool for making one’s ideas known. The series is continuing. That is, I am continuing in the series. So, stay connected.
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