Your Claims of Flapdoodle Reek of Gobbledygook: On Astrology
Disclosure #1: through my prior fund, I am a small seed investor in Co-Star & I used to work at Greycroft, one of the funds that backed Sanctuary.
Disclosure #2: I do not speak for my firm or my partners and write this as an individual.
Disclosure #3: My heart goes out to those affected by the significant crises currently taking place around the world.
This has happened before. Every time there’s a financing for an astrology company, some subset of thought leaders in Silicon Valley go off on the merits of backing (or rather, not backing) astrology companies.
I don’t write much, but I’m fired up. This is an inquiry into the swift and surprisingly (to me) strong negative comments a few notable venture capitalists have made in regards to an astrology app getting financing. I write this as an individual who has a purview into the venture world and one who has co-invested in the digital health and fintech spaces with the firms these individuals have started.
Summary of the issue: Sanctuary, an astrology & mystical services app, raised $3M from some great venture firms. A few VCs went off on Twitter as to how anyone funding or encouraging astrology should be…strong words to come…”ashamed”.[1] These are men of science and technology who have significant influence and so, in response, I’ve set out to use the basic steps of the scientific method[2] to share with you my self-proclaimed, open minded and curiosity fueled defense of astrology. Also, this is my novice and abbreviated repudiation of perspectives that denigrate astrology & comparable belief systems without delving into nuance.
Spoiler: I think there could be merit to belief systems such as astrology as a means of entertainment and more importantly forming connections among different people. I’ll stop short of defending these systems as a means of decision making, partly because, I honestly don’t know enough about astrology to take that extra step. And I cannot, without more data, say what % of people use astrology for consequential decisions and, more importantly, how those decisions pan out.
Question & Observations
· Question: Why is astrology so popular?
· Follow-up Question: Is astrology’s popularity a problem for society?
oObservation #1: Astrology has been around forever. I’m not going to cite sources for this one, but you know it’s true. I will submit that “time on earth” doesn’t mean something is righteous… so…read on for more facts…
o [Observation #2: Astrology is a tiny % of venture backed financing. 0.01% of dollars by my estimates:
§ No more than ~$50M into astrology apps in 2021P over $500B of venture financing for 2021P ($125B of actual global venture financing in Q1 2021 annualized for the year[3])]
o Observation #3: Astrology is widely believed in, or at least consumed. Almost 1/3 of Americans[4], as surveyed and catalogued by Pew and others, believe in astrology. The number trends up for those who identify as not religious. And there’s a heavy gender skew here; women are almost 2x as likely to believe in astrology as men
Research [into why astrology is so popular and whether that’s a problem]
· I didn’t have time. But maybe you’ll accept several years of talking about this with hundreds of people socially & being invested in a modern astrology application. Whatever…take it or leave it…
Hypothesis
· Astrology provides a common language for people to connect on the basis of shared and divergent personality traits. So too do Harry Potter houses. And so does MBTI. And so does the Enneagram test. The list goes on. Astrology, as with many of those personality quizzes, tests, and belief systems, sits apart from otherwise understood forms of identity. You can be a rich Scorpio or you can be a poor Scorpio. You can be a US citizen or you can be a Japanese citizen. Granted, the deeper you go into (Western) astrological charts, the more specificity comes into play around time, day, year, and place of birth and the accompanying traits. Maybe there’s some correlation to demographics. But even so, if you take a US centric view, you can be born around the same time on the same day in the same year in the same city as someone else in say…NYC…and be of completely different class or race or gender or any other demographic or socioeconomic measure. This is really attractive to people and hopefully the reasons as to why go without explanation. While one could think of astrology as deterministic, maybe what it is humanizing and freeing.
o Look, a shared language for civic education (which I taught to elementary school students while I was in college) or a shared language for science can be a strong basis for connectivity too, but this human connection isn’t zero sum AND civic education & science don’t evoke emotion the way some of these behavioral belief systems do…
· Human connection is good for the world. Q.E.D.
· Science can be informed by the “unscientific.” What does that mean? Science and technology are increasingly wading into the territory long studied by “less technical” fields. Gene editing and artificial general intelligence (will it ever be possible??), as two examples of hard, real-world technical problems, are going to need input from other fields such as ethics and philosophy in order to interface with the real world. Technology doesn’t live in a vacuum. So more to the matter at hand: belief systems that have widespread resonance (e.g., astrology) might provide an input into understanding how humans seek to understand their relationship to others and to the world. We can dismiss elements of those belief systems, but perhaps we should take the time to learn from them too.
Test With Experiment / Analyze Data / Report Conclusions
Pending. I, for one, haven’t done this part of the loop. But who has done this? Who’s looked at PHQ-9 and GAD-7 scores mapped against belief in astrology and pulled out correlative insights? Who has looked at the strength of social or workplace bonds when augmented by astrology or other types of intra and interpersonal belief systems (e.g., Myers Briggs, which one of the same VCs also claimed was “…also utter BS”)? Anecdotally, we did Myers Briggs when I joined Bain & Company at the outset of my career and it was a really, really powerful shared language with which to contextualize and relate to my co-workers’ different work styles. The test comes with all the caveats that you may evolve and change your four letter grouping over time. But my manager was no longer an impatient person; rather they were a “J” who needed structure and visibility into what I was working on.
I’ll leave you with a thought I’ve long had. When I was 25, I had a chance to spend an hour with a small group of entrepreneurs and investors and a senior adviser to President Obama. We were talking about the increasing fraying of social ties in the United States. He cited White House conversations that noted increasing disengagement among groups of different demographics and socioeconomics in the United States. American life increasingly didn’t require engaging outside of one’s “bubble”. Astrology brings people of all different backgrounds together to talk about how they behave and operate in our shared world. Maybe that’s good. Maybe that’s bad. But at least it’s engagement. And we should interrogate that. We must certainly watch for negative consequences to one’s self or to others based on a belief in astrology. But perhaps the positive benefits outweigh the negative consequences.
If you believe in science and technology, act accordingly and use the scientific method before you censure what should be funded or patronize swaths of our population. Test your hypothesis and be willing to approach observations and question with humility and in the spirit of true inquiry, as opposed to predetermined judgment.
Vishal Lugani, Scorpio Sun, Leo Moon, Scorpio Rising
[1] See Appendix 1
[2] See Appendix 2
[3] Big assumption that our industry stays white hot for the rest of 2021
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/01/new-age-beliefs-common-among-both-religious-and-nonreligious-americans/
Appendix 1:
Appendix 2:
