@ skillissues.tech
2025-02-09 09:59:29
SUNDAY MORNING OPINION PIECE: Have a read with your morning #coffee ☕️☕️☕️
**The Start-Up Scene**
(and the difference between price and value.)
***
Let's get something clear from the offset.
Investors only care about money.
This may seem very obvious to you unless you are one or all of these things:
Honest. Optimistic. Innocent. Idealistic. Authentic. Genuine.
If you have these virtues, congratulations. These are wonderful things. Hold on to them at all costs and do not
hide them, but do not expect to be successful in the current capitalist manifestation.
Let me write it again. There is only one thing investors care about: MONEY.
They do not care about anything else. No matter what they tell you. No matter what they tell themselves, they
only care about money. Money may represent things to them such as power, freedom, control and autonomy
(which I don't think is even true) but they want money.
Maybe this is no surprise to you but it surprised me.
I appreciate things of value. I can see value and I am trying to add value which is one reason I decided to post this piece on #nostr.
But the finance
industry is nothing to do with adding value. It is only ever about money. If it is about value, it is only ever about extracting value and turning it into money.
How do you measure money? Price. And price is not the same as value.
The reason I was surprised to learn that the finance industry and investors only care about money is very simple,
I believed their marketing stories.
Investors and the financial industry rarely talk about money. Don't believe me? Watch Bloomberg TV for a few
hours and tell me how many times the word money is mentioned. They will talk all day long about everything
except money.
They will talk about interest rates, trade, supply chains, risk, rates, returns, jobs, the treasury, the fed, the
environment, social benefits, growth, governance, compliance, hawks, bulls, bears, doves, war.
You name it but
they do not talk about money.
Financiers form make believe stories. In the industry they call them narratives. Then they push those stories
down your throat until you are forced to swallow and they will deny and reject everything that does not fit within
their narrative.
Remember, they have huge marketing budgets and teams of brand managers to push these narratives. There are
thousands of entities with their competing narratives filling your screens, your news and social feeds to make
you believe them.
If you don't believe them, it doesn't matter, others will and enough of them will jump on the
bandwagon until you feel like your getting left behind or you are forced to participate whether you want to or not
(CCTV, smartphones, cashless payments, internet cookies, advertisements where ever you look, 5G towers etc.).
The front-end, the GUI, is the caring social goodness that is there for our benefit, they profess. The back-end is
the truth: It is all about money.
Tell me about your UX of life, does it delight and inspire like they said they
wanted it to?
No matter what they say, no matter what they show you, no matter what you read. Just think money.
That is what
it is about. Nothing else.
This is the crucial part: It is much easier to monetise a story that you can make people believe in than it is to
monetise something of value.
Look at the AI boom, electric vehicles or cryptocurrencies as examples. They are stories that people believe in.
Quantum computing appears to be the next looming hype cycle and perhaps space exploration as well, though have
been through that somewhat already but it will ramp up again when SpaceX goes public.
These things have happened and are happening. There is no question that after every bubble bursts, the
green shoots of actual progress start to form.
But my question is this: How much have you personally benefitted
from these technologies and how much has your life actually changed?
The shifts are microscopic compared to
the claims that are made, except for a minority of elitists.
What do these businesses, these stories have in common?
There is no limit to them. There is no cap to where they can go, in theory. That means there is no limit to where
the price can go.
Limitless greed has something to latch on to temporarily. Of course these narratives can never
fully deliver on their promises. That is why there is always the next big thing on the horizon.
Space travel, where does that end? The possibilities of intelligence and learning in the form of AI, is there a limit
on that? Turning every object and service into a cryptographic token, is there a ceiling on that you can imagine?
These are good narratives. There is a lot of room for participation in these stories which means they can jack up
the price without having to actually produce anything.
Value on the other hand can be measured, it does have limits and it often takes time to produce or implement.
It
is not conducive to rapid and limitless money making, so things of value are neglected. Things of value are
normally only appreciated when they are complete or close to completion.
Few people are interested in investing money in the process of creating something of value. They just want it
when all the work is done so they can flip it.
But for most people, without money they cannot afford to create
something of value because they need to survive in the meantime as well as meet all of the costs of development.
So, how to create something that adds real value for the benefit of
many people when investors, part of the romanticised "eco-system", are only interested in rapid price rises based
on hyperbole and fiction?
***
Discuss in the comments. Zap⚡me if you made it to the end and double down if you want me to write up a follow up piece with my personal answer (whatever you send is my only source of income)
***
About this piece:
After a few days on #nostr @primal #primal and #amethyst, I am finding this a remarkable project.
I wanted to add value by providing some long form copy for your entertainment and stimulation.
I am excited by the prospect of this protocol, it is so much more than a media platform. I hope to build on it soon.
For more about my backstory just ask or check out where I a coming from at skillissues.tech
Thanks for reading and enjoy the rest of your weekend
***