Investment funding aborts innovation or The best truffles grow in purple cow dung

If you're new here, you may want to visit MyMindshare.com first. That's really what this blog is all about. Thanks for visiting!

Over the last four years of developing MyMindshare, I would periodically think that this would be a lot easier if I could hire somebody else with genuine expertise to do some of the work. Most recently, I think that I need to raise funds to hire a marketing team.

When I start thinking like that, the next step is to write a business plan. Naturally, potential investors want to know how much money I need, how it is going to be spent, and how money will be made, or an “exit strategy.”

Bullshit. To raise funding from outside investors, I need bullshit to put into a business plan. Not too much bullshit, but just enough bullshit.

Because if I knew enough to write a business plan with no bullshit, I wouldn’t need outside investment.

The function of a business plan is to demonstrate skill at bullshitting. Not just any form of bullshitting, mind you, but the specific form of bullshitting in which venture capitalists like to root around. There is a hierarchy based on the quality of bullshit that venture capitalists stick their nose into. I suspect that the highest quality bullshit is produced by Stanford MBAs backed by Stanford Ph.Ds and their truffles are a delicacy most appreciated by the connoisseurs on Sand Hill Road.

But I’m not complaining. Bullshit is better than nothing, and good bullshit is better than bad bullshit if you are in the investment crap shoot.

I’m just not a very good bullshitter, and this is a good thing for MyMindshare. Because I suck at bullshitting, I have to innovate. If I had received any significant funding to solve my perceived problems prior to now (and into the foreseeable future), innovation would have ceased. MyMindshare would have been turned over to the experts in conventional wisdom because there is no such thing as an expert in innovation. By the time you reach expert status in anything, it is no longer innovative.

That’s why you have to bullshit in your business plan when you are innovating. You have to claim expertise on a foundation that is entirely self-referential, or make disingenuous references to conventional wisdom. People who are good at that write business plans. I’m not good at that.

Note on the subtitle:

“The best truffles grow in purple cow dung” is an homage to Seth Godin, who wrote The Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, and The Bootstrapper’s Bible.

Jim Bursch  I am the creator of MyMindshare.