Sick of It

Wokeness in Entrepreneurship

In this day and age, competition is a dirty word. Words like profit are dirty too.

Scrolling through various internet sites this morning I saw a theme. One leader of a top tech accelerator has as a tagline, #empathetictech. Can anyone objectively define that term for me? Is it nuts and bolts definable in any way? What are the objective quantifiable GAAP standards for empathy?

When I get the weekly email from the Polsky Center of Entrepreneurship, all the touchy-feely startups and their efforts are trumpeted. The boring mundane ones that just solve problems and make money are buried. But, if you are gay or something like that, oh boy!

I see the word “equitable” used all over the place everywhere in startup land. “Equitable access”; “Equitable capital”. It is exactly reminiscent of the use of the word “equity” by the Biden Administration. Same definition too.

I read several daily emails on venture capital and startups. Virtually all of them cheer against Elon Musk and his leadership on Twitter. All of them. Buried deep down in one today was how a rival, Mastodon, is full of child porn. Threads is totally failing. Other prior competitive efforts to Twitter (TruthSocial, Gab, Parler) are fails. Parler was mounting a challenge but was shut down by the Big Government/Big Tech Fascist alliance.

An entrepreneurship professor at NYU was chiding Elon on Twitter and worrying about wealth inequity in the United States. He tweets “When a private citizen can pay $44 billion for a media company — “the world’s town square” — and both crash the civility of the discourse and incinerate 17 years of brand equity within 10 months …. we have too much concentration of wealth in the hands of too few.”

Wait, I thought Elon built a series of tremendous blowout startup businesses to earn that wealth? Isn’t that what we are supposed to be doing? Prior to Elon, Twitter was a cesspool and worked hand in hand with the US Government to kill free speech. That’s called fascism. I bet the same professor isn’t upset with the way the Washington Post and New York Times operate. I don’t think taking class with him would be all that productive.

I saw an article about how the current US Presidential administration has turned the US military academies into woke factories instead of leadership factories designed to create career officers. Not really a surprise given what they have done everywhere else in the government. My friend Jeff has a piece up on how the military falls far short of goals. I liked the military better when they had the motto “when you absolutely, positively have to blow things up.” Here is an old USMA Men’s Volleyball t-shirt. Do you think they could wear it today when we are instructing cadets to refer to their parents as guardians and not “Mom and Dad” so as not to offend anyone?

At Northwestern, they just reprimanded the volleyball coach for having hard practices. The athletes thought that was hazing. I always enjoyed tough practices. They challenged me. Athletics is about competition, not feelings. When I got beat, I had to figure out how to get better. At some point, you learn your physical limits, and if you can’t overcome them in some way your butt meets the bench-or worse.

Last night in Chicago there was a shooting at a “community-focused gas station”. What is that exactly?

In many entrepreneurship circles, the word profit is a totally dirty word. It’s got to be non-profit and “democratic”. It’s all about the community. I see that again and again in crypto projects. “We all have a voice and a vote.” Those projects don’t work. They fail, just like socialism and communism.

I see fund after new fund organized around “inclusiveness” or other buzzwords that virtue signal. The institutionalized network that provides the capital for funds has decided this virtue-signaling thing is good for business. My experience tells me that the best funds do not care about that stuff. They care about funding ideas and people that can execute and build a business.

In a lot of poorer communities I drive through around the US, I see a lot of non-profit efforts with a lot of government money behind them. As if giving away a lot of free junk and creating “safe spaces” is going to spur economic development. Do you know what spurs local economic development? Small business creation that solves problems for local people and makes a profit.

In my summer community, it’s really poor. When I meet a lot of the local kids graduating from college, guess what their number one occupational choice is? Social work. It’s noble, but a totally unproductive profession.

Small business creation is significantly lower post Covid, and so is venture investment into startup businesses. That might change now that the market has recovered a little. What it currently looks like to me is there are a lot of dollars chasing a small number of great businesses. Everyone seems to be risk averse, or their focus is on problems they cannot solve. I even see big-time VCs that used to create a large public profile for themselves going into shells because they are afraid of the mobs. The other major problem is many businesses start with an ineffective or wrong framing of stuff that is meaningless to running a business.

Here is all you really need to know.

Great businesses identify a finite problem and organize themselves to solve it. They earn income from that activity. They recruit and nurture great employees who expand the business. They try and create niches and moats around their business in some way to make them more competitive, and profitable, with pricing power. Those new employees listen to their customers (empathy) and solve even more problems which increases the income of the business which is reinvested into the business by expanding capacity and hiring more great employees who take care of customers. Great businesses are colorblind, politically blind, and sexual orientation blind. They just execute and solve problems for their customers. Period.

That’s old fashioned and not woke but it’s worked for millennia.