Announcing BQP Partners: my and my brother’s new angel-investing venture
As I’ve written before, these past couple years I’ve often felt like the last remaining person in either quantum computing or AI who lacked a stake in some startup company whose valuation is right now shooting into interstellar space. My academic colleagues, including the ones who seemed the most singleminded about quantum oracle separations and other gloriously useless pursuits? One by one, like in a zombie movie, I learn that they too have now launched startups, and invariably raised tens of millions of dollars, for the sorts of ideas we might’ve idly traded at coffee breaks back in the day, before getting back to our real work.
So why didn’t I join this rollicking party? Partly because of a lifelong fear that, the instant my self-worth became tied to how much money I made, I’d need to humble myself before people who bluster and bully and lie and hype and conceal … yet who nevertheless succeed at becoming orders of magnitude richer than me. I’ve been terrified of even starting down that road, of whether I’d still be myself at the end of it.
It’s also partly that I can’t stand failure, or regret, or being wrong. Of course, as an academic researcher I also fail, and regret things, and am wrong constantly—but there it feels tolerable, because normally I can tell myself that it’s all just down to my inborn limitations. After all, if I could’ve solved the major open problem that someone else solved, or written the brilliant book that someone else wrote, then presumably I would’ve done it!
Clearly, though, I could’ve mined bitcoin in 2010. I could’ve gotten an early stake in Amazon or Google. It’s not even like those ideas never crossed my mind. I just … didn’t act on them, for some reason. (But even if I had, I’d probably just be full of regret that I hadn’t done even more.) Thus, my only way to avoid paralyzing regrets, has been to tell myself constantly that I’m not in the forecasting or money-making businesseses in the first place.
It helped that, insofar as I’m shallow or covetous, insofar as I’ve desired things of this world rather than insight or eternal truth, it’s never really been money that I cared about, but just being respected and liked. Elon Musk is the richest man on earth, but also one of the most despised—which isn’t a bargain that I could imagine ever appealing to me.
Plus, when I actually meet billionaires, I don’t find myself envious of their mansions or cars or anything else that they have; I don’t feel like such things would make my life any happier. Maybe I slightly envy their ability to fund the causes they care about, or their professional staffs who relieve them of drudgery, but mostly I envy the way their wealth announces, to whatever extent it does: “I was right when others weren’t.” Again, though, I’ve never trusted the world to cause me to be right about the future valuations of companies or anything similar, so I’ve settled for having been right about PostBQP and algebrization and BosonSampling.
The bottom line is that I made a choice decades ago to forgo trying to get rich, no matter how many of my friends did the same, and to strive instead to discover and tell the truth—to be a professor, a blogger, a jokester, and an “objective” arbiter and commentator. “Then, surely, everyone will like me!” my internal monologue went. “Then, surely, they’ll be grateful for all the free service I’ve rendered them—for decades of blogging, without once so much as asking for a donation or running an ad!”
HAHAHAHAHAHA.
As any regular reader will know, my attempts to be loved as a blogger backfired pretty spectacularly. Or rather: they did lead to thousands of strangers liking me (and I’m grateful for every last one of you), but they also led to probably an order of magnitude more strangers hating me, and congregating on Reddit and Twitter and elsewhere to discuss how badly I suck. And of course, trying to shift that balance by writing what people want to hear, rather than what I actually believe, was never within my realistic option set.
In the startup context, it didn’t matter how carefully I avoided taking a direct stake for or against any of the companies I blogged about. People on Twitter simply assumed that I had a stake—for example, that I must’ve shorted D-Wave or IonQ, or invested in their competitors, or had equity in AI companies. For why else would anyone write what I wrote?
Amusingly, my attackers here typically did have precisely the conflicts-of-interest that they falsely accused me of having, but that was never at issue; only my imaginary conflicts-of-interest were. Even as the Scott-haters greedily filled their pockets (or tried to), I alone needed to keep turning my pockets out to prove that they were still empty.
So then, screw it! In partnership with my brother David Aaronson, who’s long done investing professionally, and on David’s guidance and encouragement, I’m hereby embarking on a new policy.
Namely: when I hear about a brand-new startup that sounds relevant to my interests—in quantum, AI, or anything else—and I like and trust the founders (ideally, because of their previous academic research work), David and I will often make a small seed investment if the founders are open to it. Or, of course, we might become advisors or get involved in some other way.
In fact, David and I are launching BQP Partners—the link goes to our AngelList, where you can read about how to invest with us if you’re interested. (See also whether you can spot any differences between David’s writing style and preoccupations and mine!)
So far, David and I are investing in:
- Oratomic (the new neutral-atom quantum computing startup out of Pasadena started by Dolev Bluvstein, John Preskill, and Hsin-Yuan Huang among others, which I previously blogged about here). See here for their Series A announcement this week.
- A non-quantum startup being cofounded by someone whose scientific work I’ve admired. I’ll write more about this one as soon as I’m able to!
I have little doubt that more potential investments will come our way very soon (some, probably, as a direct result of this post).
Crucially, I can handle my burden of regret—the “why didn’t I do this much earlier, if I was going to do it at all?” question—by telling myself that friends of mine were not founding companies left and right until very recently. I can also tell myself that I’m doing this less as a bet about the future (in which case … what if I’m wrong?), than simply as a way to support brilliant colleagues doing things that I genuinely admire.
When I blog about a company, I’ll always disclose if I have a financial position that presents a clear conflict of interest, so you can judge for yourself whether to listen to me. (Although, if that’s the sort of thing you’d demand, then you probably weren’t listening to me in the first place, were you?)
Having reflected on it a lot these past few months, I’m happy with my new policy and with my and David’s new venture, and I’m curious to see where it goes. I’m at peace with the possibility that we’ll lose our shirts, but I’m even at peace with a more disturbing possibility—that we’ll make millions and then people will scream at me online for being a sellout, a hack, and a shill. Those people, as I’ve learned, were going to scream at me anyway.
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Comment #1 July 10th, 2026 at 11:42 am
When I was a kid, my parents used to tell me: “In life, you have to choose between money and God.”
I didn’t become a priest, but I didn’t choose money either. I became a scientist. I think this applies to you and many of the good folks reading this blog.
Comment #2 July 10th, 2026 at 12:15 pm
I am unfortunately getting Newton and the South Sea Company vibes from this.
Comment #3 July 10th, 2026 at 12:16 pm
Nole #1: As I said, I feel like I did choose “God” over money as a teenager, and like I stuck with that choice for decades — even as more and more people who I knew became fabulously wealthy, and even to the point of (effectively) walking past million-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk.
The whole point of this post was to explain how I finally reached a breaking point — namely when, having lived my life this way, I then had to deal with quantum computing speculators on Twitter — people who were clearly just pure grifters and opportunists — assuring the world that my views on quantum computing could be completely discounted, because I must be on the take somehow. The idea that these frauds would make out like bandits from a field that I’d spent decades studying and that they understood nothing about — while I had to hope beyond hope that, if I just took enough additional vows of poverty, the smirking Twitter frauds would stop condemning me so much — well, it was too much for me.
Even now, I’ll still spend my time as a professor, blogger, and researcher, devoting his life to “God”! Just no longer to the extreme of walking past million-dollar bills on the sidewalk. 🙂
Comment #4 July 10th, 2026 at 12:35 pm
Is there a way to invest in BQP Partners to short Oratomic?
Comment #5 July 10th, 2026 at 12:35 pm
will #2: It would certainly make narrative sense if, after watching countless know-nothings profit hansomely from quantum computing hype, the people who actually understand quantum computing finally, reluctantly, dipped their toe into the water themselves … and then they, and only they, got wiped out. That might indeed be what happens in this case. If it does, I guess I’ll at least have the consolation that I spent the first decades of my life correctly.
Comment #6 July 10th, 2026 at 12:38 pm
I am willing to be a beta tester for a quantum computer prior to product release. There is interesting encryption I could target..I mean experiment with.
Comment #7 July 10th, 2026 at 12:40 pm
I don’t begrudge you making some more money (if that’s how this pans out) given all you’ve put into the subject, both research and public outreach. Still I can’t help but feel rather sad you’ve been driven to feel this way.
FWIW I doubt the detractors really are an order of magnitude more numerous (probably more likely the other way around) than the appreciative, though the former may be an order of magnitude louder. Maybe that’s the fault of those of us who do appreciate what you do for not speaking up more. OTOH I’ve never been good at “whoever shouts loudest wins” contests, and I suspect that’s true for many of us…
Comment #8 July 10th, 2026 at 12:40 pm
BasicQuestion #4: No. People accused me for years of shorting D-Wave and IonQ, but I wouldn’t know how to do that and would’ve felt little interest if I did. I’m more comfortable being long anyone who’s trying to solve the actual problems of scalable fault-tolerance and talking about it mostly truthfully, regardless of their (unknowable) chances of success.
Comment #9 July 10th, 2026 at 1:00 pm
flergalwit #7: I, too, constantly feel sad about the state of the world and my powerlessness to change it. There’s no question that being an Internet (semi) public figure for as long as I have has given me a darker view of human nature—and my view of human nature was already quite dark from childhood.
On the other hand, one thing that’s felt 100% right to me every time I’ve found enough strength to do it, is ceasing to beg for approval from people who will hate me regardless.
In the event that David and I do make any significant money from this venture, I hereby commit to donating a large fraction of it to try to fix this broken world.
Comment #10 July 10th, 2026 at 2:45 pm
I have to admit, while reading this I expect it to be a parody, and you’ll be shilling for deliberately absurd made-up startups that accentuate all the silly things real start-ups do. After all, it seemed so uncharacteristic of you to start an angel-investing venture. I was surprised when I got to the end of the post to find nothing absurd at all and all indications that you are serious. Congratulations and good luck on your new venture!
Speaking of which, would you consider investing in my startup? As we all know from Roger Penrose, consciousness arises from uncomputable quantum gravity effects in the brain. In our quantum AI company, we seek to build our own devices which exploit these quantum gravity effects to make a conscious AI. This AI will be capable of ascertaining the truth of Goedel sentences, making it in principle more powerful than any possible LLM. Our main monetization strategy is to use strenuous experiences of these AIs to support a blockchain for our new cryptocurrencies. This combines proof-of-work, with mining only possible for buyers of our conscious quantum gravity computer, and proof-of-stake, as a stake in coherence of the blockchain is guaranteed by the negative qualitative character of the mining computation. We believe the unique epiphenomenal security properties of our scheme will guarantee its success.
Comment #11 July 10th, 2026 at 3:01 pm
I can understand you, in bocca al lupo as we say in Italy! You are surely too negative about the success of your blog—your Trevisan Prize proves that! As an avid reader and big fan of your blog, I am worried: can you blog like you used to, now that you have invested in Oratomic and work for StarkWare? Do they even allow you to write anything that isn’t absolutely positive about the Oratomic quantum processor and the prospects for quantum cryptanalysis in general?
To be totally open: when I read your blog entry “Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools” (before I knew about your new business activities), I was quite surprised that you did not at least mention that the Oratomic approach requires a very large number of spatial position swaps of the qubits to enable the reduction in the number of required qubits. Interesting and promising as their approach is, it really exchanges one formidable problem (the required large number of qubits) with another formidable problem (the required large number of position swaps). This could be an excellent idea, of course.
Comment #12 July 10th, 2026 at 3:09 pm
Itai #10: See that’s precisely it, for 30 years I’ve treated any commercial or investment opportunity as purely a thing to make wisecracks about, before returning to serious work like quantum oracle separations. But then if all my friends are non-parodically, non-ironically making bank, which of us has the last laugh?
As for your quantum microtubule startup, yes, I hereby invest 20 bajillion Uncomputable Bux, transferred to you via wormhole. Let me know if you need more.
Comment #13 July 10th, 2026 at 3:13 pm
InquireR #11: With the exception of the OpenAI thing (which ended two years ago), I continue to turn down any industry opportunities that would put any real restrictions on what I can say on this blog, and more generally, I continue to write what I think about basically everything, so help me God, even when my family and friends fervently wish that I didn’t. Sorry, I thought that went without saying.
Comment #14 July 10th, 2026 at 3:27 pm
Giving money to people who can reasonably be expected to do cool things with the money is good. Good for science, good for scientists, good for the world. This remains true even if the things they’re doing are *so* cool that there’s a chance other people will even pay for the outputs and thus ultimately return the money to you. As for the commenters who are being weird about this, I think that sort of attitude is a drag on science and on society.
Comment #15 July 10th, 2026 at 3:47 pm
Scott #13: It might be hard to predict in advance what could cause you restrictions?
For example if you invest in company A and they put out some dubious work or claims, I can very well believe you’ll call it like you see it, even if it’s bad for your investment.
But now suppose company B, a direct rival to A, puts out something dubious. Mightn’t you now feel a conflict of interest in calling out B the same way you would if you didn’t have a vested interest in A? Do you have a plan for dealing with this kind of situation?
Not trying to be negative, just a little concerned, much like InquireR #11. Ultimately you don’t owe anyone the continuation of the same kind of service you’ve been offering the world for decades, but if I understand correctly it isn’t your intention to change course in this respect.
Comment #16 July 10th, 2026 at 4:08 pm
flergalwit #15: Like I said—I expect that I’ll continue to call things as I see them because I’m constitutionally unable to do otherwise. And I feel like I can’t do so in some particular case, I’ll say that (just like people regularly decline to review papers because a former student is their coauthor, etc).
Comment #17 July 10th, 2026 at 5:39 pm
Thanks Scott, I am relieved that there are no restrictions on your reporting due to your business activities. Given that you surely did a deep-dive diligence into Oratomic’s technology, I am genuinely interested in your evaluation of the staggering number of qubit spatial position swaps (billions of times for each qubit in a full-scale cryptanalytical computation) that their architecture requires. To me, the construction of such a ‘liquid CPU’ seems to be a fundamental hurdle. What is your take on that?
Comment #18 July 10th, 2026 at 6:10 pm
InquireR #17: I mean, doesn’t every scalable neutral-atom architecture involve moving the qubits around a staggering amount — substantially ameliorated by the ability to move them all or most of them simultaneously? How much worse is Oratomic’s architecture than QuEra’s in this regard? Can you point me to anything written on this?
Comment #19 July 10th, 2026 at 8:53 pm
Really, the most important thing money can buy is not having to work on anything you don’t want to work on! If one is purely an independent researcher with a pile of money, there’s no need to get up in the morning to teach intro classes. 😛 I mean, there are other ways to accomplish that, but it sure is a use for it…
Comment #20 July 10th, 2026 at 9:11 pm
Also yeah I also thought this was parody! Well… best of luck to you!
Comment #21 July 10th, 2026 at 10:32 pm
Dear Scott,
Does it mean that you will now be wearing suits? at least some times? [I mean real suits, not tweeds.]
–Ajit
Comment #22 July 10th, 2026 at 10:37 pm
I do have a question though. Suppose that AI goes like, 99th percentile well in the range of predictions of serious optimists. As a consequence there is unprecedented and unimaginable economic, scientific, and technological progress in the next couple of decades. Massive breakthroughs in every field every year. Flying cars, lab-grown organs, fusion, whatever. In that world, what is the role of the quantum computing industry? How much are quantum computers used, and for what? What, in the limit, are you hoping these companies will accomplish?
Comment #23 July 10th, 2026 at 11:47 pm
Hi Scott, congratulations on the new venture!
You have nothing to apologize about.
In fact, given the kind of companies you’re looking into, I imagine that you might actually get intellectual benefits as well. I would not be surprised if you end up learning about a cool problem and writing a paper. And of course the companies will benefit from your advice as well.
I’ve probably been giving you this advice for 20 years, but you can ignore the haters.
Your blog is so popular because the vast majority of people want to hear what you say. And if you wanted to give yourself a gift and turn comments off, then you have my encouragement.
It is true that people often take for granted content they get for free. That’s a problem that open source maintainers also have. But this also means you don’t owe the commenters and sneerers anything. Good luck!!
Comment #24 July 11th, 2026 at 3:58 am
Scott #18: Fair point, the problem is not worse for Oratomic than it is for QuEra. To profit from the low qubit numbers enabled by the use of LDPC codes, the architecture requires an astronomical number of spatial position changes. The neutral-atom researchers have demonstrated solid and efficient methods for moving atom qubits within the circuit, but scaling that up to billions of moves without ruining the QEC seems like an engineering Mount Everest to climb to me. I guess I long for one of your insightful explanations why the prospects of neutral-atom computing seem bright to you.
Comment #25 July 11th, 2026 at 5:09 am
Congratulations on launching BQP Partners! I really appreciated the honesty and self-reflection throughout this post. It’s refreshing to see someone approach angel investing not just as a financial opportunity, but as a way to support talented researchers and innovative ideas while maintaining transparency. Wishing you and David great success as you help bring the next generation of quantum and AI startups to life.
Comment #26 July 11th, 2026 at 6:35 am
It’s quite a privilege to wonder why you didn’t decide to become a billionaire. In your situation i wouldn’t really bother what people online are saying to you. You have a nice family, you are wealthy enough, you are friends with some the smartest people on earth, why care. I don’t really understand the struggle.
Comment #27 July 11th, 2026 at 8:36 am
I’m also a quantum computing guy who wants to get rich. It does seem generally good for one’s well-being. The problem is that QC isn’t very useful yet, so the QC business tends to reward appearance over substance. So maybe my plan should be to work on my quantum showmanship, and put whatever comes out of it into AI or robotics or genetics or something that actually does something.
For me personally the most important investment decision is probably the choice of employer. With the US about to hand $10B to QC companies, there’s a real opportunity out there. Any of the recipient companies would be an improvement over my current one.
Comment #28 July 11th, 2026 at 9:21 am
I am sending good investment karma your way. It’s really not worth anything because there is zero chance I could identify good opportunities in this area. Even if it doesn’t work out I am sure you will learn things that will be of future benefit. Here’s to you rollin in the dough if that is what you want. I can’t wait to see photos of your ranch with jet airstrip in Jackson Hole.
Comment #29 July 11th, 2026 at 9:47 am
R #27: Right, the heart of the problem is that the honest people in quantum computing, seeing all the technical problems that still need to get solved before QC becomes genuinely commercially useful to anyone, find it unseemly to get rich from QC before those problems actually are solved.
But then lots of money flows anyway, and the dishonest, “QCs solve optimization problems by trying every answer in parallel” people gleefully collect as much as they can, leaving only scraps for the honest people.
So, how are the honest people to respond in this situation?
It seems to me like the only sustainable answers look like: find ways to compete with the dishonest people at funding without abandoning their honesty.
There are, of course, countless parallel dilemmas throughout life. Eg, nice guys in their teens and twenties perceive that, before they could possibly be “genuinely worthy” of female affection, at a minimum they’d need to improve themselves in all sorts of ways. That then leaves the assholes, who feel no need to improve themselves and indeed no moral obligations of any kind, to monopolize female affection while laughing about it.
It seems obvious in such a case that the correct countermove for the nice guys can’t be remaining as they are, but it also can’t be turning into assholes themselves. It needs to be some third path, of competing to some extent for women while preserving their fundamental niceness. The only reasonable disputes concern exactly what that third path looks like.
(Some people will object: if lots of women freely choose smirking assholes, then who’s a nice guy to judge those assholes “unworthy” of female affection? Likewise, if lots of customers and investors freely choose to give their money to a quantum-speedups-for-everything charlatan, then who’s a skeptic to judge that charlatan “unworthy” of getting rich? The answer, in both cases, comes from the existence of an objective reality that transcends what anyone believes about it. It’s actually true that the asshole laughs about taking advantage of the women behind their backs, in ways that would repulse the women if they found out. Likewise, it’s actually true that the charlatan’s “quantum solution” will fail to outperform simpler and cheaper classical solutions, and the charlatan is counting on customers failing to understand this.)
Comment #30 July 11th, 2026 at 12:11 pm
Scott#5
It’s all about timing. It’s always the masses that get the short end of the stick, simply because they sit out the boom and try to get in at the end. History is littered with ample examples from tulip boom to real estate. The current AI and QC craze is no different, and unfortunately whoever is trying to enter at this late stage will set another example of this lesson not learnt. And the financial shenanigans will laugh their way to the bank, at the expense of the rest. Of course there are possibilities of finding hidden gems once gold rush is over, but they will be few and far in between
Comment #31 July 11th, 2026 at 12:25 pm
Scott #8 “Clearly, though, I could’ve mined bitcoin in 2010. I could’ve gotten an early stake in Amazon or Google. It’s not even like those ideas never crossed my mind. I just … didn’t act on them, for some reason. (But even if I had, I’d probably just be full of regret that I hadn’t done even more.)”
I am asking because all you missed turned out gold and so being a contrarian. So as they say unless you do something essential about the curse it follows you. You missed D-wave and IonQ too.
Comment #32 July 11th, 2026 at 12:28 pm
It’s called monetization. First you present yourself as uncompromising truth-seeker, and swear to never, ever be evil. Then comes the moment that you think that the price is right, and you sell out. You are not first, you are not last. As they say – cut the bullshit.
Comment #33 July 11th, 2026 at 12:36 pm
Prasanna #30: Well yes, that’s the other reason why I resisted getting involved with this for decades—because I’m repulsed and disgusted by the entire concept of needing to get in on a trend before other people do.
Then again, every time I did think about investing in Amazon or bitcoin or anything else, I had exactly the thought expressed in your comment: “no, it’s too late. I’d be an idiot compared to the people who got in earlier than this.” Crucially, I had that thought even when it was still early enough for me to 100x or 10,000x or whatever my investment. From this, we reluctantly conclude that such thoughts must not be treated as dispositive.
In any case, David and I will be limiting ourselves to very early-stage startups for which we have unique opportunities due to my personally knowing the founders or their work or being in the same social and professional circles.
Comment #34 July 11th, 2026 at 12:57 pm
BasicQuestion #31: In some cases (Google, Amazon), I correctly saw very early the enormous value something had, but didn’t invest for the reasons I’ve already set out at length in this post — because it felt gross, because I figured it was already too late anyway, because I’m terrified of being wrong and of the world being adversarial against me.
In other cases (bitcoin, D-Wave, IonQ), I correctly saw the enormous problems with the claims being made for something. I failed to foresee the enormous valuations the things would acquire anyway, due in large part to tulip-bulb effects.
At least in QC and my other areas of actual expertise, I can’t think of a single case where someone I saw as a charlatan turned out not to be a charlatan, or where something I saw as a devastating technical objection turned out not to be one.
Having said that, if someone believes — as you apparently do — that there’s no reality outside of what the gullible are willing to spend money on, maybe they should indeed bet against anything I bet for and vice versa. They might even get rich that way! After all, we live in a freak timeline where arguably the most transparent fraud and conman in human history is now the president of the US.
In some sense, I can only usefully talk to someone if they share my baseline belief in a reality that still has whatever properties it does even if the market and all the popular people believe otherwise. So that’s what I’ve done in this post.
Comment #35 July 11th, 2026 at 1:03 pm
Adoranna #32: Oh, believe me that if I’d wanted to sell out, it would’ve looked dramatically different from this! I would’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars a decade ago or longer, by telling investors whatever they most wanted to hear about quantum computing, and I would not be spending any time in my comment section arguing with anonymous assholes like you.
Comment #36 July 11th, 2026 at 4:49 pm
Scott #34 I am just saying just like Buffett index your index genuinely seems to show correlation. It does not make the assumption Oratomic product success is not based on scientific foundations. I am just saying some people carry the ‘curse’ and it is not impossible to shake it off but requires more than getting on track ‘this time around’. Your ‘curse’ is you have not made money for 2+ decades of opportunity in explicit stocks. I am just saying something might pull the rug off Oratomic rendering the stock worthless even though it is correct in science and technology. You know no one knows nature is physical. Newton came along and assigned values to things and got something rolling. Up to what we know Oratomic tech is correct. What we do not know is something else can come up and solve what Oratmic is doing in a different way. ‘Curse’s of top people have consequences.
Prez has issues. The issue is all prez had issues. But this prez like other prez have at least tried to do some good like children’s fund which if you think about it is a socialist idea. The prez we got after financial crisis goofed up on economic revival prolonging it to save his ass. Instead of getting the required funding in one year to bolster the economy the total capital (which was exactly what was calculated by Paul Krugman) was got over three years. Guess what he lost. His mojo which seems it won’t return until 2030. He lied to the minorities about immigration and guess what we got – this prez. Think if Hillary had won in 2008?
Comment #37 July 11th, 2026 at 6:09 pm
BasicQuestion #36: So let me educate you then. I played a central role in introducing the whole program of sampling-based quantum supremacy back in 2009-2012. That what was allowed first Google, then Quantinuum and others, to do such dramatic demonstrations starting in 2019. Almost anyone in quantum computing will tell you that that was essential to various QC startups being able to go public recently at ~$15B valuations.
Now, what’s true is that I didn’t succeed at capturing essentially any of the value that I helped create this way. What’s true is that all the billions of dollars went to other people, who optimized for getting equity early on, rather than to me or my students, who optimized for learning the truth about quantum speedups and writing the key papers that other people then managed to profit from.
But here’s the thing. In the old world — the world that people with your mindset successfully destroyed — the fact that I never asked for a cut of the billions of dollars in value that I helped to create would be all the more to my credit. It’s only in this new world — in your sick and broken bizarro world — that my failure to make money off my ideas, my allowing of all these billions of dollars to flow to other people, could be used as yet more reason to ridicule me and to claim that I have a “curse” of being wrong.
Piss me off one more time and you’re banned from here.
Comment #38 July 11th, 2026 at 7:52 pm
1) On Google and Amazon you claim (and I believe you) that you DID spot early on they would be worth investing in. Is there anytime you were wrong (e.g., Myspace, google-glasses)?
2) The following always bothered me about the business world: it seems that many companies that do well its a matter of LUCK and TIMING. The better product DOES NOT always win. It seems like such a crapshoot.
3) At the Borders book store going-out-of-business sale i bought a book “Myths of innovation” It was very good. One thing I remember that I give you as advice is: brilliant ideas are overrated, hard work and follow-through are under-rated.
Comment #39 July 11th, 2026 at 8:03 pm
Scott #37 Words do not have emotions. Sorry to piss you off. Everyone knows you were instrumental in QC becoming practical sooner than later.
But the truth is Quantum ECC are the fundamental issue. People used to think in late 90’s or early to late 2000’s QC would die before the algorithm finishes.
Also sorry my comments were only on cryptographic algorithms which quantum computers can implement with ECC. MSFT’s stationQ (started in 2006) trumpeted on anyons (for noise stability) but as far as I know never had Wall Street looking at it before 2010s. Sampling based results (as I thought) was instrumental in getting publicity. But do they have marketable products in the projected 10 year horizon? ECC is what changed the game but I remember the early 2010’s had well known sampling based results. I agree sampling based results were crucial steppingstones to get QC sooner (but still ECC is the issue) and you could very well have been on board in the executive team at Google (like many other ML profs (maybe it was not the trend in late 2010’s)) in early 2020s and I do not know why Google did not do that (maybe you yourself were not interested since you could not predict the pace of progress in ECC). Also it is still unclear (as you very well know) if these cryptographic problems are easy.
Comment #40 July 11th, 2026 at 8:19 pm
BasicQuestion #39: Sorry, but I can barely understand your comment. I assume that by ECC you mean Error Correcting Code rather than Elliptic Curve Cryptography? Yes, of course fault-tolerance has been the ultimate goal of experimental QC since the mid-1990s. The point is that without BosonSampling, random circuit sampling, and the like, the QC companies would’ve had much less that they could demonstrate before they’d achieved fault-tolerance—and that would plausibly have pushed their commercialization prospects substantially further into the future. In the actual world that we live in, many of these companies have in fact done their IPOs after quantum supremacy but before scalable fault-tolerance. I guess I can take some sort of pride in that, even if I’ll never profit from it.
Comment #41 July 11th, 2026 at 8:54 pm
Scott #41 That is the point about business world and law.
An algorithm is never patentable. Dammit you would say as a computer scientist. Everything is computational. I would like to hear your thoughts on this. Say Tao for instance compressed sensing should have potentially given him wealth. Did he get any (someone should ask him)?
It makes no sense when computer scientists can prove equality between a particular algorithm and every one of the patents out there. I thought one of your relatives is a lawyer (I thought I read in one of your blogs). Maybe you can get this into the supreme court (not that the justices would understand). At least the issue will get funding in the philosophy and law department.
You might actually have had a case since your algorithms are quantum. All patents are classical. So the law might not apply and you can reopen the case.
And I bet everyone has to bet you would win and will apply to classical world also (knowing how many inventors have been screwed).
I also understand your point that sampling gave momentum to the field and the patents for sampling might not have been valuable themselves.
Comment #42 July 12th, 2026 at 5:55 am
To chip in with my five cents worth I don’t object to people making lots of money from successful investments, but I do think they should be taxed more heavily on the profits. America is divided economically no less than it is divided politically, an unstable situation that is becoming more pronounced year by year.
Comment #43 July 12th, 2026 at 6:40 am
As a staunch Zionist, wouldn’t it be logical for you to also invest in the currently booming Israeli tech/weapon industry?
Comment #44 July 12th, 2026 at 9:12 am
Root Meaning #43: I mean, it’s not the worst idea. Yes, as the Jewish people has needed to do for millennia, tiny Israel is forced to survive by wits and inventiveness against its far more numerous neighbors who—possibly like you—lust for a second Holocaust. And yes, this has often involved the creation of innovative defense technologies that can then be profitably sold to other countries, including the many who will desperately need to defend themselves against the emerging global axis of China, Russia, and the Caliphate. I bet that David, whose Zionism often makes mine seem weak and equivocal by comparison, would be open to the idea as well.
On the other hand, quantum computing is the one field where many things that are obvious to me seem obvious (shockingly) to at most a few hundred other people on earth. So maybe it would make more sense to make money from QC startups, then donate some portion of it to support Israel’s survival and flourishing.
Comment #45 July 12th, 2026 at 5:54 pm
Congrats and good luck Scott.
Even putting aside the personal benefit to you if your firm succeeds and makes you rich, this activity will likely benefit the rest of the world. If you think that you have unique insight and judgement into which technologies and people are likely to succeed in the quest to build a large FTQC, then your investments will funnel necessary resources towards those most promising companies. Even if the amount of money you’re moving around is small compared to the big VCs, the credible signal you will provide will help the companies with the right technology and right people get funded, compared to the companies that just push hype and don’t advance the field.
For this reason I’ve always thought it should be more normalized, and in fact encouraged, for academic scientists to get involved in the business/investing world. They often have unique skills and knowledge, and are usually more interested in truth seeking and making technology work than they are in getting rich given their secure jobs, so they are people you would want identifying companies to invest in. So resources are diverted to more promising companies, and away from less promising ones.
Comment #46 July 13th, 2026 at 6:31 am
Congrats Scott! I’m excited to see you entering this arena, as a fan of Atlas Shrugged.
Regarding haters vs non-haters, I’ll say that I mainly like to comment when I disagree strongly with you on issues, but I also agree strongly with you on many other issues; eg. Sneerclub being the worst, and your writings on nerdy males’ social dilemmas, to list the two least-hot-button ones. And of course your TCS knowledge sharing is awesome and very generous.
Good luck on the ventures! And maybe consider nuclear power startups as well!
Comment #47 July 13th, 2026 at 2:11 pm
Good luck scott! Wish you and your family all the best with the new venture
Comment #48 July 13th, 2026 at 2:15 pm
Invest in Dorit if you can
Comment #49 July 13th, 2026 at 2:27 pm
Last comment, if you invested in Dolev bluvstein you might want to look at the startups of Mikhail Lukin as well
Comment #50 July 13th, 2026 at 9:33 pm
Good Luck to you and your brother.
I am looking forward to read on which companies you decide to support financially, particularly in the quantum computing space.
This has become an extremely important area for tech and there aren’t that many people who can tell apart the real stuff from hype.
ps:
I would dispute your haters are more than your fans. I know so many people in person who are a fan of your blog and I don’t know any person who dislikes you. You are definitely wrong on that one, trust me.
Comment #51 July 14th, 2026 at 5:22 pm
Okay, since this question is now officially on topic!
What do you think the annual market for QCs will be?
Comment #52 July 15th, 2026 at 11:06 am
While I cannot know whether you truly have orders of magnitude more haters than fans, I sincerely hope that is not the case. For what it is worth (and to tip the scale slightly away from online haters): I am a fan of your blog and your book, and am looking forward to you continuing to be a voice of reason in the QC space.
Wishing you the best of luck in your new venture.
Comment #53 July 15th, 2026 at 2:49 pm
Agreed Anon #50 (especially last paragraph) and Evan #52.
I think if anyone deserves to make some money from QC it’s Scott, and I hope my earlier messages (hopefully worrying unnecessarily) didn’t suggest otherwise!
Comment #54 July 15th, 2026 at 10:58 pm
Do you know the minimum amount required to invest with your new venture? It’s a bit annoying to open one of these Meridian accounts and if your minimum is very high, then it would be useful to know (since I won’t be able to invest).
Comment #55 July 16th, 2026 at 8:05 am
Congratulations on your new venture, Scott!! and All The Best!!!
Comment #56 August 2nd, 2026 at 9:54 am
“they did lead to thousands of strangers liking me (and I’m grateful for every last one of you).”
Yeap, I’m one of those thousands who like him.
Good luck broter.
Cheers from overseas.
Comment #57 August 7th, 2026 at 3:37 pm
Scott, if you’re still monitoring this, I have two cents from the other side – a startup CEO’s perspective. I want you and your portfolio companies to succeed, and I will benefit if you do. Also, I’ve made the jump from the rationalist community to the business community; I think I understand both cultures at this point and there are a few points that are unique to that transition and which traditional business primers might not explain, or might not explain from an angle that makes sense to a rationalist.
There are, at the most general level, two VC strategies, sometimes summed up as “don’t make dumb mistakes” and “don’t miss the next Facebook,” respectively. Your fund size doesn’t appear to be big enough to diversify effectively, so (correct me if I’m wrong), you’re going to be concentrating in a few investments where you’re convinced that other VCs would make dumb mistakes which you can avoid. There are a few pitfalls that you should be aware of, even at this late stage of your due diligence.
First of all, the obvious stuff that applies to everyone. I assume you’ve had a similar conversation with your brother to establish this, but it’s the standard disclaimer before anybody invests in anything: I sure hope you’re not investing anything you can’t afford to lose, that you’re an accredited investor, and that you aren’t commingling assets (even using the same computer for work and personal items). You don’t want to give creditors of the portfolio companies any ability to argue that the investment vehicle is a shell company and that you should be personally liable for the portfolio companies’ debts when (not if, in most cases) they fold.
I assume your brother is competent enough to have nailed all this stuff down, but it would be worth it in either case, if you haven’t done it already, to retain a lawyer to review the corporate structure and all associated documents. Tell the lawyer to imagine that he represents a creditor of a liquidating corporation in which your entity is a shareholder and to try to figure out how he would recover from you, personally. Note also that it becomes a lot easier to argue this if the portfolio company does anything illegal, even unintentionally; you can’t really plead ignorance if you’re an accredited investor and you’re expected to pay close attention to the operations and business planning of the portfolio company, even if that means hiring a lawyer or multiple lawyers to help you do so, and even if you don’t have much of a business background, which means you have to learn how to understand what the portfolio company is doing, ideally before you start and faster than the management of the portfolio company can change what they’re doing. Ergo, you need some background, which I hope you already have, but if you don’t, here goes.
(Also – you say your brother is experienced with investing, and he may well be, but there are many different kinds of investing that work entirely differently, even in private equity, and even at early stages. If he is not experienced at exactly what you’re doing, he may not see all the problems coming, or may overcorrect in other areas. A classic example is investment bankers going into angel investing. Investment bankers typically pass on all early-stage companies, and can justify their decisions will all sorts of “what if bad thing X happened” objections. These objections are generally correct! Angels aren’t stupid; they know about these objections, too. It’s just that, for an early-stage company, the answer is to pivot, since an early-stage company doesn’t have the extensive investment in facilities and specialized staff that investment bankers assume is already there. After all, an investment banker only encounters later-stage companies. He’s probably never seen a company that wasn’t too far along to pivot without a lot of pain, he thinks those companies are still “early stage” because they’re pre-IPO, and he will argue that pivoting from one bad idea to another is just a waste of your time and his money. A “company” of four people sitting around a table in a basement is irrelevant to an investment banker, but that’s where you’re making your investments. Similarly, there are lots of different kinds of lawyers, too, and the suggestion above should involve someone who has handled a corporate bankruptcy before, not the guy who files incorporation paperwork or trademark applications.)
Second, and this is probably the most important part, concentration on the cutting edge is very inadvisable. If you’re investing in a company because the founders published a paper showing an O(n^1.44) runtime – which, let’s say, is state-of-the-art – think about the number of times that somebody has published a paper the next week showing an O(n^1.43) runtime. Now what? Relatedly, in research, generally, nobody cares about an O(2) speedup – not an O(2n) speedup, but an O(2) speedup – but in production software, that can make the difference between software that will run on today’s computer and software that will run in five years but is impractical now. Again, now what? If you try to pick winners on that basis, and I am not exaggerating here, you will lose your shirt.
So, are you taking (or would you consider taking) a hybrid approach, where you take equity in exchange for a favorable evaluation of a company’s technology? It sounds like you’ve already consulted for VCs to tell them to avoid companies which are obviously based entirely on technology which, provably, can’t possibly work. It might help you grow to the point where you can effectively diversify, if you take equity in lieu of a consulting fee, for example, without putting in all of your own money, or while taking an option, or some other structure that gives you some skin in the game but not betting your retirement savings on any one particular company. Such a strategy will take time – usually several zero-to-IPO cycles – and you’re not doing it wrong if you don’t get rich immediately. Nobody does. Once you get through several successful cycles, and you have a contact list full of LPs who want to invest with you, and you control $200M or so (of other people’s money, not yours; you don’t have to personally be a billionaire to do this), then, I think you’ll have enough of a fund size to pursue a diversification strategy and not have to get lucky to succeed.
Third, there’s another aspect that could sink you even if you do everything else right. You’ve expressed in the past a (complete, IIRC) disinterest in software project management, requirements setting, and other day-to-day customer relationship management things. These can literally make the difference between a successful startup and a failure. Many, many, many great researchers are terrible managers, and if you invest in those people, again, you will lose your shirt – no matter how good the research is. As I recall, you said that it didn’t seem to you to be an intellectual exercise, so it was profoundly uninteresting to you, which is certainly true – but neither is facilities management, and if nobody is emptying the garbage cans, the company doesn’t run. Sometimes, the guy who ends up doing that has a Ph.D. In a startup, so it goes. There are no “other people” to do that stuff. I’ve personally done research, made sales calls, written contracts, drilled into concrete, and demolished drywall with raw sewage soaked into it.
It’s easy to laugh at people who don’t know (or aren’t organized enough to manage the fact) that they need to empty the garbage, but that’s a symptom of a larger problem: companies that don’t manage things that they don’t want to think about, generally. Your portfolio companies are based on world-changing research, yes, but they still need to be businesses. I’m not just talking about low-level tasks that high-level thinkers occasionally trip over. I’m talking about structuring the business so that the research achieves the goal – and this is the type of work that should be done before the company spends a cent, and which researchers generally don’t like to do. (Basically, do an algorithm analysis of the business, where the company’s organization is the computer architecture and n is made of money, not bits.) Don’t be one of the people who think that because business strategy often sounds like a string of buzzwords – and frequently is repeated by people who don’t understand it – that business strategy itself is meaningless.
I recall, for example, a discussion about a proposed fusion reactor which would, if built, have been chasing small-margin commodities pricing differentials that would essentially guarantee that it couldn’t make a profit. I pointed this out, stating that the prospective competition had already paid off the capital cost of their equipment, to the extent that it basically did not matter how much better the fusion reactor was than the existing equipment – it would cost more to build and maintain the fusion reactor’s ancillary equipment, even if no fusion occurred, than the money they could hope to make.
I told them that they needed to find a higher-margin market to enter first, where they could charge more, to pay off the research and development and other fixed one-time costs, before entering low-margin markets. Not just that, I said, the growth markets were ones that don’t exist yet. Find a business case that’s wildly profitable *for the customer* but doesn’t close without fusion. Then, design the reactor around the ability to sell to that customer, who doesn’t exist yet!
This is startups 101, for those who don’t know. But a more senior researcher dismissed what I said as “business book nonsense” and insisted that only the most efficient reactor, according to his performance metric, should be built. I’m sure it will be; neither of us have enough influence on anything to make it happen or not. When it is, it will either be subsidized by the government or close down in six months. Senior researchers tend to be very impenetrable to the possibility that they may be working on the wrong problem, as was this gentleman – don’t do that. If you do, and I may be sounding like a broken record here, you will lose your shirt.
Such researchers can be easily identified by a career-long stream of failed projects, “successes” that were rendered completely irrelevant by somebody else in a couple of years, and a consistent complaint that it was all stopped by the bean-counters. These people never ask what the bean-counters needed before trying to sell them something, which is actually understandable to a point: innovators never ask what the customer needs; they ask what’s in the customer’s way. The solution is often not something that it would have occurred to the customer to ask for. But these guys don’t ask that, either. They assume that their idea is the best, because it scores highest on some efficiency metric that never, ever captures all possible sources of inefficiency.
It may seem trite, and it’s not a technical problem, but academia has its culture; business has its culture. The gap is huge, and even though it’s non-technical, it matters. If you’ve never seen the other side, it’s easy to assume that the gap is narrower than it is. Both sides carry assumptions that the other side doesn’t recognize. Almost nobody successfully crosses it. I’ll give you another example: probably 99% of your work involves proving, after long study, that something cannot be done. That saves time, and money, and effort, and needs to be done before the business is organized or before a new project is started within the business. That’s how you avoid getting into problems that you don’t know how to get out of, and that’s a great early-stage approach to take. (LBJ would never have gotten into Vietnam if he’d been familiar with big-O notation!) You can’t really do it in mid-leap, though; it generally takes more time than you have, and meanwhile, you’re spending money on staff and recurring expenses. That doesn’t mean that you can decide and plan out exactly what to do before you do it, however. It means that the initial approach you take must not close off the ability to change it, you should know ahead of time what changes to external circumstances would trigger the changes, and you have to keep your antenna up for those changes, particularly “unknown unknowns.” More concretely: a business plan isn’t a list of procedures. It’s a decision tree, where you establish in advance what needs to be working and to what degree before you can use it, and if you have open dependencies at a decision point, what you intend to do about that – before you start.
To be clear, I’m not trying to glorify the people whom you have 60 IQ points on, who have “street smarts” and know how to cheat people while technically not breaking the law and therefore staying out of trouble, and who will take all your money and not care. The problem isn’t exactly those people; it’s easy to avoid those people by staying away from speculation, where those people operate. Not giving them your money at all is how you avoid losing it to them, and you’re not proposing to do that. That doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods, though. The problem is the people seeking funding from you, whose hearts are in the right place, and who will try to think of everything, and will come up with a program structure that takes into account all the best objections from all the smartest people…and who still fail, because they do everything down the middle, on the assumption that the most likely event will occur.
It’s hard to explain to program administrators who think that this assumption is “conservative,” but the mode ain’t the median. The most likely event to occur isn’t necessarily likely to occur at all. Look at the Fall of France in World War II: the French conducted a highly-sophisticated analysis of where the Germans were most likely to attack, spent 85% of their budget building the strongest fort in the world there, and in so doing, guaranteed that the Germans would not attack it, because the adversary could see where it was, too. The most likely event did not occur, effectively because measuring it changed the system. Program administrators are the “people who handle money” that you’re most familiar with, but they almost always make terrible business decisions. Operating that way is yet another way to lose your shirt.
So: how are you going to create new markets? How are you going to select portfolio companies whose research work gives them runway rather than a temporary advantage? How do you know you’re not building a Maginot Line? Are you going to recognize that similar statements from other people in the future, who use business shorthand but without explaining it, aren’t just buzzword bingo and negativity? I don’t think you’ll suffer from any of the problems that “stupid money” has – I don’t think you’ll chase fads or fashionable investments without knowing anything about the core business – but I don’t see any evidence that you’ve ever analyzed product-market fit before. People who don’t do that generally end up with a magnificent, perfect product that nobody needs. You could easily end up in that situation, and it’s avoidable.
More fundamentally, if you can’t spot the sucker at the table, you’re it. Can you spot them? Not trying to be negative, here, but has your ability to do so improved since your involvement with the Effective Altruism folks? Because, now, it’s not just your reputation – there’s a fiduciary duty to other people. Do you know how to pick up on people trying to push your buttons? (Not just bad buttons, to get a bad reaction, but good buttons, trying to butter you up.) Can you do that better than an experienced corporate salesman who is pitching you? Do you know you’re not being set up to take worthless equity after everybody else has snapped up the growth potential and is looking to offload their particular hot potato? People who come late to the party get robbed all the time.
Unfortunately, though, there’s no “grand unified theory of business” and no way to create one which contains sufficient generality without losing necessary specificity. You’re going to have to learn all this inductively, from case studies. I only recently concluded that I had enough breadth of experience with these case studies to step into really working in it, and that was after more than 20 years and some very disorienting and dislocating experiences that made me realize that I was on completely the wrong track and needed to start over.
The problem here is that the track I was on was being part of the rationalist community. I ran into problems that my rationalist outlook couldn’t solve, and that should be a serious red flag for anyone coming from that community into the business community. (Look at how rational the French were – and still are, broadly speaking, in their culture. That didn’t help them in 1940, going up against lunatics. Rationality didn’t help them understand irrational behavior.) You, as I understand it, haven’t had that; your career has generally been a consistent success, all the way through. You had an upbringing which taught you to challenge assumptions, which is the correct foundation for this sort of work, but if you don’t have the information needed to know that it’s an assumption, you won’t know to ask the question, no matter how good you are at considering and answering questions in general.
As a result, the guys who were brought up not to challenge assumptions, who generally are not very intelligent, but were fed the right answers and are good at implementing the answers quickly, will generally beat you at their game, at the beginning. How are you going to beat them? How are you going to steer them into a situation where their highly-refined right answers are addressing the wrong questions, and, in a very theoretical-CS way, where the more work they do, the more problems they get themselves into, until finally, they’re in over their heads? Once you do, the amount of time that it will take them to unpack their assumptions will give you enough time to refine your processes to the point where you’re operationally effective. The other guys will learn how to copy you, but it will take them enough time that you can do what you want to do before they can stop it. (Going back to the 1940 example, the Germans did this to the French. The French Army of 1945 was more than capable of conducting a blitzkrieg; it took them longer than the six weeks they had in 1940 to learn how to do that.)
The question really isn’t “are you sure you know how to do that,” because the answer is probably no. (If it isn’t, you’ve had a personality transplant. Self-doubt has been such a factor in your public communications to this point that I can’t imagine that these questions, properly considered, don’t give you pause.) Nor am I saying “be careful”; it’s entirely possible to “be careful” yourself out of opportunities, as you well know.
The question, I think, is how you can contribute your technical knowledge to an investment team, to allow them to avoid stuff that’s obviously not going to work – and, more importantly, to get your founders to ask the right questions about who can use what they have, and to get QC-adjacent founders to understand the capabilities of your portfolio companies, so that your portfolio companies have customers. It’s entirely possible for bright and motivated people in other fields to not know how QCs work to the extent that it wouldn’t occur to them to know how to ask for what they want. Doing that without trying to pick winners among the rest should get you some equity in successful companies for yourself in return, instead of a consulting check for a dollar and 38 cents.
This also takes your time and productivity into account, since you’ll do much better work for the betterment of the world as the #1 world expert on QC than as the 400 millionth person who knows basic business principles. That, I think, is what you can do, with what you have, where you are. You may, of course, be privy to non-public information that indicates that you can do more than that, and I don’t have any insight there. But, I think, the more of these meetings you’re in and the more of these companies you see, the more awareness of the non-technical problems you’ll have.
A good place to get started, IMO, is this approach of making conversations happen between customers and engineers, before you engineer anything, with the goal of integrating what is engineered into a workflow for customer success. In software project management, this is called “DevOps.” It is one of those techniques that are irrelevant to a researcher but vital to a business. It has real-world effects, big time. In 1940, the Germans did DevOps, although it was not called that at the time, and the French didn’t. DevOps was independently reinvented in the 2000s, as a reaction to the lack of organization and excess of overhead “process” in contemporary software project management frameworks – and that brings up another thing you’ll have to avoid.
One of the reasons that DevOps was lost after World War II was that the Germans didn’t articulate it as a formal framework, and in fact, the Germans culturally didn’t do “frameworks.” Allied armies had a French-type staff structure, where the top officers define what is correct and everyone is ordered to agree with it. After the war, Allied analysts tried to figure out who in the German Army defined their “doctrine,” or as the US Army-influenced modern American corporate culture calls it, their “management framework.” By contrast, the idea on the German side was to have a self-modifying workflow – not, in fact, a process at all. “Workflow,” here, implies an inductive development of techniques from case studies, rather than a top-down dictate of formal process from the top. This isn’t simply a “flexible doctrine” as opposed to a “rigid doctrine” – it’s *no doctrine*. Be careful with that, though; “no doctrine” doesn’t mean “no ideas.” It means not trying to reduce predetermined theories to practice, but rather developing theories from dialectical analysis of numerous case studies, so that the theoretical statement doesn’t get ahead of the evidence and become unchallengeable. Basically, it’s the difference between Aristotelian philosophy and a modern reverse proof.
Accordingly, beware of anyone trying to sell you a framework. If it can’t be modified, or if it doesn’t contain a mechanism for modifying it to suit changing conditions, run like hell. You do not need a motivational speaker giving you “the four Cs of success” or some-such. None of these artificial processes work outside of the narrow conditions in which they were developed. They are often pitched as “you’re open-minded, aren’t you – why won’t you just try it and see?” The result will always be lurching from one “framework” to another, none of which work for your specific situation.
Managers who don’t understand what they’re managing frequently get caught in this trap. If you spot someone employing this pattern, you can usually beat them by putting them in a situation which their framework can’t explain. The opposing manager will respond by declaring their framework to be infallible, disciplining employees who try to point out that it’s not working, and running off a cliff while faking success. Developing a competing product that attacks an assumption in their business case is usually how you do this.
Most rationalists have a psychological barrier to doing this; namely, that it takes analyzing irrational behavior to understand why anyone would act like the above manager. In fact, most rationalists don’t consider “why anyone would act like that” to be an important question. It’s either right or wrong. Well, the above manager has enough power over people to fire the people who are telling him something he doesn’t want to hear, and that has real effects on the people who have less power than he does. That gets us to the Fundamental Theorem of the Social Sciences:
“Imaginary or incorrect constructs have real effects on the real world if people act, in the real world, as though they are true.”
This doesn’t make science imaginary. It is, however, what makes the social sciences actual sciences, with actual (qualitative, but real-world) testable predictions: predictions of how people will engage in irrational behavior. This theorem works because it’s entirely possible for powerful people to use their power to force people to deny reality. Entire corporations can exhibit collective behavior which is bafflingly disconnected from reality, and frequently do so, simply because that’s what their internal office politics dynamic led them to do. It’s not impossible to understand what they’re doing and why, but you can’t do it by assuming that anything rational is going on.
This is a drastic departure for a rationalist. The analysis of the behavior of the people in the situation – which rationalists generally don’t care about, since it’s wrong and the idea is right – must proceed from the people’s inaccurate understanding of what’s going on, and the people’s agendas about what to do about it, even when the agenda has nothing to do with a rational response to the situation! This is an inversion of the old saying that “facts don’t care about your feelings”: feelings don’t care about facts, either.
I didn’t really get this, the concept of “values,” until I watched interview footage of Holocaust perpetrators. There is absolutely no justification for what they did. There is absolutely no rational analysis that could lead them from the “problem” that they thought they had to the solution they decided to implement. But, and this is equally important, those people were generally not insane in the psychiatric sense. They chose to do what they did; they were criminals; they were guilty; an insanity plea would not apply to their actions. Those people were not seeing pink elephants or talking to themselves; they were not ranting and raving. Sane people can do things that have nothing to do with reality and are capable of refusing to allow anyone to talk them out of it. That’s what “values” means in the social sciences – what the person cares about, and how it dictates what part of an observed event matters to the person – and if they don’t value the facts, they just don’t and won’t, and you can’t make them.
They start acting out a story in their head, and the story is orthogonal to reality. Understand the story and the storyteller’s self-constructed role in the story – what character they’re acting out – and you’ll understand how they’ll act. Not only can it can have zero to do with reality, it frequently has zero to do with a rational response to looking at the same set of facts and misunderstanding them. Holocaust perpetrators, for example, were not people who were misunderstanding some set of facts and could be convinced that they had made a mistake once the facts were effectively communicated to them. Their decisions were simply not based on facts. Their decisions were based on what they imagined, with no connection to any facts and unprompted by exposure to either facts or to incorrect statements. They told themselves a story and played along to it. Telling facts to those people would have had absolutely no effect on their behavior. And, yet, they were psychiatrically sane. How could that happen?
Now, on to people who are closer to us – they can act like this, too. Remember the fusion debate above? The senior researcher valued his metrics over everything else, labeled himself as “rational,” and decided that anything that wasn’t his metric was “irrational.” Rationalists can fall into this trap, too! It’s how everybody acts when they’re not thinking! It can happen to you, if you don’t have your antenna up about it – in other words, it’s how you act when you’re not thinking about how people act without thinking. If you intend to start operating among people who are highly experienced at analyzing how people act when they’re not thinking, you really, really, really need to start looking at their behavior from this perspective before you make irreversible decisions, like investing money that you can’t replace.
Yes, in short, money is numbers, but it’s not data. How people acquire and use money has nothing to do with the rational way in which they should do so. Working with people’s non-rational way of doing that involves understanding their non-rational way of not thinking. Just be prepared for it to take years, to not have the answers yourself immediately, and to have your antenna up about it as early as possible.
Reading over this again, I hope I’ve avoided the trap myself of assuming that just because I didn’t see you doing it, that therefore you didn’t do it. I know you’ve thought of at least some of this! It’s just that you probably haven’t thought of all of it, at least not in the context I’m putting it in. And, yes, this is a lot longer than I’d hoped it would be, but I don’t see much of a way to shorten it and hopefully it helps. If you were the proverbial fool from whom his money is inevitably soon parted, I wouldn’t bother writing this, but you have a reputation for listening carefully, something that many VCs do not have. Hopefully, you can leverage that into investments that require careful, specialist consideration that the ADHD guys pass on. Good luck (but don’t rely on luck!) and I hope you keep leveraging those of us in your professional network who have been there.