> What the ordinary person might interpret as a con game or sheer lunacy, the heavily credentialed investor, with his TED Talk understanding of things, will reliably regard as brilliant eccentricity.
When people hear about typical con games, like the Pigeon Drop [1], their reaction is often, "Thank goodness I'm so smart I'll never fall for a con!" But that's incorrect. Maybe I wouldn't fall for that con, but that just means the con wasn't for me.
Things like Theranos and WeWork fooled people who were plenty smart. But they are, like everybody, trying to model the world using 3 pounds of meat. It's not enough. We take shortcuts. And all of those shortcuts have flaws.
One of our industry's collective flaws is a belief in the genius, that revolutionary smart guy who's just so smartily smart that they see things the ordinaries don't, and will therefore be very successful. But that leaves us vulnerable to people who perform the tropes of genius. Hands up everybody who's had to work with an "architect" like that.
Another is of course the genius entrepreneur, who has a grand vision to transform the world. As we can see, investors just love that. They've been trained to love it by all the "genius entrepreneur" stories that are generated by finding somebody successful and then filling in the narrative mad-lib with events from their lives. And of course, finding that "genius" entrepreneur lets investors see themselves as geniuses of a different kind. It lets investors justify their belief they deserve to be super rich.
Let's hope things like Uber and Theranos and WeWork put enough holes in that myth that we'll stop being vulnerable to people who put on the genius outfit and do the genius performance. Because personally, I've been tired of it for years.
[1] https://abc7news.com/news/vallejo-man-loses-$10000-in-pigeon...