Right, so if you had good judgment and a reasonable network, I think you could find a lot of the promising opportunities.
Someone would be like “I have a device that produces bright light at a low cost, and I need funding to manufacture it on a massive scale.”
So you’d be like “Really? Let me see this device.”
You’d inspect the device, see that it does in fact do the thing the inventor says it does, and then after further diligence on the business plan & team you’d invest.
I think this is roughly how to go about separating the real opportunities from the snake oil.
Worth remembering that, especially today, there are hundreds of thousands to millions of other highly intelligent and resourceful people trying to do the exact same thing. So you need to have a reason to believe you can do a better job than they can.
Philippe LeBon was a French civil engineer working in the public engineering corps who became interested while at university in distillation as an industrial process for the manufacturing of materials such as tar and oil. He graduated from the engineering school in 1789, and was assigned to Angoulême. There, he investigated distillation, and became aware that the gas produced in the distillation of wood and coal could be useful for lighting, heating, and as an energy source in engines. He took out a patent for distillation processes in 1794, and continued his research, eventually designing a distillation oven known as the thermolamp. He applied for and received a patent for this invention in 1799, with an addition in 1801. He launched a marketing campaign in Paris in 1801 by printing a pamphlet and renting a house where he put on public demonstrations with his apparatus. His goal was to raise sufficient funds from investors to launch a company, but he failed to attract this sort of interest, either from the French state or from private sources. He was forced to abandon the project and return to the civil engineering corps. Although he was given a forest concession by the French government to experiment with the manufacture of tar from wood for naval use, he never succeed with the thermolamp, and died in uncertain circumstances in 1805.
Right, so if you had good judgment and a reasonable network, I think you could find a lot of the promising opportunities.
Someone would be like “I have a device that produces bright light at a low cost, and I need funding to manufacture it on a massive scale.”
So you’d be like “Really? Let me see this device.”
You’d inspect the device, see that it does in fact do the thing the inventor says it does, and then after further diligence on the business plan & team you’d invest.
I think this is roughly how to go about separating the real opportunities from the snake oil.
Worth remembering that, especially today, there are hundreds of thousands to millions of other highly intelligent and resourceful people trying to do the exact same thing. So you need to have a reason to believe you can do a better job than they can.
Yes, I think the crux here is how good you think your judgment/taste is relative to that of all the others who are trying.
Historical anecdote: