Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Fundamentally, venture capital is the business of identifying & believing in ambitious people who need someone to believe in them. The greater the extent to which they're underestimated, the more you stand to gain — why is this *never* articulated?

So true. Also there are gains to be made by believing in people beyond venture capital too. Everyone, not just VCs, could benefit from that attitude.

It seems like a cultural failing if everybody’s default mentality is ‘I can’t make progress or do great things’ until somebody explicitly tells them otherwise.

A quibble: rather than it being about "believing" it can be about *knowing*. It's a good idea to know (fallibly) their ideas are good (have been subjected to good methods of error correction - by your own standards) and so for that reason are worth investing in.

That's not my understanding of how investment works. I think it is taken for granted ideas founders have will often change fundamentally. Building a business is not mindless execution based on ideas on has on day 1.

The concept of "belief" howsoever used (for the supernatural, Plato's "JTB" misconception, etc) is a mistake. So if you don't want the focus on ideas, but personalities - very well. But it's still not belief. It's *knowing* some business person is a good business person.

Wait, what's the definitional distinction, here? "Knowing with some degree of uncertainty" does not seem to me fundamentally distinct from how most people interpret "believe."