Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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."

Yes. That's the common understanding (I'd say misconception). But *knowledge* has a physical substrate. It has uncertainty and can be false - indeed we should expect it to be so. But belief? There's no such way to physically instantiate it apart from knowledge.

So, following Popper's logic - all we have is knowledge or its absence. There's no place for belief. Given all knowledge is uncertain - whatever one calls belief is either actual knowledge or (in religious senses) something like "hope" and in other cases merely "wild guessing".