Let’s get something clear from the offset.

Investors only care about money.

This may seem very obvious to you unless you are one or all of these things:

Honest. Optimistic. Innocent. Idealistic. Authentic. Genuine.

If you have these virtues, congratulations. These are wonderful things. Hold on to them at all costs and do not hide them, but do not expect to be successful in the current capitalist manifestation.

Let me write it again. There is only one thing investors care about: MONEY.

They do not care about anything else. No matter what they tell you. No matter what they tell themselves, they only care about money. Money may represent things to them such as power, freedom, control and autonomy (which I don’t think is even true) but they want money.

Maybe this is no surprise to you but it surprised me.

I appreciate things of value. I can see value and I was trying to add value with my business. But the finance industry is nothing to do with adding value. It is only ever about money. If it is about value, it is only ever about extracting value and turning it into money.

How do you measure money?

Price. And price is not the same as value.

The reason I was surprised to learn that the finance industry and investors only care about money is very simple, I believed their marketing stories.

Investors and the financial industry rarely talk about money. Don’t believe me? Watch Bloomberg TV for a few hours and tell me how many times the word money is mentioned. They will talk all day long about everything except money.

They will talk about interest rates, trade, supply chains, risk, rates, returns, jobs, the treasury, the fed, the environment, social benefits, growth, governance, compliance, hawks, bulls, bears, doves, war. You name it but they do not talk about money.

Financiers form make believe stories. In the industry they call them narratives. Then they push those stories down your throat until you are forced to swallow and they will deny and reject everything that does not fit with their narrative.

This is because their “narrative”, their story, their lies is the very thing that they are selling.

Remember, they have huge marketing budgets and teams of brand managers to push these stories. There are thousands of entities with their competing narratives filling your screens, your news and social feeds to make you believe them. If you don’t believe them, it doesn’t matter, others will and enough of them will jump on the bandwagon until you feel like your getting left behind or you are forced to participate whether you want to or not. Take a look at CCTV camera, smartphones, cashless payments, internet cookies, advertisements where ever you look, 5G towers, oil. Now try saying you don’t want these things in your like anymore and see what happens. I can tell you. Nothing will happen. You are now forced to live with it, whether you like it or not.

The front-end, the GUI, is the caring social goodness that is there for our benefit, they profess. The back-end is the truth: It is all about money. Tell me about your UX (User Experience) of life, does it delight and inspire like they said they wanted it to?

No matter what they say, no matter what they show you, no matter what you read. Just think money. That is what it is about. Nothing else.

Why sell stories and lies instead of creating something of value? Crucially, because it is much easier to monetise a story of make-beleive than it is to monetise something of value.

Look at the AI boom, electric vehicles or cryptocurrencies as examples. They are stories that people believe in. Quantum computing appears to be the next looming hype cycle and perhaps space exploration as well (We have been through that one somewhat already but it will ramp up again when SpaceX is about to go public).

These things have happened and are happening. After every bubble bursts, the green shoots of actual progress do sometimes form. My question is this: How much have you personally benefitted from these technologies and how much has your life actually changed? The shifts are microscopic compared to the claims that are made, especially during funding rounds.

What do these businesses, these stories have in common?

There is no limit to them. There is no cap to where they can go, in theory. That means there is no limit to where the price can go. Limitless greed has something to latch on to temporarily. Of course these narratives can never fully deliver on their promises. That is why there is always the next big thing on the horizon.

Space travel, where does that end? The possibilities of intelligence and learning in the form of AI, is there a limit on that? Turning every object and service into a cryptographic token, is there a ceiling on that you can imagine? These are good narratives. There is a lot of room for participation in these stories which means they can jack up the price without having to actually produce anything.

Value on the other hand can be measured, it does have limits and it often takes time to produce or implement. It is not conducive to rapid and limitless money making, so things of value are neglected. Things of value are normally only appreciated when they are complete or close to completion.

Few people are interested in investing money in the process of creating something of value. They just want it when all the work is done so they can flip it. But for most people, without money, they cannot afford to create something of value because they need to survive in the meantime as well as meet all of the costs of development.

I am most people.

So, how could I get investment for my business so I could create something that adds real value for the benefit of many people when investors, loyal to their romanticised “eco-system”, are only interested in rapid price rises based on hyperbole and fiction?

I needed to create my own story of unlimited potential to get investors on board, my own narrative. How could I do that? By adding a “tech” element to the solution in the same fashion every company has added AI to their brand recently.

There is only one problem, which takes us full circle to why I am here writing this blog: I don’t know how to use a computer.