The End of Vulture Capital

The world is full of people, projects, and businesses with something substantive to offer that can impact the collective good. In fact, there appears to be more such people than there are available, receptive investors who are willing to fund them.

Traditional Venture Capitalists, (TVC’s) are often unconcerned about impacting the collective good or about the people whose offerings will benefit it. They do not feel that they are integral to the delivery of ROI (Return On Investment). It is a well understood paradigm that Venture Capitalists believe that those entrepreneurs need them. And entrepreneurs, in their commitment and calling to fulfill their vision or mission, have bought into this formidable myth and have internalized it as a fact that they must accept and operate from.

Venture Capital is Vulture Capital

The traditional venture capital model taught in business schools and used by venture capitalists and traditional investors defines the criteria by which valuation, selection, and risk level are assessed. This model is often riddled with inequitable assumptions, structures, and exchanges. Traditional methods and structures for evaluating viability, credibility, and potential for success are grossly one-sided. They are unfit for modern day leaders, pioneers, entrepreneurs, artists, and scientists, and they need to go in the worst way.

The traditional funding paradigm is deeply flawed. It overlooks a vast spectrum of knowledge, understanding, and consideration related to energy systems, physics, and intelligence. This flawed paradigm stands in the way of a critical mass of opportunities from being born and taking root in the world. It is costing humanity trillions of dollars in lost employment, health, happiness, and potential. The cost to our children comes in the loss of new and empowering investments that need to be made not only if they are needed in the future but if they are on time. If we want to make the world a better place for more people, we need a new investment model and new tools for discerning what needs investment that will make life better for not just thousands but millions and billions of people around the world.

The Impact of Investor Reluctance

Many venture capital investors are capable of funding worthy undertakings and the founders who are capable of delivering them. However, it is often difficult for those investors to find their way to creators/founders – and when they finally do, they often lack critical path understanding about endeavors that are meant to serve the collective good. They are another animal altogether and require different kinds of attention, understanding and capitalization. Such endeavors are not meant to look or feel like the status quo or fit into the paradigm of pure return on investment. They emerge from an entirely different consciousness, intelligence, and sense of purpose that may be hard for traditional investors to recognize or understand. Their founders may speak a different language and in fact may be bringing new knowledge or a new paradigm to an entire industry.

Seed funding is integral to opening the floodgates of opportunity around the world. Yet, seed funding is often the last place traditional investors or their advisers dare to tread. This reluctance to venture into new territory keeps them from crossing the threshold into a new funding and investment paradigm that is needed at a worldwide level. This is the realm of exploration, adventure, and discovery.

The primary underpinning of an investment is to exploit opportunities to make profit while lowering the level of risk involved and often involves only moving into only that which is known and provable. This mindset obstructs the delivery of millions of projects, creative works, more efficient technologies, and products that could improve the well being of people around the world and create an unfathomable number of new jobs and opportunities. As a result, our world’s leaders pioneers, scientists, artists, writers, creative people, poets, storytellers, filmmakers, and other change agents are continually starved off.

This has created an integral conflict between creators and funding sources. The fact of the matter is that without creators, the growth of our world is stunted, stifled, and obstructed. Funding sources worldwide need new information outside the traditional investment paradigm, but they often lack the essential receptivity and humility to learn. If they had these components they would find a new oasis of opportunity that is ready for them.

The fact is that the traditional funding protocol for acquiring funding is part of the very problem that is in the way to invoke the funding. In a global environment where anybody is a potential competitor or customer, we need new and evolved protocols for presenting, producing, communicating, funding, and delivering new ventures.

Organizations Are Living Things

All projects and organizations are living organisms with their own life force. This life force is present before the project or business is funded.  All businesses have consciousness. Business is animate. A business is not inert. It could be said that most of the business world does not operate business as if it has consciousness.

Traditional business advisers are unaware of this fact. They are likewise unaware of the realm of physics, chaos, energy systems, and how energy moves into the world of form and matter. Investors and creators speak different languages, live in different worlds, and are motivated by different things. As such, they experience different kinds of risk.

The Meaning of Risk

When we speak of risk, we mean real life risk-taking: the potential loss of one’s family, mate, friends, community, job, credibility, creditworthiness, home, transportation, and the ability to secure future employment. We mean the potential loss of the many years a creator’s life that has been poured into singular focus, attention, concentration, leadership, accountability, commitment, and dedication, which transcends money and the world of material things.

Risk means walking into the wilderness where few dare to tread. It means getting up everyday with nothing certain about one’s existence. It means accepting that someone promised to do something, knowing that they will, and trusting that they are ready to deliver – because it’s what they came here for. Risk is the realm of explorers, pioneers, leaders, change agents, scientists, visionaries, and entrepreneurs.

No amount of financial risk can compare to this level of real-life risk-taking, because no amount of money can buy back or replace the loss of a life’s work that means everything to its creator. Money simply doesn’t hold a candle to the risk that creators courageously accept for the sake of us all. But under the traditional funding paradigm, such risk-taking is written off as “sweat equity” – a trivializing metaphor for risking one’s life, family, home, credit, friends, transportation, and everything else that comes with a drive to create.

“Sweat Equity” is a Toxic Seed in the old misguided paradigm of venture funding. It’s arrogant and highly misinformed roots need to be pulled out of anything connected to business.

It’s time for this inexcusable disregard for leadership, creativity and vision to come to an end. The Rainmaking Company is committed to introducing the means to unleash a critical mass of jobs, opportunities, and businesses that will serve the greater good for generations to come.