On examining philosophical origins for entrepreneurship

In my post today, I’m going to examine and speculate upon a few questions:

• What if Derrida was actually quite right about the nature of language?
• If we can bring back philosophers of times past, who would we ask to sit for our panel?
• Are all online social participation and reviews worth the same? Do all opinions offer genuine value?
• What are the philosophies that drive these contemporary entrepreneurs to innovate?
• What does ‘Carpe Diem’ mean in our current times?

We’re all critics. The economy of trust, reviews, and likes harnesses the positive powers of our tendencies to critique. In a way, it is important, because it offers a voice to the consumer. These are also explicit product signals that a consumer engagement with a product has occurred.

Perhaps it is almost too obvious to state: the consumer is an individual at the end of the day. How can we make sure that reviews are of significance and offer genuine value? Are these people who do the critiquing qualified enough to provide value? On yet another level, individuals are different and have unique preferences — they enjoy and like different things. Over or under-rated anything generally depends on who does the rating. While the relevance of these reviews and ratings are a crapshoot at best, they reveal and encourage the reader of the review or the future consumer to ask the right questions to discover what is of most value to them. Is this product offering genuine, ideally quantifiable in financial terms, value that is sustainable? Or is it yet another bubble? Is it unanimously clear to all investors that a startup is a rocketship and not a merely profitable business?

The more relevant questions are: what are the founding values and philosophy that drives the entrepreneurial spirit in our contemporary times? What drives this generation towards the necessity to innovate? Could it be the awareness of corruption that is an inherent and unavoidable flaw of the existing systems we’ve built (in the name of corporations)?

To examine the origins of our (conditioned) thinking, we look toward philosophy. We can agree that our thinking is a result of various types of conditioning. We can conclude that our values and principles, the inner guiding motivating force, to be a product of our contemporary culture. Contemporary phenomena include physical riots (they’re apparently still a thing despite our best efforts in the advancements of virtual and augmented reality technologies), mental illnesses and non-neurotypical behavioral disorders (instead of seeing these to be mere, evolutionary adaptations), and consumer data privacy.

If we can bring back philosophers of times past, who would we ask to sit for our panel? For starters, Camus and Derrida would be on my list. Derrida infamously used his extremely convoluted writings to convey the point that the nature of language contains multitudes of interpretations because meaning is a collective social construct and is deferred infinitely. If you’d like to see an example of this, read up on academic research where academics will argue any misappropriation or misinterpretation of concepts and arguments with one another. Another more common phenomena is the differing association of meaning of the same word from the vantage of different users: the lawyer and the computer scientists. The most practical and direct effect (use case) of such “postmodernism” language would be legal and contractual languages. Whoever writes the legal language is getting the benefits, and who is being exploited? What does it mean to be a cosmopolitan? (Was it Flaubert who first coined the term cosmopolitan a century and half ago?) It would appear that the term is much more relevant because we’re in an increasingly globally connected world.

The danger of complying with appearances only.

Complying with appearances masks the lack of true understanding of complex issues that need resolutions and sustainable solutions. These issues are generally complex enough that a tagline of your product value proposition wouldn’t be able to elaborate on the genuine value that your disruption would bring.

Customer Data Privacy. Do consumers understand the consumer privacy terms in legalese they’re agreeing to and their implications? It is reasonable to have a basic understanding of what marketing consent means, what you’re agreeing to when handing over your data to corporations. It is reasonable to expect patient data to remain private. The concept of security means that you can reasonably expect that your data is not being exploited (or passed on) by 3rd parties, in plural, and certainly not the government. It is an immensely interesting concept to invest in. In contrast to the entrepreneur or investor vision of foreseeing the best case scenario, the exercise here is to foresee and speculate the worst case scenario, and then design a solution that solves for these inherent flaws.

The focus, really, shouldn’t be on the infinitely deferrable nature of meaning or the preconditions of meaning that make understanding necessarily biased, inaccurate or incomplete. The historical narratives are inherently biased, and therefore, our perceptions are also necessarily biased. It would probably take forever for various stakeholders to come together, and then, argue forever the most appropriate objective meaning (if it can even be determined) that should arbitrarily take precedence. For the individual’s interests to take priority, disruption of existing systems sounds only logical and necessary. Prior to that, aligning on a desiderata amongst various stakeholders with likely competing interests sounds better.

To Camus, life is inherently meaningless and absurd. Life is rendered meaningless because humans get born to die, in a nutshell. He would most likely find our contemporary efforts to chase future visions enabled by technologies to be the newest variation of indulgence in living, to be quite curious, and would caution that, with low probabilities of success, we might just as well enjoy the struggle. Or, opt for ice cream instead, and leave all that hard work to Elon Musk.

I’ve always wondered what musicians who play in the orchestra would think of Camus’ absurdist philosophy. Whether or not these musicians view life to be inherently absurd and yet still make a conscious decision to pursue their craft is a testament to their passion in their work. From the perspective of the benefiting party, their passion and their expression of life through music is definitely worth the work they’ve put in. The very best of these pianists could very well claim that music begins in the mind. They could very well hear the music in the mind, recreate it back in paper form and then perform it to realize their inner vision of the nuance of notes and melodies.

Having Clarity of Future Vision

The ability to envision, visualize within their mind, the future accurately and attach positive emotional value to it is crucial to generating self-motivation and determination to reach long term goals. Progress and short term feedback rewards are also quite necessary to generate the momentum required to reach these goals. Willpower, self-discipline, and ability to associate positive emotions to the future outcome, are purported inner forces of the self that are essential ingredients to the recipe of success far into the future — for the entrepreneur, or the musician practicing to perform a score.

Serendipitous Distractions.

Carpe diem was an expression of the ideology for living and enjoying the moment. Not affected by distraction or future worries. Is it because long term goals are too uncertain, and certainly not a guarantee to bring the desired result? Perhaps the most perplexing thing is its English translation of “Seize the day”. If the moment you’re living in is indeed a living thing, then the mere aggressive action of seizing, as the verb implies, would most likely result in killing it. There is another interpretation to the expression: letting it be, letting the day exist, simply, instead of imposing undue force onto it. While this could just be an example where certain cultural expressions in language cannot be entirely and accurately transalable in another language because of the limitation of cultural collective construct in meaning (Derrida’s point), it is perhaps a good opportunity to reflect on these evolving language and cultural constructs and their longer term implications in regards to the conditioning of the mind.

Technology has, in many ways, enabled us to plan accurately for the future. Perhaps the slogan for enjoying the moment was designed in a time where tragedy is common: war, droughts, famines, sicknesses without affordable cure, etcetera, and thus, people could not plan or live for years into the future because there were simply way too many uncertain variables. We’re in the midst of a technology revolution, much like the industrial revolution. Times are uncertain because change brings uncertainty. Yet, the difference in our current times is that we can envision what the tech-enabled future could look like — and then make it happen. Living in the moment, in contemporary times, could mean, making time for serendipitous moments to occur and find new inspiration. Having the ability to accurately see those future visions in the form of products and cultural implications really does take inspiration and deliberate thought.

If you’d like to hear more about my ideas on how to help you on your challenges in venture capital or in your entrepreneurial endeavour, please reach out at Jacqueline [dot] gotomarket [at] gmail [dot] com