—“Very inspiring and encouraging for me, after reading how rarely angels and venture capitalists fund women founders. There’s hope for me, even if the suits are sexist! Fighting for social justice online: how can we use the Internet to make the world a better place? “— Charlotte A.
Statistics are Statistics. Data is Data. Fact is Fact.
Few women will pay the dear price in time, stress, health, family, friends, risk, and life demanded of high growth businesses. Few women endear the kind of loyalty required of risk taking-talent marginally superior enough to crate a marginally superior product or service. Few women choose to operate in markets that are competitive, technical, novel, with business models that are marginally different. Few women argue entirely empirically and entirely from incentives. Few women can make a man trust them with large amounts of money that he has been entrusted with by others. Women do, but few women do.
So, it is not a matter of justice but of empirical evidence. And arguing otherwise merely disqualifies you from receiving investment. People with money and responsibility that they have been entrusted with by others to make objective decisions cannot betray that trust by preferring to invest in your business idea versus the business idea of someone who does not make those same mistaken assertions.
And I say this only because whomever has given you an education has done you a tragic disservice. We do not invest in religious doctrine. Investment is a science of eliminating error, bias, wishful thinking, and deceit from business hypotheses, leaving only survivable business models as candidates. And betting upon people who demonstrate error, bias, wishful thinking, and deception (including self-deception), is unscientific.
Investors do not bet on any form of mysticism — including the myth of social justice. (A term which both Socrates and Hayek have demonstrated, does itself not survive critical and empirical analysis.) You should be angry at the people who lied to you. Not the people who will not perpetuate the lies that were told to you. In investments, everyone has one color, creed, and gender: money. And investment is more color, creed and gender blind than Lady Justice ever dreamed of being.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine