The Beautiful, Untrue Things Entrepreneurs Believe
Last week I attended a business plan contest. In being overly optimistic and full of earnestly believed assumptions — most of which will ultimately prove false — business plans, as Alain de Botton says, constitute a peculiar subgenre of contemporary fiction.
The scene was the Bend Venture Conference and the focus was verbal pitches (written business plans had already been vetted by the conference organizers). Representatives from a dozen companies mounted the stage in turn to deliver short overviews of their ventures. Eight were in a “Wild Card” competition wherein speakers delivered their pitches within a strictly-enforced two-minute time frame.
Audience members voted to select the Wild Card a winner, so personality, delivery, and presentation order weighed as heavily as venture feasibility and the entrepreneur’s track record. This year’s Wild Card winner was ADASA, a maker of specialized RFID tag encoders for a technology category that has been poised to become the Next Big Thing for ten years running.
Competing for the grand prize of a $120,000 equity investment were four other companies previously reviewed by the conference organizers and selected as outstanding potential vehicle for investment. Each was grilled post-pitch by a panel of five venture capitalists (VCs), who, along with the conference organizers, voted to determine the winner.
Contestants included Moonshadow Mobile (whose founder assured me the previous evening that I had missed the third great technology revolution), Precision Plant Systems, which offers technology tools for crop management, Second Porch, which enables users to rent, trade, or share their second homes, and Site 9, a hosted collaboration tool provider now generating $40,000 in monthly revenue (and which hardly seemed to need funding).
The presentations and feedback sessions were entertaining, especially the good-natured pushback up by the VC judges concerning 
founder assertions. The scene recalled Oscar Wilde’s characterization of lying as “the telling of beautiful untrue things,” for each entrepreneur’s assumption could only be proven true or false in practice. Therefore contestants could only believe in and vigorously assert their beautiful visions, while the VCs could only assess stated assumptions in light of hard, previous experience with similar ventures. It was disheartening to recognize, for example, that Precision Plant Systems — whose crop management solutions are so economically elegant and socially powerful — faces a stupendously difficult, expensive, manpower-intensive task in selling to cost-sensitive small-scale farmers, who can take years to evaluate purchases affecting their land.
But in the end, Precision Plant Systems took first prize, and that somehow seemed fitting. Returning home, we all felt like winners, hopeful that Precision Plant Systems and its CropIQ system will, indeed, evolve into a beautiful truth.
You may also enjoy:
“The Surprising Truth About Why People Become Entrepreneurs”
“How to Go Solo Without a ‘Big Idea’”
“Four Ways to Unleash New Ideas“
“Making Money: The Right and Wrong Questions to Ask”
“How to Create Wealth, How to Keep Wealth”
“ Steve Martin Tells the Story Before the Glory“
“For Entrepreneurs Starting with Nothing, Here’s the Ultimate Strategy”
