I had lunch with Milton Pappas yesterday. Milton and his partners at Euclid Partners taught me the venture capital business in the mid/late 80s. We got to talking about mentors and I asked him who taught him the venture capital business. He told me General Georges Doriot of American Research and Development taught him a lot in the late 60s and early 70s. Milton and his partner Bliss McCrum started Euclid in 1971.
As we were talking about biotech, an area Milton loves and invested heavily in, he told me that he ran into so many people in that sector who were brilliant but could not communicate what they were working on simply and crisply. He returned to Doriot and told me that the General had advised him that “I don’t care how brilliant an entrepreneur is, I won’t back them if they can’t explain themselves simply and in a manner everyone can understand.”
That rings true to me. It is not enough to understand something that others don’t understand. At some point you have to convince people that what you are doing is important and they should join your company, buy from your company, invest in your company, and write about your company. I like to call this “dumbing things down” but it doesn’t have to involve simplification (although that is one way to do it). It could also involve creating effective analogies, describing a future state where the technology is in mass use, or some other technique that makes something complex easy to understand.
One of the essential techniques in bringing technology to market is simplification. Dumb things down. It’s super important.
