"Crazy new ideas"? A VC, Graham, is praising crazy new ideas?
After I sent some hundreds of emails to Silicon Valley, NY, and Boston venture capital firms with nearly no positive feedback and nearly no feedback at all, I concluded several points:
(1) VCs won't invest in, consider, look at, or pay attention to crazy new ideas. Might guess that one reason can be that when the ideas are deep technically the VCs don't have the expertise to evaluate them, but the VC rarely seek evaluations from technical experts either. Net, VCs don't want to invest in crazy new ideas and hardly value ideas at all.
(2) My best guess is that most of all VCs like to invest in traction already significant and growing rapidly. The traction most desired is after tax earnings, but also good enough can be pre-tax earnings, revenue, or just Web site traffic.
(3) VCs also like the traction to be in a big market.
(4) VCs also like a team of several founders: Maybe the VCs are afraid that a sole, solo founder would get into human relationship problems as their company grew, and the team of several founders helps alleviate that fear. Also with several founders, if the VCs don't like the CEO, then the VCs can fire the CEO and promote one of the other founders to CEO.
E.g., I have had at least two crazy new ideas for new businesses:
The first idea was new and much better than anything else for real-time monitoring of health and wellness of servers and networks. I had running code and some quite good results on a variety of real data. The idea would not have had the potential of building a company worth $10 billion but might have built one worth $500 million and, maybe, with more advanced versions of the product, continued to grow. I gave a talk at the main NASDAQ site in Trumbull, CT, but apparently no VC had any interest at all. So, I went ahead and published the work; so, at least it was good enough to pass peer review!
Second I have an idea, and 100,000 lines of .NET code apparently ready for at least initial production, for a huge market and that, if people like it at all, and there is various evidence they will, should be worth $10 billion, maybe 200 times that if I further develop the work and people around the world like it a lot, and there is some evidence they might.
The idea makes powerful uses of some poorly known and understood advanced pure math (maybe understood by fewer than 10 computer science professors in the whole world, and only a tiny fraction of pure math professors will look for or see the connection with computing or business) and some original applied math I derived likely beyond over 90% of computer scientists.
But apparently no VC in the country is interested at all. Same for YC, the NSF IIP, etc. But, and really I designed this project this way, I don't really need funding now and won't if the traction grows. I've had some delays from unpredictable outside interruptions but am about to return to the work.
I can believe: The $500 million is too small for VCs to care, and the 200 times $10 billion is too big for them to believe.