225 - Raising During Elections
As someone recently pointed out, election years in the US are difficult to raise funds in, and the summer of such years is perhaps the worst time to do so, as “investors aren’t in the mood”, which as blatantly silly as an investor being “in the mood” sounds also appears to be true.
During that conversation with a member of our team, someone also pointed out that the severe anxiety that many investors are currently feeling would persist significantly longer if a particular person was elected. It has been noted that it would severely disrupt not just the status quo, but potentially dismantle entire government agencies and predictably create high and highly chaotic instability across the US and from there quickly ripple across the world.
I won’t make any statements of endorsement or condemnation to these points or to the parties in question, but rather point out the rational steps that should follow that assessment. If someone sees such a threat, and investors feel this anxiety over the outcome of the upcoming election, then regardless of which candidate is the source of that anxiety, the rational response is the same.
Both sides see risks and anticipate some kind of damage following the other being elected, and so both should rationally concern themselves in part with the recovery from that damage should it occur. This is simply a prudent step to take in risk management terms, as anyone with a gram of common sense should know that things won’t always go their way.
Anyone who truly believes that the other side will inflict some great harm if they win, and understands that they may indeed win, thus has a high vested interest in the means of recovering from that damage. As is frequently the case in business and medicine alike, prevention is far more effective and less costly than treatment, but even early treatment is still far more effective and less costly than late treatment.
It is now too late for true prevention, that ship has sailed and the coin is in the air, due to land however it lands. However, there is still an opportunity for early treatment. The means of delivering that early treatment requires funding the only technology demonstrated to date capable of human-like concept learning, understanding, reasoning, and alignment, which itself is scalable and thus fundamentally able to handle hypercomplexity in ways that humans and weak types of “AI” cannot.
Whatever the outcome of the upcoming election, this remains true, as it did in years past, and will continue to for years to come. The longer people wait to invest in said technology, the higher the damage and subsequent costs will predictably become, and because of that the people who stood by and did nothing may become accomplices to the very things that they now feel such anxiety over.
Will you put down the exploding phone or rock the "Van Gogh"?
