An Open Letter from an Investor to Aspiring Data-Scientists and Entrepreneurs

What is it to venture, to accomplish?

A venture is, to actualize the impossible, and convert it into a business.

Even if folks say something can’t be done or that it’s just a pipe dream you take on the challenge and make it happen. That’s what a venture is.

And when the inconceivable finally happens, that’s when people are shocked, and jump all over it.

Products will sell explosively. Enormous profit will be made, and your business will be a huge success. If you’re the kind who decides something is impossible and gives up before taking the challenge, you are unqualified to start a venture.

You can forget about your idea.
The most important thing in business..
..is to take action!

Many data-scientists only read articles, ponder and sit still in their university, research laboratories or workspaces.

They have good ideas, but they never seek financing. Rarely take any action, virtually never enough. Because they don’t want to ‘bow’ to investors, and because they are afraid of rejection. Sometimes it has to do with ego, sometimes with habits. Why would a 40+ year old data-scientist with a dr. degree/ PhD listen to this 27-year-old that did not even go to university for a minute?

There is a a lot of noise about start-ups and ventures, but they are more often than not of the same ilk.

They all come to consult with me with their cherished ideas. They roll out their pitch decks and tell me tales of opportunity. How good their idea is! After they are done talking, I respond with one line.

That takes all the wind out of their sails. They sit around thinking they are still unprepared and so on.

How many have actually started their business after that?

What they don’t know is - I check up on them. One, six, twelve months later.

You would think 1 out of 10 would go for it right? It’s not even 1 in a 1000. Sure, 2-3 out of 100 make a bad webpage or do ‘something’ for a week, but that’s it.

If you don’t take action, you can’t know what it takes.

Success is an extremely easy thing.

All you have to do is go for it. Take responsibility for (everything in) your life.

So what happens to the 1 in 1000?

I offer them investment alongside a seemingly strange task.

Something as easy as cleaning a data-sheet that can't be finished in a day. The idea is that they get their friends in to help or at least clean as much as possible. Sounds a bit random and harsh, but when you are about to receive a million in investment this could be considered a minuscule task.

Virtually every-time the response would be "I need more time", "this can't be done in a day", "it will need at least 3 days of full-time work sir" and so on and so forth. They don't even take action for an hour and ask "is it allowed to ask for help?" They just quit straight away. A great filter.

Especially when one was raised in a fine home, is a graduate of a fine school or in other words what society would consider an ‘elite’.

Upstanding elites tend to do only what is proper, and all alone.

They try to do proper things in a proper way, all by themselves. They reason things out logically, and find the most efficient way. Even when they approach me with their supposedly 'team' it's mostly just them and a few friends or co-students with mediocre passion and no drive for the project. They are in for the ride, but they won't steer the wheel. These 'teams' have the same appearance as a single person.

Nothing interesting ever comes out of doing something alone. Because people aren’t motivated only by reasoning.

Interesting results are not made out of reason. They are made out of feelings. You could call it inspiration.

If you want to rock the world with a venture you have to share your enthusiasm with colleagues and it has to be mutual.

Some things can’t be done all alone. We need help from all kinds of people. Mentors and colleagues alike.

We endeavor together with them but we must endeavor doubly more at first.

A financier instead of a laborer

or i.e. an investor. What kind of capital does a young individual have? One could call it a commodity. What does a young person possess that they can invest for the sake of society?

It’s time.

When you are only fourteen-twenty-thirty something. The only useful think a young person has for society is time, and that’s all. You sell your time and earn wages as compensation.

And that’s what you call labor.

To get employed is not about starting a job at a company; it’s about signing a labor contract. Laborers offer their time. Meanwhile, financial managers who possess all kinds of capital will promise to pay them with funds; that is how the capitalist setup works.

What is ‘time’ anyway?

Time, which one possesses, is a commodity. Time is life.


A laborer is a person who sells his or her own life, so that he or she can make a living.


That might sound kind of insulting and disrespectful towards people who work by the sweat of their brow. But this is merely stating an objective fact.


You have to set aside personal emotions for a discussion like this.

It may sound cold to say it, but a laborer is just a rat in a rat race. Spinning in a cage in the same spot his entire life, trying to reach the hanging bait.

He goes after the financial bait provided by the financier, and cannot escape the wheel.

Time will begin to run out, until finally his entire life will finish inside the cage.

But labor isn’t just selling time in exchange for money. There are other unseen values, such as the work being worth it, or the satisfaction that comes from accomplishing goal.

People work for psychological satisfaction. They work to the best of their ability in order to find their true authentic worth.

HYPNOSIS

People have been deceived by seemingly reasonable values that keep laborers working, as established by financiers. If you buy into such values as real, if you work your fingers to the bone seeking realization of dreams and growth in work, you’ll remain right where the financiers want you.

What sounds like some nefarious ploy is the reason I became a financier, an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist and beyond. To grow businesses huge, succeed as business manager on a global scale and as a way to plant the seeds for my legacy.

People think that once a person begins work at a company, they can stay there for the rest of their lives until they retire; but that’s a complete lie - especially in India and Japan.

Statistically, there aren’t many people who have worked till retirement at the same company. That’s because theres only one employee who will get promoted out of all the others who started work at the same time.

Those who lose the battle of promotions will quit of their own accord, or start working at a related company or even get moved to another division. This principle holds true around the world.

It’s difficult to just keep on working in one place.

When viewed this way, being a salaryman, data-scientist (ad infinitum) is a high-risk proposition. It’s like walking the narrow edge of a cliff one step at a time to avoid falling.

India has entered a state low growth, Japan is on the decline. Even major corporations will lose stability. Many mountains of companies will come crashing down, taking their employees with them!

When a huge corporation falls, the consequences will be unfathomable and its employees will be devastated.

If you don’t have the guts to start your own business venture? Do you need to have some kind of concrete business plan? No. That is why it is best to be looking into it while working.

A meaningful internship is a great way to tackle that. Emphasize on meaningful. I observe thousands of low-paid jobs, courses and alike disguised as internships. Vice versa there are many opportunities untapped because people prioritize certificates and big names on their profiles. They think they can network and learn from the best, boost their brand and so forth. In reality they get short term contracts and work they can't grow from, don't build any relationships and then upload their certificate to create 0 noise.

To become an entrepreneur and financier it’s important to understand the workings of society and business.

To clear one potential misunderstanding up. A data-scientist is nothing short of an entrepreneur. You solve problems with whatever tools you have at your disposal. How many more times will I see someone/a team lose focus, build some contact form/webpage from scratch and waste all their time and energy to build something we already have, not even improving it by a bit. Google, Microsoft, Youtube, Facebook... those are gigantic corporations. Google-sheets, Youtube tutorials and Excel are multi-billion dollar products. When you want to prepare a meal in 2019, do you head off into the wild to hunt?

To understand the workings in society, it’s most advantageous to work in the close vicinity of business managers already taking risks and actualizing the right mindset.

One of the reasons I am working for those for free - a habit I started long before I had enough money to sustain my lifestyle. I would work in the night, learn during the day. I never had any interest in certificates and pity praise. Only skills.

You could rob me off of all my things, drop me off with nothing but a set of clothes somewhere in a random country where I don't even speak the language and while it might take a while, I would still come out of top. Because you can't take my skills away from me.

Side-note: Don't confuse my confidence with arrogance, that would be a spineless thing to do.

There are not many chances to learn directly from the creator of growing business.

It’s fine to go the ordinary route and work for a major corporation, there is nothing wrong with that.

But I refuse to indefinitely sell my time. And you may want to consider that - maybe later in your life - for yourself as well.

To salvage all the skills I loaned, refine and cultivate them while adding my  own style and yield a huge return. That's my self-made-millionaire formular. And it will be my multi-billion formular as well.

2019 July, 28th

About the author: Joey Bertschler balances multiple high-level roles across the Security Token Alliance, bitgrit and Cosmology.

Joey Bertschler is the Vice President of the Security Token Alliance, the world’s largest think tank for the Security Token industry with over 80 partners, Advisor to the World Data Science Forum, and Brand Manager at bitgrit and Cosmology Inc. He has reached audiences of over 1 million on social media channels and is involved in a plethora of marketing campaigns in APAC and CE.