Posts

I’m publishing this post against my better judgement, and at the risk of starting a flamewar. However, I think it’s time for a reality check for those beating the drums of “diversity and inclusion”.

First of all, let me make it perfectly clear that I’m very much in favour of diversity and including everyone regardless of their physical attributes. And if you decide to judge me based on my skin tone or which chromosomes I was born with, that’s on you.

Dopamine is a chemical in our brains associated with good feels. Rather than explaining it myself, I’ll share a quote from the book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, (pp. 102-103):

All animal brains are designed to create flashes of pleasure when the animal does something important for its survival, and small pulses of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral striatum (and a few other places) are where these good feelings are manufactured. Heroin and cocaine are addictive because they artificially trigger this dopamine response. Rats who can press a button to deliver electrical stimulation to their reward centers will continue pressing until they collapse from starvation.

I don’t like making predictions, but one prediction I do have is that many future big companies will be what I call “skin in the game startups” (you heard it here first).

Having skin in the game simply refers to sharing risk and rewards with a counterparty. In startupland, angel investors have skin in the game: they give money to founders to help them start a business in exchange for equity with the hope that the business will become more valuable in the future. The investor is sharing the risk of the company (by outlaying their money), and if the company does well the investor will eventually reap grand returns.