Emily Dickinson on Investing in DeepTech

This weekend, I will be transitioning to a new job, leaving Alice & Bob after a couple of years of supporting their scientific endeavors to the best of my abilities.

While my career in "tech" and my personal life (being married to a researcher) have always been alongside scientific research, this period is the closest I came to working on actual open-ended problems.

So for this episode of my series on Business and Poetry, I wanted to explore that theme. Alice & Bob is a VC-funded company aiming to build a quantum computer. To do so, it has to tackle open scientific problems. What can poets tell us about exploring uncharted scientific territories in a private business setting?

Obviously, that is way too trivial a question for poetry. But since those efforts are at the core of humanity struggle for improvement, there are poets that wrote tangentially to that question.

I wanted to get something by Dickinson for this, and here is the one I found (thank you Poetry Foundation).

“Faith” is a fine invention

By Emily Dickinson

“Faith” is a fine invention

For Gentlemen who see!

But Microscopes are prudent

In an Emergency!

I will not write a long analysis of a four-line gem. I will also skip the reflection on the historical dialog between faith and religion.

I will share one remark though. VCs, especially in the deep-tech fields, often use vocabulary such as "I believe in this", "I have faith in this founding team", "I share their vision". In that poem, this vocabulary belongs to the first two lines, the religious ones. The last two lines, the rational ones on prudence and crisis, are for executives

Thank God for religious-like irrationality then. Where would deep-tech investment be without you

#businessandpoetry