What are stories worth?

Whenever possible, I try to look for the big picture. So when a few weeks ago a founder was venting to me about the frustrations of pitching and fundraising, it made me wonder—has the process of seeking investment always been this way?

What I found was shocking. We all understand that equity investing, and its closely related cousin, debt, is a fundamentally optimistic act. It requires the belief that tomorrow will be better and more lucrative than today. It requires a belief in stories.

That’s not the shocking part. What surprised me is how recent this phenomenon is. For millennia, no one really thought there was much left to discover. The world was the way it was, and religion was there to handle any nagging uncertainties. No one invested in R&D. This stasis was so powerful that a military general could have fallen asleep in 3000 BC and awoken 3,500 years later to find warfare and military technology essentially unchanged. For the 1,000 years after that, gunpowder was the only seismic battlefield innovation.

It is a very recent phenomenon that everything has a shelf life so short that obsolescence hovers over new product introductions like the Grim Reaper at a maternity ward. I remember when the compact disk was invented. No one said, oh, just wait till this is replaced with streaming—we said hey, this is great, now we have CDs. These days you buy the latest phone fully cognizant that the technology which will make it obsolete is already in advanced testing.

Centuries ago the pace of change was so slow that no one really thought about it at all. Inertia reigned. Pitching was pointless.

Things started to change around the time a young explorer named Christopher Columbus became obsessed with the idea that there was an ocean route to Asia that could disrupt the spice trade. It took him seven years to convince King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to give him a seed round investment of 3 small ships and a few men.

His experience still resonates with any founder pitching Sand Hill Road VCs today, but it was a radical break from what came earlier. In fact, his success was one of the key early proofs that there was undiscovered territory (in his case, literally) that would bring outsized benefits.

So when you’re frustrated about fundraising, remember that the story you’re telling of a better, richer future is your uniquely valuable contribution to the optimism which has enabled virtually all progress in recent centuries.

Just how valuable?

Today’s global debt markets are valued at over $300T. The global stock market adds another $100T or so. All in the belief that tomorrow will be more prosperous.

Here’s another visualization of how our belief in discovery and growth has enriched us:

The biggest engine of progress has been scientific invention, much of which happens at universities. One of the great ironies in my line of work is that university researchers power our future but often can’t describe it. The scientific method, which reveres the dispassionate discussion of evidence, creates value that its adherents struggle to articulate.

Whether you’re a university-based founder or not—the next time you’re mired in a painful fundraising cycle, comfort yourself that you are engaging in the most value-creating activity mankind has ever invented. Columbus had to convince his investors that a better future was possible; for all of us in the present day, we just have to convince them that our vision of the future is the right one.