Having insight into insight

Have you ever noticed that entrepreneurs never put an “out of office message” on their email?

John Stokes said this to me while we were having lunch at the soon to be demolished Rosati Restaurant in Flinders Lane. John is a British entrepreneur and venture capitalist based in Montreal, Canada, where he runs a US$50 million fund called Real Ventures. He had spoken the night before at the Churchill Club on his thoughts on globally successful entrepreneurs, while on a tour of Australia sponsored by the Global Entrepreneurs Program.

John indicated during his speech that he felt that successful entrepreneurs tend to display four traits, a major one of which was insight. This was fascinating to me, as I had been thinking a lot about insight all week, as I had just seen the movie Moneyball. In it, Brad Pitt’s character has an insight that dramatically changed the way baseball operated. Apparently it is a true story.

For 70 years, baseball talent scouts had been recruiting players, based on their assessment of whether the person would be a future star. Brad Pitt’s character, who was forced to think differently because of a lack of money in the club, realised that perhaps they should be buying home runs, not future stars. The Oakland A’s then picked up a series of cheap but high scoring players that the scouts didn’t like, and won a record 20 games in a row.

But John’s key insight with his real venture fund was that any business worth investing in would have lots of suitors, therefore they needed to look very attractive to the right type of business. 

Which is why they came up with their slogan, “Investing from Idea to Exit”. This idea of attractive investees having multiple suitors was backed up for me by a recent conversation I had with two high net worth individuals – both agreed they had only ever made money from investments where they had to convince the investee that they should take the money. Sadly, every investment into businesses that chased them for money, eventually failed.

Insight in business has several meanings, including finding out pieces of information, seeing intuitively or discerning the true cause and effect in any given situation. Unfortunately in business there has been very little written on becoming better at developing insight. Most of the discussion is around customer insight – which normally means reducing market research costs by inferring more with the data collected.

I think getting insights into insight will be my almost tautological project over the Christmas break.

Oh, and the fact that entrepreneurs never put an “out of office message” on their email? On discussion we decided it wasn’t a particularly big insight. It just that entrepreneurs don’t ever consider themselves as unavailable or “off”.

Merry Christmas.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.