The Wannabes
Just because you badly want to be in an industry does not mean you can have something to offer to that industry. I mean, I would love to work in an F1 team. But could I? I’ve got nothing to offer to it, other than my appreciation for the heavily logoed gear, the fancy headsets, and the big watches everybody seems to be wearing.
Not everything I consider cool is worth having me in it. Learned this the hard way.
Said this before, but here we go again. Circa 2015, and my naive soul thought the Internet of Things was going to be great. So I launched a “company” (although it was never registered) to ride the IoT hype train. Intoxicated by overconfidence, I thought I could offer something to ‘the market’ and take a scoop of the huge money it was envisioned it would generate. My “product” was a rudimentary sensing device—read, a PCB board with WiFi—that accomplished very basic things such as reading temperature or humidity and sending it using HTTP requests, plus some expansion pins. Be sure, I marketed it with fanfare as the most groundbreaking piece of technology that had ever existed.
To launch my wannabe company, I contracted a website designer, I purchased flight tickets to pitch it somewhere far away, and I designed and produced a few PCBs in Asia. All in all, my wannabe company increased the global GDP an infinitesimal amount by giving work for a while to a few people. Now multiply wannabe experiments like mine by the millions of other wannabes trying to do something and there you go: a thriving aspirational, wannabe global economy based on nothing. Website designers do not really care if the company they’re designing a landing page for is real or not. A PCB manufacturer in Shenzhen does not give a damn if the board they’re producing and mounting is a good product or not. The airlines do not give a crap if the people they’re hauling are respected industrial moguls or con artists.
Capitalism without Capital is a book written by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, published in 2017. The book explains how the nature of capitalism has shifted from the production of physical goods to the production of intangible assets, such as ideas, software, research and development, and brand identity.
The authors argue that intangible assets are now the primary driver of economic growth and innovation, and that traditional measures of economic activity such as GDP fail to capture the full extent of this shift. They also suggest that intangible assets require different types of investment, management, and regulation than physical assets.
The book provides some evidence to support the authors' claims, drawing on examples from a range of industries including technology and creative industries. Overall, "Capitalism without Capital" provides an interesting analysis of how the nature of capitalism has evolved, and the challenges and opportunities that this presents for businesses and policymakers.
The book made me think about wannabes and intangibles. My wannabe experiment was not entirely intangible (I had to get the board manufactured). But there is purely immaterial wannabe stuff out there. But, it would be a far fetch to categorize wannabe facades as intangible “ideas”, following Haskel and Westlake’s book. An idea, in my dictionary, is about inventing something valuable that changes someone’s life. My thing was pure make-believe. Props. A mirage. Something trying to appear as legitimate but lacking any depth beyond the shallow surface. How many of these aspirational facades are around us, not creating any value by themselves but pushing the economy a bit by purchasing different kind of services needed in order to sell their vapor?
There seems to be an accelerating proliferation of people with naive dreams and with the urge of being in certain industries but lacking the most basic skills or competence to offer a real product.
Story time. An executive assistant that used to work in a company I worked for left and set up a ‘geospatial analysis company’ out of nowhere. Said wannabe adventure expectedly lacks the most basic substance to be seriously considered. Bodly, the website contains “testimonials”, which are blatantly made up.
In another company I worked for, a non-technical person who worked in sales for a while left and converted himself into a “speaker”, in the process launching a podcast where he talks about things such as “cybersecurity and cloud reliability”. Said podcast is a 40-minute sequence of nothingness, which I took the effort to listen to from beginning to end. Unexpectedly, nothing substantial about cybersecurity or cloud technology was discussed outside shallow remarks you could get from chatGPT. If anything, all this material is not a waste of time but research material to observe and learn how the wannabe ecosystem works.
Last anecdotal one: in a project with an institutional entity, the person acting as point of contact suddenly left and launched a 1-person “NewSpace” training company. The experience of this person in “NewSpace”? One year tops, if we count as “experience” being around a project while having zero technical responsibilities.
There is nothing inherently wrong in being aspirational. Nothing too wrong either in liking an industry and wanting to be part of it. We were all rookies at some point of our lives. Everybody’s gotta start somewhere. Maybe what is wrong is the shameless sugar coating. Having been a wannabe myself before has made me very skeptical when I am introduced to a new company. It takes one to know one.
Interesting dynamics takes place when two wannabes come together and try to sell each other their snake oil. If anything, the Spice Girls’ famous song from the 90s captures in the most concise manner possible the interaction:
Yeah, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want
So tell me what you want, what you really, really want
I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want
So tell me what you want, what you really, really want
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna
I really, really, really wanna zigazig ah
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna
I really, really, really wanna zigazig ah