Silicon Valley’s Arrogance: WeLove it. On Adam Neumann’s latest round of funding.

Where do I begin?

The message this sends to a lot of founders across the globe — especially ones that look up to the “Silicon Valley” model as being ideal — is different.

Lets set a few things straight, Adam is clearly skilled at getting investment from top-tier investors, because he’s skilled at telling them what they want to hear. If you’re focus — day in, day out — is to get good at telling investors what they want to hear, then thats what you will be good at. It’s a skill that cannot be transfferred to building and creating revolutionary products. So don’t compare yourself to what you see in headlines, a lot of the time thats the 15 minutes of fame most people will get in their lifetimes. Investors are incredibly easy to fool.

The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors. If you’re super good at sounding like you know what you’re talking about, you can fool investors for at least one and perhaps even two rounds of funding. But it’s not in your interest to. The company is ultimately doomed. All you’re doing is wasting your own time riding it down. — Paul Graham

We assume investors are picking out the humblest founders who have truly built valuable products, who have strived, and learned where the next wave of value is coming from. But they aren’t.

This kind of news is so painful to entrepreneurs who strive to do their best everyday. Who do things from passion and love.

A founders focus is to build something valuable. Real value is often counterintuitive, and sometimes isn’t popular in the mainstream. It’s not until it booms that people pay attention to it.

The best modern example is TikTok. Vine existed for a while, but no founder decided to take that idea and move it to the next level. Because it’s counterintuitive. This leads investors to believe that anything out of the ordinary is worth funding — at the expense of the ordinary. A vine alternative wasnt funded because it felt too ordinary in the eyes of investors.

After a few visits to Silicon Valley it immediately became apparent to me where the confusion lies. Because counter-intuitive ideas are the ones that take off, investors often take this to an extreme. They reach a point of delusion thats so far away from the normal, that it breaches the territory of their ego.

Charisma and delusional thinking wins. The most successful founders over the last 6 years or so couldnt compare to those that came 6 years prior, when apps like Instagram and Snapchat took off. To compare them to this, is almost laughable. The old ways of investing in true innovation is gone, and the habits of investors over the last 7 years has favored flashy, arrogant, founders rather than the original ‘humble dropout’.

Often when investors put a lot of money into an idea it’s driven by some core belief in doing something in that space. We saw this with Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes didnt need a product, because investors wanted a brand new solution in healthcare/biotech.

Adam is brilliant at pitching his ideas, anyone that can make investors believe that they are the sole solution that they have always been looking for, will definitely raise a good round. After all, he’s all they’ve been looking for after all.

When delusion and charisma become the qualities that attract investment, true innovation is lost. Contrary to Silicon Valley’s view, it’s often fairly simple ideas — that are also counterintuitive — that take off. WeWork was a real estate company disguised as a tech company. Ideas that start out as a lie, never grow, because they are not what they say they are. They are lies — it’s that simple.

Innovation demands an incredible amount of humility. It is born of curiosity, excitement and interest — genuine things, that are suffocated in the face of lies. Snapchat and Facebook taking off among university students is the best example. There was no arrogance, it was humility. Th original driver of innovation.

To founders who are reading this, it’s simple: Silicon Valley’s arrogance is not anything to look up to or consider. Keep building, and when you build real value. Value thats worthy of massive returns and hype, most investors will come knocking.

That value is born out of humility. It is almost a labor of love. Look at the world around you, pay attention to what you are interested in, and go build something exciting. This advice doesnt guarantee success 100% of the time, but it 100% guarantees that you are not fooled by mainstream antics, and that you do not chase people who do not value your ambition and drive.

So there it is. You do not need a large Silicon Valley investor in your cap table. You do not need the validation of big players to be successful. And you do not need $350 million to boost your startup. The only thing you need is yourself.

So build what you love. Put it out there. Learn new things everyday, and dont compare yourself to people who chase the arrogance of being recognized for who they are vs what they built.