Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

Some of my favorite businesses, as long-term channel viewers are aware, are fake technology companies.

These are startups usually out of California, but in recent years they've sprouted

all over the world, where a charismatic founder takes a humdrum business, lairs on a veneer

of technology, and pitches it to investors at an astronomical price, claiming that it will

change the world. Now, when I say that these are my favourite businesses,

I don't mean favourites to invest in our own. You'd never want to do that. But they are my favourites

to read about. And without these businesses, financial news would be really boring, and I read

financial news all day long and I don't want to be bored. To maximise the

entertainment value of a fake tech firm, the core business needs to be as dull as possible. Something

like a window cleaning business, a sawmill or a well. A well would make a great fake tech business.

The water drawn from it could be possibly

recorded on the blockchain. There could be some sort of social angle to it. Not actually social.

We don't need people actually meeting at a well. That's out of date. It needs to be the kind of social

where people only interact using their phones or with some

sort of a headset, and they should only discuss how wealthy the well will eventually make them

on the app.

It's 2024 and that's what people want.

Now key to a fake tech business is a shameless and charismatic CEO who knows how to pump the stock price up

when raising rounds of capital from VCs. The CEO needs to be irreverent, possibly have a distinctive

hairstyle, and most importantly, a modern-day hippie-druggy vibe. VCs require that these CEOs at least appear to believe

their own pitch when they're claiming that the new product has an infinite total addressable market

...