The founding essay
Right too early.
Four times I saw years ahead what others went on to build. This essay is not the story of those times: it is the explanation of why Volcano is built never again to depend on convincing anyone.
4 min read
Francesco Esposito, founder of Volcano.
The phenomenon has a name.
Cassandra, daughter of the king of Troy, received from Apollo the gift of prophecy and, with it, the curse: she would always tell the truth and nobody would believe her. She announced the deception of the horse and the fall of the city; nobody listened. Hence the name of the phenomenon that risk management knows well: the well-founded warning that is systematically disbelieved, because whoever receives it pays the cost of accepting it today (money, time, revising their certainties) while the announced damage is future and uncertain. So the message is not refuted: the messenger is discredited. It happened to the engineers who advised against the Challenger launch and to the analysts who warned about subprime mortgages. And it happened to me, four times, with dates.
Four times.
In the early two thousands I proposed to investors that we build online maps. I convinced nobody. In February 2005 Google Maps arrived.
I proposed video calling software. I convinced nobody. In 2003 Skype arrived; eBay bought it two years later for 2.6 billion dollars, and Microsoft, in 2011, for 8.5.
I proposed the first estate agency built on satellite and spherical imagery. I convinced nobody. Today there is no property portal that does not use them.
I proposed an application for geolocating taxis. I convinced nobody. In 2010 Uber started operating.
One clarification, because this essay is not a claim: I am not asserting credit for what others built. Executing is the hard part, and they executed. What I am pointing at is something else, more uncomfortable: the ideas were on the table, years in advance, and the market that should have funded them said no.
The compliment that is not one.
The most instructive part came afterwards. The same people who said no remind me of it today, thinking they are paying me a compliment: you were right, you saw it before anyone. And I know something they do not: if tomorrow I took them a new project, they would say no again. Not out of malice, nor out of clumsiness: because the Cassandra effect is not a defect of people, it is the structure of the early market. Saying yes to an early-stage idea costs money today against a distant and uncertain benefit; saying no is free today, and the mistake only shows up ten years later, when nobody is keeping score any more. In the short term, no is always the rational answer. That is why whoever arrives early always loses the argument: they are not arguing with people, they are arguing with a structure.
Against a structure, another structure.
The Cassandra effect is the symptom; the cause is the lack of a system between knowledge, capital, industry and relationships: the full thesis lives in the extended theory of capital. Faced with that wall there are two possible reactions: improve the persuasion, or build the system that makes it unnecessary. Volcano is the second. That is why its funding does not depend on convincing an investment committee that the future will arrive: the public non-repayable grant and the tax investment of the Tax Lease fund exactly the F3–F7 window, the phase where persuasion fails structurally, because the tax investor's return is certain and does not depend on the project succeeding. And that is why the path begins with the capture of the problem: an early insight is collected when it appears, not when the market finally accepts it. Being right early, on its own, is of no use. Being right early inside a machine that validates, protects and funds is everything.
If you arrive early too.
This whole site is built for the Cassandras: for whoever has spent years seeing a problem nobody attacks, a technology nobody applies, an idea everybody postpones. We are not asking you to convince us: we are asking you to tell us, and the machine does the rest: analysis, validation, protection, capital.
References: the myth, in Greek tragedy (Aeschylus, Agamemnon); the phenomenon in organisations, in the Rogers Commission report on the Challenger (1986) and in the literature on the 2008 crisis; the launch dates cited are public (Google Maps 2005; Skype 2003, acquisitions 2005 and 2011; Uber 2010).
Next essay: The window of time →
John F. Kennedy, 1962