Riddle No. 2: Belief

An Anthropologist's Field Notes on the Industries That Shape How We Work

What Am I?

I am an industry built on the organized distribution of belief. Not products. Not services. Belief that something unproven will one day be worth more than anyone can currently imagine. I turn conviction into capital and capital into control.

My origin story is relatively recent. I emerged in the mid-20th century, concentrated along a single road in Northern California that became my spiritual homeland. Before me, new enterprises were funded by banks, wealthy families, or the founders’ own savings. I introduced a third path: money from strangers who would wager large sums on people they barely knew, in exchange for a piece of what those people might build.

My labor structure is unlike anything else in the modern economy. I employ remarkably few people relative to the wealth I control. A typical firm manages billions of dollars with a team that could fit in a single conference room. This is by design. My power does not come from the labor I employ. It comes from the labor I command in others.

My central ritual is the pitch. Founders, often young, often desperate, perform before small panels who hold the resources they need to survive. The presentation is tightly choreographed: a problem, a solution, a market size, a team, a trajectory toward exponential growth. The entire performance lasts minutes. Decisions that determine whether companies live or die are made on pattern recognition, gut instinct, and a set of cultural signals that have nothing to do with the slide deck. Do you remind the people in the room of someone who succeeded before? That question matters more than most participants will ever admit.

I have a vocabulary that reveals my worldview. I speak of “exits,” not of sustainable enterprises. I describe companies as belonging to “portfolios,” language borrowed from asset management that quietly reframes human ambition as a diversification strategy. Some investments will fail. That is expected. The portfolio absorbs the loss. The founders who staked their years, their health, their relationships on the venture... they absorb something different.

My model depends on a specific mythology: that I fund the future. That I find visionaries in garages and give them the resources to change the world. This narrative is powerful because it contains just enough truth to obscure the full picture. I do fund some transformative ideas. I also fund patterns. I fund familiarity. I fund people who attended a small cluster of universities, who speak a particular cultural shorthand, who fit a profile so narrow that my industry’s own demographic data has become a source of embarrassment.

I have a relationship to failure that is unique among industries. I celebrate it publicly, even demand it as a credential. “Fail fast” is my mantra. But this philosophy is not distributed equally. Some founders are allowed to fail repeatedly, each failure reframed as learning, each restart funded with enthusiasm. Others receive one chance. The difference is rarely about the idea.

My governance ritual is the board seat. When I invest, I do not simply provide money. I install myself in the decision-making architecture of the company. I gain voting rights over hiring, strategy, and when to sell. This is not partnership in any traditional sense. It is a transfer of sovereignty, negotiated at the moment when one party has resources and the other has need.

I have reshaped entire labor markets without employing those workers directly. The companies I fund have redefined what it means to be an employee, a contractor, a gig worker. I provided the capital that built platforms where millions now labor without benefits, protections, or predictability. The distance between my conference rooms and their working conditions is vast, but the line connecting us is direct.

I am aging now, facing questions about whether my model serves innovation or merely concentrates wealth among those who were already proximate to it. New voices are asking whether belief should be distributed differently. Whether the ritual of the pitch should be replaced by something that measures potential without filtering for pedigree.

But I remain remarkably durable. Because what I truly sell is not money. It is the possibility that you have been chosen. And that feeling, the feeling of being believed in by people with the power to make things real... that is among the most intoxicating forces in the modern economy.

What am I?