Dealing with Deep Technologists

So the first thing I learned was that deep technologist - even good friends - do NOT like to explain things. It is not some perverse sense of hiding the technology or anything - these guys just get nervous if they have to say too much. In my case that was disastrous.

My Deep Technologist (DT) and I worked on a comprehensive message to present to investors and those investors' sets of experts. Since my DT cannot explain things to me corrected half the time (and I have my own deep set of technical abilities), it was up to me to extract from Mr. DT the actual details at a low level and boil those up into business terms. Along those lines, we spent weeks pouring through all of the intricacies of the invention, how things would be obtained, stored, transported, etc... and all the while Mr. DT kept nodding his head saying "that sounds about right"

If your DT ever says "that sounds about right", hit him/her HARD - SEVERAL TIMES - trust me that will be much less painful in the end.

Instead, I took our agreed upon message to my investment group, all set to get my money are start building, and the experts trashed my invention. IMPOSSIBLE, STUPID, NAIVE (and those were the nice things). What the hell?!? Our invention was sound, we had a proof-of-concept - WHAT WENT WRONG???

After the 3rd such trouncing, I sat down with Mr. DT and asked him to go through things again just to make sure we were not missing anything. His response? "Oh those guys were correct, you were not saying things correctly at a deep level". Seriously, he was lucky we were on the phone or maybe I was lucky as jail sounds even worse than this venture.

After I ram out of breath from providing my enthusiasm over his response, Mr. DT and I laboriously went through everything AGAIN. This time I harbored no "sort of"s or "about right"s. I beat on Mr. DT until I finally had everything correct.

So I took the CORRECT version to a 4th expert and LO AND BEHOLD he was on board (immediately I might add). On top of that, two or the other 3 (one refused to ever talk to us again) also got back on board. Great - right?!?

Hardly. With the negative hits from the stupid initial communications, the valuation of the company was dropped 70% by this investment group and they want yet another proof of concept prior to funding the actual development effort. To say the least we are at an impasse and I am now looking for other funding - essentially starting over again.