Common sense is uncommon, and perhaps even more with super brilliant people.
Rafael Martin considered himself to be someone with much-higher-than-average intellect. And the speed at which he was climbing the corporate ladder seemed to suggest that his belief in his intellect was supported by empirical facts.
He had recently become a partner in the famous French VC firm ##, and he was just thirty – by far the youngest partner the VC firm had seen. Part of the reason he had risen so fast had to with his abilities to understand high tech. While most others in the firm – including its senior partners – were mainly MBAs with only a shallow background in science & engineering, Rafael was at the top of his engineering class at Caltech. In fact, every time he visited his alma mater, his professor bemoaned the fact that he had become a turncoat with mercenary aims, though Rafael himself tried to frame a VCs work as something that helps provide the world “value at scale”.
Over the past few months, the firm had scjeduled things such that any startup or inventor with a solution that was high tech was directed straight to Rafael’s room.
An inventor walks into a venture capital partner’s office and claims that he had invented a perpetual motion machine. The partner, a PhD from MIT, knows that such a machine is not possible and tries to convince the inventor to be reasonable.
But the inventor takes the VC partner through his prototype in a very detailed manner, and at the end of it, the VC partner is amazed. It really did look like a perpetual motion machine which somehow magically was generating its own energy from nowhere.
He does not know what to say and asks the inventor to come the next day.
He discusses this with his colleagues and they are also equally perplexed.
At night, he discusses this with his wife. He tells her they were really looking at some really disruptive innovation.
His wife, a mere mortal whose only educational qualifications were a Bachelor’s degree in English literature, just types into Google “Latest perpetual machine fraud” and the very first link is about the trick used by the inventor, and which had already been figured out by a few other investors elsewhere he had tried to dupe.