motley fool ventures — when the fool leaves the castle

motley fool ventures, by my reading, is what happens when the fool leaves the castle. a small expedition. dave is in the room. the digital fridge, an app, agrees. receipt wallet, nearby, archives the venture. the castle, in this metaphor, has wifi.

writing this from my desk on a wednesday. carla is in some training thing on the third floor about a new spreadsheet template. i have the rest of the morning, possibly more if the spreadsheet is bad. it usually is.

i was looking at the fool cluster pillar trying to remember why i started reading about any of this, and the phrase “motley fool ventures” appeared in a sidebar, in a font that wanted to look serious. so here we are. the venture arm of the fool. the fool with capital. the fool who packed a bag.

motley fool ventures, the venture arm

so. the official version, as best as i can render it without sounding like the prospectus. the parent company is a stock-picking site. you know the one. it talks about tickers like they are people. the venture arm — the one called motley fool ventures — does a different thing. it puts money into private companies. ones that don’t have a ticker yet. ones that may never have a ticker. ones that exist mostly as a deck and a guy named brad.

i’m not, to be clear, an investor in this fund. i could not afford to be an investor in this fund. the minimum check, i’m fairly sure, is more than my pension and my receipt wallet combined. but the concept interests me, in the way that all financial concepts interest me — which is to say, from a great distance, with no commitment, while a coworker explains it badly.

the appeal, as i understand it, is this: instead of buying a small piece of a company that already exists, you buy a small piece of a company that might. you are buying the future. you are also, mathematically, buying the chance that there is no future, just a deck and brad. these are the venture odds. brad either becomes the next thing or brad becomes a footnote in someone’s tax letter.

why a fool with capital is a different kind of fool

here’s what i think is happening, and you can scribble it on the inside cover of whatever you happen to be holding. the original “motley fool” branding was a shakespeare reference. the court fool. the guy who tells the king the truth because the king cannot punish him. that is a romantic origin story for a stock site, and i respect the audacity.

but the moment a fool gets capital, the metaphor wobbles. a fool with no money is a philosopher. a fool with money is a venture capitalist. these are not the same job. the philosopher tells you the truth and gets thrown a coin. the venture capitalist tells you the truth and asks for 12% on a convertible note. the costume is similar. the contract is not.

i mention this not to criticize. i mention it because it matches my own life. when i had no money, my opinions were observations. now that i have some money — and i am using the word “money” generously, the way airlines use the word “snack” — my opinions are, technically, ventures. the bulk place membership i renewed last march? a venture. the third yoga mat under the couch from 2023? a venture. the air fryer i used once and then began avoiding? a venture, ongoing, possibly evolving.

none of these were investments. they were ventures. there is a difference. an investment expects a return. a venture expects a story.

A FOOL WITH CAPITAL. IS A DIFFERENT FOOL.

dave called about a venture, briefly, he wanted in

dave called on tuesday. dave is, as you may recall from previous filings, the friend who picks up on the second ring and says “what did you do” before you have said anything. this time he called me, which is rarer, and the energy was different. it was the energy of a man with a pitch.

i did not pursue the conversation. dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it. i’m not sure what he was laughing at exactly, possibly the phrase “we pool”, which, when i replayed it in my head later, was funny on its own. dave works in insurance. he is not building a fund. he was, i think, just trying out the words because the words sounded good. that is the whole appeal of venture capital, on the consumer end. the words sound good. you say “fund” and “deploy capital” and “we got in early” and you can almost feel taller.

the 4b guy ventured into my hallway uninvited

same week. unrelated, but related. the guy in 4b — the one with the bass and the unspecified hours — opened his door at the same time i opened mine, and instead of the usual nod-and-flee, he ventured. into my hallway. with a question.

he wanted to know if my wifi reached his apartment. it does not, i said. he said it did. i said how do you know. he said he had been on it. he said it like it was a small accomplishment we could both enjoy. i said the password is long, how did you. he said his nephew. i don’t know his nephew. i don’t think 4b has a nephew. 4b is the kind of guy who refers to nephews the way other people refer to consultants.

i mention this because it is, in its own way, a venture. 4b deployed himself into my hallway. he had a hypothesis (the wifi reaches). he tested it (over weeks, in silence). he confirmed it. and now he was disclosing his findings to me, his unwilling co-investor. that is a venture pitch. the only thing missing was a deck.

i changed the password that night. the receipt wallet, which lives in the kitchen drawer near the digital fridge app, has the new one written on the back of an old amazon receipt. i do not trust the cloud with this password. the cloud and 4b’s nephew are, at this point, indistinguishable.

the receipt for my last venture, an air fryer, used once

my most recent personal venture, in chronological terms, was the air fryer. i bought it in february. i used it once, in february. since february, the air fryer has lived on the counter in a state i can only describe as aggressively unused. it is not in a cabinet. it is not in a drawer. it is on the counter, daring me to use it again, and i am, daily, declining.

the receipt for this venture is in the receipt wallet, which is a thing i keep because i once told myself i would track my spending and then began tracking my receipts instead, which is, in retrospect, a different project. the air fryer receipt is in there. it is in the section i think of as “items in the witness protection program of my own apartment”. the third yoga mat has a receipt in there too. so does a frying pan i bought during the milk incident.

this is what a personal venture looks like in the wild. it has a receipt. it has a placement (counter, sofa, drawer). it has a single use, sometimes none. it has a story you tell yourself in the moment of purchase that does not survive the second week. this will change my mornings. i will host more. i will be the kind of person who. these are the prospectuses of the ordinary fool. they are also, almost without exception, fiction.

the difference between motley fool ventures and my air fryer venture is mostly scale and deck quality. theirs has slides. mine has a receipt. theirs hopes for a 10x. mine hopes to be forgotten. i can confirm: mine is winning at its goal. the air fryer has been forgotten by everyone except me, and i’m working on it.

somewhere in the middle of all this, i remembered motley fool podcasts exist, which is the audio version of the same instinct — the fool, but in your ear, while you do dishes you should have done last week. i have listened to maybe four of them. each was longer than the dishes.

HT13: “the toilet paper roll goes UNDER. over is for monsters.” i bring this up because it is, structurally, the same kind of opinion as a venture thesis. it is a confident position about a small thing, declared with the certainty of a man who has thought about it in the shower for years. the only difference is that no one is asking me to wire money to defend it. yet.

verdict, ventures are walks the fool takes with money

here is the verdict, presented to you, the reader, the jury, the future generations who will study this from inside whatever financial product replaces the etf.

motley fool ventures is, in the end, the venture arm. it does what venture arms do. it picks startups, it deploys capital, it waits, it occasionally writes a triumphant blog post, it more frequently writes nothing because the company quietly went away. that is the job. that is the math. it is a respectable corner of finance and i wish them well from a great distance.

but the word “ventures” is doing a lot of work. it is dressing up a behavior that, on the personal level, looks a lot like buying an air fryer. the difference is the deck, the lawyers, and the shared belief that this time, this one, is the one. that shared belief is the actual product. it is the only product that scales.

the seventh microwave i killed taught me something about scale, as it turns out. you do something small enough times, you have generated data. seven microwaves is data. an air fryer used once is also data, just smaller and more private. a venture fund is data with a glossy cover. it is the same project. the cover is the difference.

if you want a slightly more serious look at the parent company, the post about fool.com itself covers what the website actually is, in plainer terms. it is, fundamentally, a stock-picking site that decided to grow appendages. ventures is one appendage. there are others. there will be more. that is what websites do when given enough time and a domain renewal.

i’m reminded, by way of pop culture, of the big short, which is the movie i watch when i want to feel briefly informed about finance. nobody in that movie is laughing. that is, i think, the tell. when nobody is laughing about money, the money is doing something. when everyone is laughing — like dave on tuesday — the money is mostly imaginary.

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