Reply To: Okay, Let's Stop The BAKE SALE mentality and get SERIOUS

[Rezwan]

No injury!

Quite the opposite. I’m just casting about for ways to justify my more cautious approach and the NYT article gave it some validity with a bit of gender discrimination to make it unassailable. 🙂

But back to the serious matter at hand, each person will have a different pitching style, and different pitches will work on different people. I, personally, am not comfortable with pitching a single technology, first because I legally can’t (that’s soliciting investment and I’m the head of a nonprofit). Second because I’m too conscious of the uncertainty, and the history of fusion and “overselling”. So my approach is to acknowledge the uncertainty and work to build the capacity and stamina for risky research so that no one ever needs to oversell fusion. We (citizens, investors, researchers) need to roll up our sleeves and get the work done. It’s the harder sell, but ethical and reasonable.

I think when you sell the potential of Focus Fusion as a done deal, you get more people saying, “OK, I’ll wait and see if it works out”, whereas if we acknowledge the risks up front and show that you’ve thought through all the possibilities, you attract more serious, committed people. I like starting with a broader context: why EV folks should be interested in fusion in the long run, especially given that there are potential “pleasant physics surprises” (selling fusion just on mainline fusion is a non-starter). And then, in a separate one sheet, you could pitch focus fusion – or another fusion person could pitch their idea.

The one sheet I’m going for here is the general one, it should be usable by a variety of fusion researchers. Industry to Industry pitch. Leave specifics for the actual companies when they talk to actual investors.