Just Throw Money At It
I ran across several articles today (like this one) that basically said the city of Newark wasted $100 million that Mark Zuckerberg had donated to its public schools. My immediate thought, without knowing any details about this particular situation, is that most problems can not be fixed merely by throwing money at them.
As an analogy, I like to work on cars. One time I was trying to change a fuel filter on my SUV. I was using all my strength and many tools for 30 minutes trying to pry it loose. It did not budge. Then finally I realized there was a tricky latch I had to release. Once I did that, it popped right off without any effort.
Oftentimes, money is like brute force. Throwing money at a problem is throwing brute force at it. But brute force might not have any effect. What might actually be needed is smart decision making. It might need someone who is masterful enough to wade super deep into the problem and figure it out. Money rarely gets you people that will go super deep. Those people need to be passionate and work for something bigger than a paycheck.
That’s one reason entrepreneurs are awesome. They often go really deep on their work. Waaaay deeper than people would normally go in a day job.
There are some problems where throwing money makes sense. For instance, once a repeatable and predictable customer acquisition model is achieved with strong product/market fit, throwing money at scaling the business can make sense.
But too often there is a tendency to throw money at things rather than thinking critically and going deep on them. For instance, you do not have enough inbound leads. So you just throw more money into Google adwords. Or into tradeshows. Without analytics. That kind of stuff happens all the time.
How have you seen people throw money wastefully at trying to solve problems?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
James Malcolm
Sort of related: $5 problems. How often are you needing to borrow someone’s phone charger? Just go buy 5 knockoffs and spread them around: work, home, car, travel kit, etc. No more out of battery. $5 problem.
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
Very true!