The Same Brain

Knowing better doesn't help. I would know.

In the late nineties four of us started an email marketing company which we sold successfully before the dot-com market peaked. For a while, being acquired changed very little. We ran our division the way we had run our startup, and nobody at the parent company paid us much attention. Then the NASDAQ continued to crash. Soon thereafter, our revenue mattered and our costs showed, and so our new senior management started paying attention. The agency we had enjoyed, running our own show of a few dozen people inside someone else’s company, drained away more and more each quarter.

The change followed me out of the office, too, which hurt even more. In 1999, telling people you were an “internet entrepreneur” was something you got to early in a conversation. By 2001 it was something you put off, because people would immediately laugh. Not politely. I was only a few years into my career, and it was the first time I watched everything change that dramatically, that fast. I did not take it well.

Somewhere in that stretch, a colleague absolutely insisted that I read Who Moved My Cheese?, Spencer Johnson’s little business-book parable about two mice and two mouse-sized people whose cheese disappears, and who differ in how quickly they accept it and go looking for more, or whether they ever do. Even at the time it read like a cliché, and it felt a little patronizing to be handed a book about being a mouse. I didn’t even like it.

And yet, for twenty-five years, every time the ground has moved under my professional life, that book is the first place my brain goes. Lately it has gone there a lot, because the ground is moving again, this time under the venture business I am in now.

In theory, I should have been immune. I was a psychology double-major in college, concentrating in a social and personality track, and what pulled me there was the literature on bias: all the documented, replicated ways human judgment bends without our permission. My advisor was the daughter of one of the field’s most famous names, and she carried on the family tradition by drilling one point into us above all the others: evolution built in these biases, and it built them for a reason. They are features that have outlived their environment, but they still remain. I knew all of this cold in 2001. I could have footnoted my own unhappiness as it was happening.

Resistance to change is not an information problem. It is a wiring problem.

Our brain wiring has fancy psychology-speak names that have drifted into popular discourse. Status-quo bias is the term Samuelson and Zeckhauser coined in the 1980s for our tendency to stay with the default long past the point where switching would serve us, and it turns up everywhere from health-plan enrollments to retirement allocations left untouched for years. Loss aversion, Kahneman and Tversky’s older and more famous finding, holds that losses weigh roughly twice as much as equivalent gains, which is why a change that trades a certain loss for a probable gain feels like robbery even when the math favors it.

Then there is present bias, or relatedly hyperbolic discounting as David Laibson modeled it, the one I find most humbling. We discount the future steeply and automatically, so a change that costs something now to pay off later registers as a bad deal even when the arithmetic says take it. You feel the discount; you don’t decide it. That is why insight alone fails to transfer. You can know the long-run math cold and still treat the next few months’ comfort as the only real number in the room.

A few years ago I wrote about that cheesy little book on my other blog for those building their venture careers, and I drew the lesson everyone draws: the only constant is change, what got you here won’t keep you here, adapt.

Which brings us to venture capital, our industry, where I have now spent more than two decades, whose core competence is capitalizing on radical change. Every pitch memo we write rests on the same wager, that the big company’s wiring will not let it adapt before the startup grows too big to stop. We are, professionally, connoisseurs of everyone else’s wiring.

But now the cheese is moving on us. AI is walking into venture capital’s own maze, and the biases I studied in college keep turning up mega fund-sized. Status-quo bias is the Monday partner meeting that runs in 2026 exactly as it ran in 2016. Loss aversion shows up in the partner who weighs what AI takes from their role, the status and the craft of it, which is why so many internal evaluations of AI are quietly rigged before they begin, with no one doing the rigging. And present bias is why the firm always finds more time to wait before making real organizational change: the cost of rebuilding is due now, the payoff is a fund or two away, and deferral looks prudent for a while.

I argued in my first Carried Away post, The Disruptors’ Blind Spot, that venture keeps a portrait in the attic, the one true picture of ourselves we decline to look at. We all know the portrait is up there. Our fundamental wiring is why we don’t climb the stairs.

In the parable, Hem is the little person who stays at the empty cheese station, insisting the cheese will come back. The book draws him as the fool. Twenty-five years of thinking about him have convinced me he is drawn from life, and that he might as well be a VC.

The venture capitalist’s brain is finely tuned to see technological change coming, as long as the change is coming for some other industry. Turn that same brain toward our own maze, where AI is the disruption and we are the incumbent, and it goes quiet. The same organ returns opposite verdicts, and the only thing that changed is whose business is on the table. Mine included: I can name every bias in the room and struggle to loosen its grip.

The cheese is moving anyway.

The same brain, two verdicts. GPT Image, in the manner of Picasso.