Have you ever thought to yourself, “I love capital, but it seems so rudimentary. So simplistic. So… single-faceted?? I just wish there were more sides to it. More angles. More… facets???” If you have, you apparently are not alone. While I must confess that I myself have always been content with any capital I could get my hands on (naively unconcerned by whether my crisp Benjamins – ok who are we kidding, more like Washingtons – had one side or 20), the wiser and more erudite among us (aka some Phillips Exeter guys) have clearly been toying with some groundbreaking financial theory for a long time now.
What is Multifaceted Capital? As far as I can tell, it’s an up-and-coming venture capital firm run by a group of Phillips Exeter graduates at Brown. As is true for all great things, Multifaceted Capital became a part of the main(ish)stream at Brown on the academic communications platform known as Sidechat. Hardworking undercover venture capitalists infiltrated the app and inconspicuously spread the gospel of the nuanced, dare I say, multifaceted approach they take to… capital? As any good journalist would do, I got to work investigating the origins of both the organization and the concept behind Multifaceted Capital.
As more of a farming/crunchy/Birkenstocks/French poetry girly myself, I turned to a local expert in the field of capital: my economics professor. However, when I emailed her looking for insights, she responded by ccing my sophomore TA and kindly asked that I not contact her directly again unless it was to offer her cigarettes.
So, I took the next best thing and turned to my one econ bro friend for help. The conversation went a little something like this:
“Hey John! Whatcha reading there?”
“Well Jane, this here is the Financial Times. I am learning so much about the times financially!”
“Wow John! So funky, fly, and fresh! Say, do you happen to know what makes capital multifaceted, perchance?”
“Golly gee Jane, where do I start? Honestly, it’s such a nuanced and complex concept that I’m not sure your little woman brain would be able to comprehend the amortization of such a frictional unemployment free lunch. Maybe you could try the Interwebs for a more simplistic explanation?”
John then went back to reading the Financial Times upside down, presumably to observe it from another facet.
As he suggested, I turned to the internet for help. What I learned was not shocking in the least: according to Linkedin, “Exeter Alumni are 100X more likely to build a billion-dollar company than non-Exeter alumni” (yes, that is a direct quote). Seeing as the boarding tuition is a bit over $60,000 (yes, that is USD, not Kazakhstani Tenge, I checked), I imagine the seed money they have access to is more like coco de mer and less like pepita money. Thankfully, they are clearly putting that money to good use; they have already secured a domain name and have a button you can push to contact them regarding “LP prospectus.” I didn’t actually do that, because I am not an “excellent entrepreneur […] from Phillips Exeter alumni & friends community,” and, more importantly, I don’t know what LP stands for.
I still have some questions. What makes capital go from single-faceted to multifaceted? Is it predetermined when the capital is established? Or is there a tenure track to become multifaceted? Are there programs I can put my baby capital in to increase its odds of developing many facets? Maybe club golf? Suzuki violin lessons? Does this new level of innovation refute Marx’s Das Kapital? Should it be Die Kapital instead? Is the singularity of Karl’s conception of capital now outdated? These queries have been keeping me up at night. However, I can rest a bit easier knowing that the prodigy captains of industry are leading us to a brighter, more multifaceted future.