Introducing Babbage

Famed financial author George Goodman explained in his marvelous 1967 bestseller, The Money Game, the origin of his pseudonym – Adam Smith. (Readers might remember the popular TV show, Adam Smith’s Money World, which ran on PBS from 1984 to 1997.)

Apparently, Goodman had penned an anonymous article for New York magazine, and he’d selected Procrustes as his moniker. The name belonged to the son of Poseidon, who enjoyed stretching victims on a bed of nails. (Goodman thought this a good metaphor for Wall Street).

Anyway, an editor at the magazine decided that the name Procrustes seemed much too contrived, so he just changed it on a whim to Adam Smith. And the name stuck. Goodman called it a happy accident. 

Now obviously, the author (authors) of this note is (are) not Babbage. You should know that we are instead the principals of a new venture capital and private equity team called Ballistic Ventures.

Charles Babbage, of course, was a polymath who designed the first computer. Today, he is buried in London’s Kensal Green Cemetery – or at least most of him. Half his brain was cut out and is on display in a museum in London.

We’ve decided to create this Babbage character as a means for capturing and sharing our collective views with you on technology, cybersecurity, business, government, investment, and other areas that suit our interest – and hopefully yours.

Our approach will be for Babbage to provide a stream of articles and to proxy our advice to cybersecurity startups. Babbage will include guidance on technology trends. Babbage will allow us to make criticism where appropriate and to offer compliments (sparingly).

But you can be certain of one thing: Babbage will try to make the material both useful and entertaining. Our hope is that you follow Babbage’s narrative and come along with us on our journey as we build our new investment firm. 

And like all good authors of anonymous pieces, we are happy to take full credit as a firm for your gracious admiration when you like something Babbage has written. But if things go amiss, we will blame that dimwit ghost writer whom we should have vetted more carefully.

Watch here for our first article as Babbage.