People think of the Midas Touch as a good thing . . . So did King Midas of Phrygia — for a while.  After all, what could be better than having everything you touch turn to gold.  Forget quantitative easing and other modern-day Federal Reserve shenanigans; King Midas is the archetype for printing money first and asking questions later . . . 

And, indeed, not thinking through things was the beginning of the end for the good King.  After all, a Golden Touch is an epic gift right up until you need to eat (or in later recountings, hug your daughter.)  So there sat poor Midas with a glass of golden ice where his water had been and plate of gleaming food before him . . . and that's when his belly started getting rumbly.  Pretty soon, Midas cried out to Dionysus to reverse the gift the wine-god had given him (the Touch was payback for helping sober up a lushy-pants satyr.)  Dionysus — never one to pass up a glass of wine or a chance to teach a lesson — told Midas to head down to the banks of the river Pactolus and wash everything in its waters, thus returning the gilded items to their original states.  In the end, Midas was poorer, but wiser (for the moment.)

But some cats never learn: Midas decided to take his newfound wisdom and go hang out in the woods for a while with Pan, the god of mischief.  Always feisty, Pan challenged Apollo to a music contest.  Of course, Pan with his rustic pipes stood no chance against Apollo and his Golden Lyre on that week's episode of Olympian Idol.  When the notes were played, all the judges raved that Apollo had the better tune . . . except for Midas.  And not only did he vote against Apollo, but Midas also got mouthy with the Patron of Delphi much like an ancient Simon Cowell.  For his insolence, Apollo said, "you have an ass's ears!" and a pair of floppy donkey ears grew from Midas's head that stuck with him the rest of his days.

Aside from being a great exemplar of the Greek Tragic Cycle, what does this parable have to do with investing?  

Well, first off, you've got to admire Midas for his willingness to be contrarian during the Pan vs. Apollo battle of the bands.  I often note that the fear of being wrong and alone pushes people in finance to do conventional stuff and run with the crowd.  But in doing so, they take the possibility of being right and alone out of play.  This is what Lord Keynes was talking about when he said, "worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally”.  But being non-consensus right is where fortunes and reputations are made; that's the heroic investing quardant.  Of course, Midas probably pushed it a bit far in defying an Olympian god.  Indeed, while Mr. Market can be a harsh taskmaster, underperformance is rarely punished with the rageful pique that the Immortals could muster.  The two-by-two matrix below lays out the scope of outcomes for the financier.

And that's where this post comes full-circle: Back in 2005, I was pitching our then-latest private equity fund of funds offering to a salty investment committee.  Toward the tail end of the discussion, one of the most cynical of the members of that committee asked, "but how many Midas Listers are in your portfolio?" in referring to Forbes' annual ranking of venture captialists.  I started giving an answer that approximated a 2005 version of Dan Primack's critique from this morning, but after a few moments, I stopped and said, "but wait a second: you're not paying us to invest in the Midas List of 1999 — that's just conventional wisdom –you're really paying us to invest in the people who will be on the Midas List in the 2010s, that's the real challenge.  Some of them might be the same, but many will be different."  I didn't really believe in the Midas List, but the line made for great rhetoric.  I remember that discussion vividly because immedaitely after, I met my friend Josh Kopelman from a then-nascent First Round Capital for the first time for memorable lunch outside of Philadelphia.  

And indeed, while it seemed like a really contrarian move back then to invest in First Round's pre-institutional funds — among other things we did in those heady early days of the micro-VC movement — I always knew that there was something disruptive about the voodoo those guys were up to collectively.  Even though I remain pretty cynical about the Midas List, it has been gratifying to see some of the folks I've known for a while in the micro-cap VC space like Josh and now his partner Rob Hayes, Mike Maples and Steve Anderson (and cats like Bryce Roberts in recent years) get some well-deserved recongition.  Congrats to everyone on the List (even if I don't buy into it entirely.)  And thanks for making all of us that invested in you look good.  Keep putting that moolah in the coolah!