Witchdoctors
The author leads Sky Pilot 5.11 at Mt. Arapiles in Australia on a visit in 1997. One of the best trad cliffs in the world, Arapiles was recently closed to climbing by Witchdoctors. Photo by Steve Monks, IFMGA.
When my friend Sam Dryden was a senior advisor to the Gates Foundation, he once told me a story: after he was President, Jimmy Carter went on a personal mission to eradicate the Guinea Worm, a terrible parasite in West Africa that infected millions of children. It was easy to cure kids of the Guinea worm – just teach them not to drink the dirty water where the parasites live.
The problem was that in all these African villages, there was a Witchdoctor who made a living selling some useless tribal remedy to the local families. Curing the Guinea Worm with education threatened the Witchdoctor’s business, and they fought President Carter and his colleagues everywhere they went.
Witchdoctors aren’t stupid – they’re evil. They know the snake oil they sell people doesn’t work and isn’t the cure for their misery, but they have a vested economic interest in preserving suffering.
At Boulder Ventures, we invest in enterprise software and pharmaceutical startups, and everywhere we go, we find Witchdoctors.
Whenever we fund a new company whose product cures disease or solves a big problem, we encounter Witchdoctors who make a living convincing people that this is a pain they should endure as a natural part of their lives. Our companies then spend a lot of time and money explaining why that’s not true and that our solution is safer, simpler, and better for them.
Witchdoctors are powerful leaders in their communities, especially if they’ve been selling poison successfully for a long time. As a result, most people would rather eat more poison than solve the problem.
Change is hard, and when there’s a new drug or a platform shift that threatens their economic model, the power of the Witchdoctors to resist change is strong. But in the end, Witchdoctors always lose.
In 1986 there were 3.5 million cases of Guinea Worm in West Africa. In 2023 there were 14.
Jimmy won.