Transcript of Occult Capital Office Hours: Pitching To Investors

Blessings upon everyone. I’m [hissing static] from Occult Capital, and in this video I’m going to be running through a roundup of all the most common guidance we give to the teams that we advise along their journeys into alchemical engineering.

Just to give you some context, folks come to us from all sorts of backgrounds. We speak with solo mystics, conjurers, seers, thaumaturges, healers, even wraiths or specters, and they all know that they want to use their careers to caress the folds of eternity, but maybe they’re feeling uncertain about pursuing a standard archmage or sainthood track. And they’ve decided to strike out on their own and take the more direct route of developing a freestanding piece of woo.

There’s a super common phase at first where early-stage teams will be overwhelmed with just the sheer extent to which the world is bright, dark, subtle, alive, fractally writhing. And they’ll start to, you know, start to doubt their direction and their ability to influence that. Maybe your idea is just a wisp on the breeze. Maybe you are just a wisp on the breeze. But it’s really key to remember that, if you think about every piece of ritual, superstition, what-have-you that you use in your daily life, all of that was pioneered by someone in this exact same situation. And so what we like to tell folks is, all you really need is some conviction and a story of what has recently shifted in the psychic landscape, what have you noticed that others haven’t. And then how can you leverage that.

So there's gonna be five pillars that any vibrational solution has to address. And you can sort of visualize this as the points of the pentacle.

Point one is stochasticity. Basically, everything occult needs to leverage that somehow and really understand how they're hooking into that. When we talk about randomness, you know, we’re kind of getting into the heart of what it means for something to be occult, because randomness is just a process whose inner workings aren’t given to man. And so, to access the depths of the human soul, it’s gonna be crucial that you lock down your engagement with the veil of mystery. The number one question a lot of investors are going to be asking is, what’s your solve for stochasticity?

You look at, for example, the dancing flame, that’s a nice clean solution. And you see a lot of the players in the divination space especially nailing this too. Rhabdomancy, kabbalah and numerology, bone casting. If you’re targeting children, maybe you get away with something simpler like petal-pulling. But for any other market, if investors catch a whiff of determinism, they’re going to think, okay, either this is going to get manipulated by Goodhart demons, you know, swallowed into some perverse analytics sinkhole, or the conscious ego is going to clog the pipes and there’s just never going to be enough bandwidth to admit the Godhead.

So that’s number one. Number two is coverage. You want to demonstrate span, you want to cover the space of all the most salient concepts and primitives, and you want to avoid redundancy. Most pantheons do a good job with this. You can look at, for example, the Greco-Romans, the Hindus, really like any established polytheistic tradition. If you’re an Abrahamic org, maybe you think of the different saints or prophets. I think the astrological house system really nailed this as well, with a really tight execution where they broke the metaphysical substrate down into, on the one hand, signs, and on the other hand, houses, and then squared those together. And you see that in the tarot, too, you have your suits and then your ranks.

Now obviously, a bunch of associations are always going to stack and overlap, and that’s completely okay. What we always tell people is that the key here is to embrace loose associations and to just focus on not overlapping on any one category. So maybe, you know, one of your elements associates to the dormouse, the liver, and the sensation of ill humor. And then you just build on that theme and steer clear of any other animals, organs, or feelings. But you could get away with an external body part, or even like, a much larger animal, or a noncentral beast like a fish or a bird.

Point three is decisiveness. So you’ve established a focal point, a Schelling point, now you need to actually make sure that that is like, that there's a way for people to come to a consensus on it. So consensus is a big one. That’s the stone soup effect. One great example of this is crystals. You look at a rose quartz, right away that gives you the suggestion of love. And so that’s what ends up corresponding to the heart, you know, you can see kind of a parallel to, to onomatopoeia. A few connections you can draw totally literally, a bunch more you can get some rough consensus association, and then some you kind of have to innovate on or just go really esoteric, and that’s fine as long as you’re nailing all your other fundamentals. But all the obvious associations, you want to try and line up with people’s intuitions. Like for example, if you think about the meanings of different aura colors, all of them are pretty much exactly what you’d expect. Red is fiery, pink is loving, yellow is charismatic, green is nurturing, right, you get the idea. Because at the end of the day you live or die on people’s intuitions. That’s the name of this game.

So then four is integration, like, how do you, how do you concretely hook into the divine. This has to do with how you bridge that gap and link the higher power into whatever’s doing the channeling. So that could look like voodoo, Mask work, the various Books of the Dead, all of those are strong on integration.

A lot of times this sort of ties back into stochasticity, like, if your solution reduces into too low a dimension, then there’s just not possibly going to be room to jam the sacred in there. The other thing here, though, is that you need a super rich substrate of associations to land on, and ideally that substrate has a good hallowed quality to it. The simple test here is, you can take one of your users, grab them by the collar and cry “CAN YOU FEEL IT IN YOUR BONES?” And if they leap to their feet and shout back “BY GOLLY I CAN FEEL IT IN MY BONES”, you’re on the right track.

Point number five is the body. Now, that’s going to divide up into a couple of parts. Sensory is, you know, think of your five senses. So visuals, for example, hugely depends, the rule of thumb is basically just avoid neons. Aurally, you’re going to want to, you’re going to be looking for anything mimicking heartbeats, wave forms, crackles, or the human voice. So violin or cello is a good choice for the voice, drums for the heartbeat, fire or sticks for a crackle, and you can really go crazy with resonance.

For physicality, touch, you want to work with the skin, you want textures, temperatures, maybe hand contact. I think the Ouija board executed this really effectively. Palm reading is another one, you’d think it would be obvious here, but I think people sort of overrate its coverage and underrate its sensuality. And then there’s taste, here you’re typically gonna want to look for bitterness, light sweetness, subtlety.

Then finally on top of all the sensory, you’ve got your internals and your proprioception. We really like to emphasize nailing your proprio. That’s gonna be that internal perception. A lot of meditation traditions stand out here, practices like internal family systems and focusing really shine, dream work can be big. And then you know, drumming, reiki, breathwork, everything that grabs the internals from the outside and opens up that interface channel. You want to make sure your users are locked in onto really tight, really high-res gurgles, burbles, pangs, flutters, frissons, twists, shifts, thaws, dissolutions, throbs, and winces.

There are a couple of things that I think like, that early stage occultists do just out of nervousness and I just want to head those off from the start. You know like a lot of times people show up and will get intimidated looking at the investor with their rows and rows of eyes, like I know it’s a lot of eyes to look at [laughter]. And you know, you’re craning your neck up at them and they’re bending over to fit under your ceilings. But you want to take some deep breaths, chill out, and basically just stick to your core vibe prop. I think what you don’t want to do is try and forcibly dogfood them into using your thing right away. The big cliché is like, you do your demo and you say oh, we're gonna predict the future, we’re looking into our crystal ball, ooh, what does it say, oh look, it says our thing is the future. They don't want that. They’ve seen all the gimmicks. And anyway they have their own teams of in-house prophets.

Another mistake we see pretty often is a team will lose conviction and start branding with a scientism style, like, going into we’re quantum this or evidence backed that. And in our experience this tends to be a death knell, because it telegraphs low confidence and it’s a sign that you’re straying from the occult or, you know, holy path. It’s a much, much stronger sign if you can drill down on your core competency. Sometimes that’s influenced by planetary trends or what a particular fund caters toward. Like when we were in a goetic cycle, we saw a ton of teams pitching summoning rituals, and then that meant there was a lot of compliance and security work they had to take on. And then for a more recent example, we had lots of groups jumping on the network spirituality, cyber angel wave, so then for them it became all about balancing like, the divine masculine and feminine, like that kind of thing.

And then one other thing I’ll mention is, a lot of groups, when they start out, try to overoptimize questions like, things like what’s the optimal ratio of fleshies to egregores on the team? And I think that actually doesn’t matter as much as a lot of people think. At this stage, you really just want to nail down a straightforward pitch of your vibrational thesis, which breaks down into, how do you hook into the spirit layer, what are you eliciting, and what’s the impact story.

I will say, you do want to have a pretty high internal competency on that spirit layer, just within your own organization, because you need that not only for development but also to be able to project that across to investors. Like, if you take a meeting wearing moonstone crystals, you need to be able to tell a story that’s more sophisticated than “we’re going to the moon.” There are occultists who can pull that off, but it’s going to look like, you know, it can look like associations with ebb and flow governing their product cycles, or like, shadow work incorporated into their retros, or tidal analyses for an org targeting international markets.

You’re going to get asked about your time to lindiness. And that might stretch over multiple lifetimes. So one thing you’re likely to get drilled down on in particular is succession on your path to lindy. If you’re going to do this using reincarnation, that’s a more and more popular path these days, but you have to walk a fine line, where you retain some illegibility, but you also want to release enough information to make sure that your incarnations aren’t going to, like, aren’t going to kind of drift too far over time. Another road you can take is to just propagate through the zeitgeist. You can get a big force multiplier on that if your org ships a holy book or scriptures from the start. I’m not even going to try and get into the subject of apocrypha because that would be a whole other talk in itself.

As far as dealmaking goes, I would just say don’t overcomplicate it. If you’re not careful, right, you’re going to get into these elaborate rituals where you shard your soul up, sign it away, all this stuff that fundamentally is going to weaken your cosmic position. Ninety nine percent of cases, you’ll arrange for the investors to take their payouts in karma or qi.

Some investors are going to be especially close to samsara, and so maybe they might have special considerations, where you might need to work out something more short-term. And some smaller or more esoteric investors might not have souls in the traditional sense, or, you know, won’t have enough internal coherence or continuity for you to be able to write them into your org’s ontology. But in those cases you can absolutely just call us up and get help working something out. We’ve seen it all, or at least perceived its presence.

And that’s it for today. Appreciate you all tuning in. If you or your team are building any kind of divine or arcane solution and you have a question about what we just covered, I absolutely encourage you to reach out and get in touch. You know in your heart how to summon us.

[The final thirty seconds of the video contain an unearthly, guttural vocalization that eludes verbal description but that is autotranscribed, for reasons still murky to interpretability researchers, as “Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to like and subscribe.”]