Finance pays for new technologies, but financiers and technologists are sometimes at odds.

Financiers are by their nature conservative and analytical: they speculate on the future performance of markets, but the whole of their art is to make speculation as predictable as human affairs allow. By contrast, technologists are ambitious and optimistic: their innovations are applied science or engineering, but they believe their inventions will dominate markets or create entirely new businesses. Much of the business of technology finance consists of the wooing of wised-up financiers by ardent technologists.

But there is this paradox: while financiers are jaded, when they fall for something, they fall hard. They lose all their natural caution. I was the editor of the technology business magazine Red Herring during the Internet boom, and if it is now received wisdom that the venture capitalists and investment bankers who funded that mania were the cynical promoters of a financial euphoria, I never saw it. Financiers loved the boom more than most dot-com chief executives. But like disappointed lovers, financiers were bitter when their speculations proved unfounded, and without income or more capital, many of the companies that Red Herring wrote about were, in the end, ruined.