# What are the different flavors of uncertainty? * When you need an insight to be able to say that you’re heading in the right direction * Unclear whether what you’re trying to do is even possible * Unclear whether you can scale a thing * You know exactly what the bottleneck is but unclear how and if it will be solved **Technological need-meeting uncertainty**: even if you manage to harness a phenomena through a principle of action as envisioned, there is a question of whether it will actually meet the need you expect it to. The more precise the definition of what working means ([[What does ‘working’ mean?]]) the less need-meeting uncertainty there is and the question is shifted onto uncertainties that live in the process. **Market uncertainty**: Market uncertainty is related to technological need-meeting uncertainty but just has to do with how much people are willing to **Value capture uncertainty** There might be a huge market for a technology but there might be a lot of uncertainty over whether **Business model uncertainty** some new technologies actually have very clear Risks are things that you can put on a distribution. Investments are always risks, not uncertainties because you can count the outcomes. ### Random Thoughts * There’s something intuition pump-y about uncertainty at least in the realm of investments in comparing an uncertain situation to buying stocks chosen by a random number generator. [[Narratives are how we deal with uncertainty]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+are+the+different+flavors+of+uncertainty) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+are+the+different+flavors+of+uncertainty)