You're right, of course, and I was being obtuse.

I do think that harder science backgrounds (which will naturally form a larger proportion of the employees at Google and which itself selects the brightest and the best from the cream of the educational faculties) will often produce more business-friendly ideas from the conjunction of science, IT, and maths. At the same time those backgrounds will provide a more fertile ground for those ideas both by linking the entrepreneur with a higher paid, more educated and business-oriented network of peers which by its nature will also have stronger connections with venture style funding sources. This is a wonderful thing.

More profoundly it seems to me that those sorts of ventures have a very different motivation from arts based ones. The primary value of Freidman's idea is clear: to provide financial value to businesses. The motivation behind the idea seems to be closely allied: what if we could reduce financial risk to business owners using weather data? Conversely, the motivation of the majority of arts projects produces a more ephemeral value; not lesser but different; and I'm not talking about the final, quantifiable and clearly marketable commodity here (film, book, musical track, immersive experience). Those things do have a clear financial value. Rather, the motivation of many working in the arts is to address the human condition, to produce emotion, to provide perspective, to connect, only connect. All laudable goals but difficult to put onto a spreadsheet, difficult to include in a business plan, upon which it is difficult to demonstrate projected returns and therefore difficult to fund.

That doesn't intend to suggest that those working in the arts are in any way disadvantaged, or hard done by, in the VC world, rather that, by the fundamental nature of the differing motivations in those fields, and by the network of individuals with whom one shares that field, there are different opportunities available.

“Want to be rich? Don't go into the arts,” is the adage, clichéd by overuse but grown from seeds of truth. Of course there are enormously wealthy authors, say, but few business folks will plan an investment strategy around the returns on a book – at the very least it will be around the foundation of a publishing company or a new strategy in digital publishing distribution – but their motivation here is still fiscal, still comes down to figures, and to providing quantifiable value to a customer, or a business.

Further, the author is betting his success on the personality he invests in the final product: his work, and no-one else's. Freidman's idea, turned into algorithm, turned into business, stands alone, divorced from his personality. That's why he can sell it on.

That's not to denigrate the value of arts related contributions to the business world. I've applied them myself. Even my pitch for a sprawling transmedia narrative told across audio, video and graphic novel media eventually requires me to speak to investors in terms cost and return, to encapsulate things in discrete units which can be considered financially. The chief motivation might be to entertain but the physical manifestation of that entertainment must be presented in terms a business person can understand.

So really all I'm saying is that entrepreneurs with an education and employment history similar to their peers that present ideas couched in terms of finance to people looking for financially astute ideas have good support in their network.