Likewise, stock market IPOs are a parody now - not means of getting financing, but dumping the paper on the retail after for the insiders and VCs to realize their gains.
Yes, it's downright stupid to buy into any tech IPO these days. The fundraising and all the growth were done by the A-M rounds, while the IPO is the bag-dump for the last few rounds of investors. Stay far away.
They're solving that problem. Look at Spacex. They not only got the rules changed for fast-tracked inclusion in Nasdaq and Russell indexes to pump the price on their garbage asset, they changed the rules so insiders could bail early. It was a one-two punch in service of making insiders richer at the expense of retail investors. Transparent corruption, where a few billionaires write the rules that allow them to reach into regular folks pockets.
The lockup period is still in effect (for now) but reductions to index inclusion rules expose the stock to passive vehicles like ETFs that are obligated to have a specific allocation on the stock. So now there is an essentially guaranteed demand established by the time the lockup period expires. NASDAQ allows mega-cap companies into the NASDAQ-100 after 15 days which is much shorter than the lockup period for 80% of the SpaceX shares.
Can you name a recent IPO that didn't put funds in the corporate coffers?
If the complaint is that people are investing in companies that are a Bad Bet, the solution is simple. Don't buy stocks that are you think are losers. That's the definition of insanity.
If someone wants to blindly invest money with zero diligence, then they have to be willing to accept the returns of a zero diligence bet.
VC is basically just plowing capital into people that went to prestigious schools or maybe were at a top company. They collect fees and every once in a while a company hits.
Any analysis on the asset class is moot.
Most of the VC media is aimed at hiding the fact that its a lottery machine for a pre selected group
I think the letter V should be removed from VC to better reflect your point that these are barely ventures - they're more like a rigged casino spin for those that don't have the talent to do the building themselves.
That's what the letter V was historically understood to mean. As the article says, venture capital used to be a small segment of the capital markets for the uncommon set of companies who can't prove their idea is any good until they get more capital than their friends and family have to offer. The idea that venture funding is supposed to be anything more than a rigged casino spin is upstream of quite a lot of the problems people have with modern VC.
I don't think they are that squeamish about hiding it. VC's talk all the time about investing in people and understanding that their ideas May shift over time.
Tyler Cowen is a big component of pre-selecting talented people and not even requiring an idea. I think this is the model of Emergent Ventures (EV), launched in 2018, and is getting replicated in many places.
i can't believe the whole blog post was just the tldr. this is going to be a legendary series of blog posts! j/k i WOULD like to read the long version of this but i probably won't remember to go back to this blog.
The first one passed with a lot of regular people losing their homes, their jobs, and even their lives. I wish just for once we could have the wealthy elites get their comeuppance without it also screwing over everyone else.
there were substantial crashes and booms during the gilded age as well, it wasn't uncommon to go bust and lose a house before the great depression. The panic of `73 is pretty comparable with the great depression, for example
My paranoid brain thinks the new "Every baby gets a $1000 investment account" is a lame effort on their part to keep it going. For an extremely low price tag they can give every child & parent skin in the game. For someone struggling seeing their kids account go up a $100 might compel them to support the bloated financial/banking industry now that they get a few drops from it.
There is an explicit claim in the essay that says they aren't all the same.
Third bullet point says "a handful of venture capital firms have become 'do everything' funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses".
This is all silly and as best as I can read it due to very vocal large VC managers having politics the author doesn't agree with.
Take a look at the bullet points. It's just scattered random conflicting complaints.
VC is small and is now big (okay...)
They're not even VC anymore, they're doing all sorts of other investments (okay and?) Oh and they don't really care about their returns, but they grow fast (what? I'm pretty sure VCs care about returns). You know what else grows fast? Cancer!
Now that they're large, they have power over founders (why? there's other sources of capital). And they use companies to push their politics (seems much more complicated than just paying lobbyists).
And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)
There's an argument against large VC, but this ain't it. Talk about misaligned incentives, how they push aggressive tactics without regard to the founders, who may not be indifferent between a 50% chance of building a company to $10m to a 1% chance of building a company to $1b
Or just say "I don't like the politics of [VC related person]" and save everyone time.
> And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)
Not if this were something healthy. This wouldn't be the first time joe average is holding the bag when the rich set the house on fire again. The USA economy is particularly brittle (as in: not diversified) in that regard.
I can understand how the article might conflict with personally held notions and thus might look odd, especially as the weird dealings of the tech accelerationists do not find much press coverage. The only thing I can do is recommending to keep your mind open for new info, the article mentions he will follow up on the bullet points. The author has another previous article [1] that references Paul Krugman's article "The rich are crazier than you and me"[2], that might be an interesting read alongside the other pointers. As an aside, I also recommend to watch the video at the end that goes into Andreessen hiring murderer Daniel Penny.
It's not like pension funds are forced to invest in VC funds. It's the unions decision too, so ultimately if they are bad investments, it's average joe union workers fault they voted for shitty leadership.
> But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host
I thought a cancer grew from a defective cell that is able to divide and grow to over take the healthy ones.
I would not focus on individual cells but the ability to grow super fast, which itself is not a defect since it's important during development, but the checks on this ability can be removed by later mutations/metabolic issues
The problem is using cancer as a singular noun in this context.
>a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts
"A" cancer does not grow from a cell, a cell is a cancer cell if it keeps dividing when it should not. The cancer cells as a collective are the disease referred to as "cancer".
If they had written
"cancer grows from cells that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host"
I’m a VC and agree with much of this. The mega firms have totally warped VC and the desire for massive cash appreciation has led to a host of bad characters getting involved. I still love working with early stage companies but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence. There are so many issues destroying early stage VC right now. We need major policy change / guardrails but that won’t happen.
> but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence
Are you able to shed some light on this? It would be interesting to hear what people like you come across.
There’s a lot so we would need to talk in person. But basically the power law is way too powerful right now. The impact that a small group of people can have is too much and it’s distorting things. This is not unique to VC, the concentration is insane right now across the board.
Based on my experience on the fundraising side, I'm inclined to agree with your perspective. One small nit to pick: I think policy changes can happen. However, it's hard for me to imagine meaningful change occurring before a catastrophic event. How big would the blast radius be? Obviously no one knows, but I hope it's closer in scope to "The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank" as opposed to "The Collapse of Lehman Brothers".
At the Federal level, absolutely. I could imagine that California and New York could work together to affect meaningful change. It would still be tough because specialty finance regulation is unlikely to generate the type of constituent response usually required for government action, but it's not impossible.
That said, reform would be a Herculean task under the best conditions. Effective change would never be a "one and done" operation. It would be great to have a non-profit like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to carry the mantle.
I don’t think collapse is by itself a good predictor of change. People in collapse just bow easier. Change of this scale unfortunately comes from terminal and collective despair. Let’s not rule out either normal change, not every marginal action needs to make things worse. The system might have enough variation still to turn around. In short, despair or its anticipation are not optimal strategies.
I think “regular” VCs are one of the cohorts of people I feel worst for! I have a lot of friends who got into the business wanting to help entrepreneurs, and now they’re stuck on a cap table with folks who they’d never want to do business with. It’s not any different than the founders or employees who don’t want to be saddled with these guys, either.
The hard part is figuring out how to change these structures so that people can actually extract themselves and still build stuff that isn’t toxic and destructive.
I think the root problem is it takes a lot more money and resources to compete now than it did before. Before, due to broadband being new, everyone not already having high performance computing devices, and the quickly decreasing costs of hardware, it was possible to use a skeleton crew and barebones resources to do something impactful. Or you have to be a very, very exceptional performer.
I don't feel bad for VCs. Venture capital has turned the old style of startup entrepreneurship into a financial hustle of Startupism that is about trading equity value and not about venture creation. Maybe it always was about that, but at least in the 1960s-early 2010s it seemed at least somewhat more about business and value creation. Now it all just seems like a financial hustle. I hope we see VC become the minority way that businesses are built and financed as it used to be in the tech industry.
I know milenimals who know how everything works but only check messages every 2 weeks and dont answer if anyone calls. Might play a game once per month, might watch one movie per week.
One guy boots up his pc, looks at one website, closes the tab, closes the browser, shuts down the pc and switches the monitor off. I have to admit the technology looks terrible if used like that.
That's like waiting for domesticated animals to walk of the farm by themselves. Mess resolves itself the same way throughout history when different camps within the elite start saying enough. But there is a process just like abolishing slavery or getting kings to hand over money printing to the central bank. Wasn't driven by the plebs. It takes time because the different camps have to align. The parasites get reigned in eventually because they are in the minority camp.
I'm in a startup, and we are (somewhat lazily) trying to do Series A fundraising. We _are_ a company that has AI as a part of our app, but not an LLM company.
The advice from our early investors was to basically overhype ourselves, telling that we can transform the world overnight. And also to remove any mentions of our _actual_ product that has real paying users because it can muddy the grand vision.
Another hot thing in the startup world is what I'm calling the "vibe income". It's potential income from a signed MOU or contingent on the success of some trial. So we had to compete with companies saying that they're already having $500k in "income" after just a few months. We naïvely thought that our GAAP income is more important.
I have really bad feelings about this whole situation.
Most of the industry is running on bullshit. The concept of running a productive service that meets genuine user needs in a clever, delightful, and satisfying way has been replaced by grifting, scamming, hyping, manipulating, and outright lying - a headless chicken voodoo dance to attract moar moneyz and worship the blind, idiot god Number Go Up.
I have so many thoughts about this, I'm not sure where to start.
Doing a raise has always been weird, there are lots of things that impact it, and different players in PE have totally different theses and motivations.
As a founder, finding the right investment partner has always been one of the most important and difficult things.
As a rule of thumb, I recommend to founders that only about 50% of the value of the investor is their cash investment. In many cases, less than that.
The things that are at least as important are their advisors (who open doors for you), their portfolio companies that can partner with you, and the alignment of their thesis and worldview.
I don't see any of that as having really changed much recently, other than a tightnening of capital for non-AI companies, but I suspect we're going to see a big shift there over the next 18-24 months, as the pressure from the LPs to deploy stays the same, but fingers get burnt from this bubble.
Also, don't forget family offices and industry VCs (Optum Ventures, etc...) that can automatically check off a lot of those things.
It's not our first fundraise, and not our first startup. But something _is_ distinctly different this time. People are no longer willing to wait for years and are betting on nebulous claims in hopes of a huge payout.
And I feel that this goes far beyond the usual VC risk-taking.
Interesting, I'm curious about the changes - I know AI has drawn most of the pump & dump sharks, just like crypto before it, but there were always a set of responsible holdouts that resisted fad-tech for real value opportunities.
Yes, we are working with responsible VCs: endowments and large well-established companies in the field.
It's as if the whole industry is suffering from a high fever. This is purely my personal vibe, perhaps others might chime in with their subjective opinions.
I was part of a couple raises back then and I remember every founder was being forced to find some blockchain application, no matter how inappropriate, to get any attention from the fad-tech VCs
AI is sucking up orders of magnitude more capital than blockchain. So it's not like there is a segment of VCs who are fad-tech and obsessed with AI. The entire ecosystem is distorting around mega-companies and people who can believably say (usually by lying) that they will be a mega-company. And "mega-company" means something much much much bigger than it did even 5 years ago.
I think society at large is increasingly hitting a gambling mindset fueled by algorithms murdering everyone's attention spans and dopamine receptors. Life is also expensive and it's NOT getting cheaper. Combine thag with endless stories of the rich and powerful getting away with heinous acts and most people have stopped caring. They stop caring about the future, they stop caring about any kind of long term thinking, because why would they?
Don't take any sort of business advice from VCs. They aren't even competent at running their own business, which is a financial play, not an operational business building and selling products or services. 90% of VC firms don't provide a net positive return to their own investors. That should tell you something. Their advice is self-serving to help inflate your equity value and has nothing to do with your current or future business.
Hate to sound like a Marxist but... this is what happens when capital has this much power concentrated in so few people. Eventually the system eats itself.
If you're in the right elite at the right time though, you can make a lot of money while everything falls apart underneath
I'm guessing you located are in the bay area? If so, that is one thing under your control that you could change. The early SV VCs didn't build the industry by staying in NY (where the capital concentration at that time was). They had to get away from that scene to do what they did. It might be easier to cut your own lane if you weren't sharing the same turf.
I've been in an interesting spot the last few months. I've pitched probably two dozen or so VCs and, and while almost every case showed interest, it was quickly followed by "rules" and "desires" that were antithetical to the product.
The product I am building is a decentralized trust system. The word "trust" is literally in the name. It requires very specific decisions and a very specific organizational and legal structure to be successful. Why? Because anything else doesn't breed trust.
But that's actually the problem. The VCs don't like those things, because in almost every case it relinquishes their control/power. Or, they ask us to do something either questionably or blatantly unethical in order to sweeten the pot. I was one of those founders "unaware of the Cancer Capital situation." After six months of pitching, it's become extremely obvious to me that the current VC system is incapable of funding anything ethical or long-term.
I don't know what the right answer is from here. Our current attempt is founding a syndicate of like-minded individuals to bootstrap a pre-seed. It seems like the only possibility where you might be able to maintain an ethical vision without fighting a cancerous overlord. We'll see how it goes.
Yeah, you need to look away from private equity investment. Mutuals, co-ops, LLPs, there's lots of other models, but VC and PE money is not where you want to be.
I think the problem is that decentralization is almost by definition antithetical to the ability to capitalize on something. As you indicated, decentralization means diffusion of control and power, which are essential to capitalize on that thing. Why would a VC or any capitalist invest money if they cannot see a way to earn back multiples?
Sure you could make some money, but nowhere near the monopoly profits everyone is seeking. A decentralized Google would never be as profitable as a centralized one, so where would a capitalist prefer putting their money?
IMO this is also why decentralized systems or peer-to-peer applications never really caught on. Some point to technical challenges or usability issues or a lack of use-cases, but I believe all of those could have been overcome with enough investment. There just wasn't enough money in them compared to centralization. (It didn't help that the only really popular systems were almost entirely used for illegal or unproductive purposes.)
And these dynamics over time are what have led to the asymmetric Internet today. The Internet was supposed to be equal, with each node capable of being a client and a server and, heck, even a router. But that's clearly not what we have today: networks hostile to P2P connectivity, increasingly powerful centralized services, and decreasingly capable end-user devices.
Well said. To be fair, there is a proposed healthy income stream to the company proper, and the investors are buying equity in the company (at relatively low scale, >$20M ARR). But that's sort of an "old school" play and it seems most VCs want more than just equity. Or if they do take equity, it comes with some insane pump and dump plan that would destroy the very thing we're building.
But I think the broader point I'm making is that what _is_ making all of the money nowadays is increasingly unethical and counter-productive to society. For example, see Kalshi and co. That, in our experience, is what the VCs are in all of the rage for right now, and as I said it's completely antithetical to our vision.
"Why would a VC or any capitalist invest money if they cannot see a way to earn back multiples?"
Why did Andrew Carnegie invest in building public libraries? Surely it wasn't because he was expecting a capital return.
The oligarchs (at least some of them) used to feel some responsibility to the betterment of man. It really seems like today's billionaires really only care about money and power and nothing else.
As an olive branch, I came in connection with a group (mostly out of Asia) that seems to be more connected by the day (meaning I keep making more mutual connections). They have a very specific vision for capital aimed at funding generational companies whose vision aligns with bettering humanity rather than exploiting it.
They are out there, but unfortunately very much on the fringe because it's difficult to raise money with that ethos.
In case of Andrew Carnegie, it was probably desire at end of his life to been rembered as not only a ruthless businessmen and monopolist.
"Carnegie spent his last years as a philanthropist. From 1901 forward, public attention was turned from the shrewd business acumen which had enabled Carnegie to accumulate such a fortune, to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to using it on philanthropic projects."
It hasn't occurred to you that your idea might not stand on its own? If your product was amazing, serious and highly ethical investors would throw themselves over each other to invest with you. There are many such investors, but they have strict requirements on what they invest in as well.
You don't have any God given right to other people's money for high risk ventures. Neither does anybody else. But it's easy to blame "the system" when things don't go our way.
Not sure how practical for your startup, but how much of the next 18 months can you fund in ways that don't create equity (or implied equity) overlords? Can design-partners prepay? Can you get paid pilots, deposits, a grant?
I was living in SF Bay Area when a16z started. They had good marketing and a good reputation. Their analyst posts were insightful and well received here. My perception of a16z has changed drastically. I’m ashamed just how badly that marketing worked on me in the early years.
Indeed. I was once an Andreesen fan (many years ago). I've been trying to like him despite all the negatives for many years, but reading this I just can't any more.
All the same to me. All of these entities have ruined previous workplaces in one way or another. Effectively stealing years of my life that I put my labor into.
These rich cunts are the reason everything is shittier and the term "enshittification" exists in our modern vernacular
VC was good when a guy with no technical skills raised 10s of millions of dollars. That was when VC was good, right?
This guy has been grifting his entire career but it's those other people who are the problem, guys!
He's not wrong about VC but he's another Chamath - a guy who grifts a thing to death, moves on to the next grift and goes 'look, that grift I'm no longer doing - it's bad, very bad!'
When you get caught stealing candy, saying 'look, he stole more than me!' doesn't work. Were you raised in a human society? I thought people learned these things when they were 7.
If you’re arguing he and I are the same thing, though he’s a VC and spends his time being a podcaster who advocates for the venture industry, and I’m someone who is talking about how power actually works in society, I proposed an easy test of your assertion. Let me know what results you find.
> and I’m someone who is talking about how power actually works in society
He also does this. That's... the entire point of the comparison.
Nice try. Shall we continue to where I start copy/pasting an LLM explaining it to you until you can't pretend to not understand any longer and move on to some other bad faith tactic? I want to see your most advanced bad faith attempt - deflection and playing dumb are for juniors. Show me something good.
I was thinking about this the other day in regard to Flock. There's simply no way this company will fail, despite the public outcry, because the rich people in charge will not _let_ it fail.
Of course it can fail, just like the AI circular investment moves can fail just like the Soviet Union failed. Too much decisive power in too few hands, disconnected from reality, disconnected from competition, disconnected from outside community criticism. It fails open loop. A lot of money can temporarily buffer the failure, but already we see world wide inflation and interest rate increases from the open loop decisions of the most powerful class.
I don't have a sufficient understanding of how North Korea to assess that - too much my information about North Korea is propogandistic sound bites. I do know they have had famines in decades past, and don't think they have them now, so that suggests their economic/industrial strategies are a least passing a minimum threshold of being connected to reality.
Look at Silicon Valley Bank that was also "too big to fail" and when it did the taxpayer had to bail it out. If something is too big to fail, it's too big, the regulator should have stepped in earlier to chop it up.
Wow, TIL a16z hired the NYC subway guy as a partner purely as a political stunt. This on top of the $115M in the midterms, them no longer legally being a VC firm, and recent discussion on dark patterns in their portfolio [1]. I'm inclined to agree with the thesis of the article especially with regards to this firm. Looking forward to the other articles in the series.
a16z has always struck me as the shadiest vc - i associate them with NFT's, crypto and god knows what. They personify the amorality of chasing money over anything (Maybe indicative of SV culture these days in general).
I don't think anything that could even be mentioned as VC despises its own clients as much as a16z. Trying to sell investors on NFTs in 2026 should be criminal.
As someone reading much of what Molly White publishes, there is no short supply of people in crypto that give of the same aura and are f̵i̵n̵a̵n̵c̵i̵n̵g̵ donating to someone that will push their crypto regulation agenda https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/117191164732599820
My absolute regret is that I used to look up to Marc and Ben, in the sense that I felt we were on the same team, trying to build cool new technology. That was a long time ago. It appears now that they've completely lost their way, or they never had a moral compass in the first place. Having met some of the people in those circles, I've never come away with the thought that they were nefarious cartoonishly evil, but this incident with Penny certainly seems to confirm that they in fact, are. What a world. I will now burn their books in my campfire out back, and continue my hopeless search for tech people who have a shred of humanity and compassion.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 9.5 ms ] threadhttps://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/spacex-insiders-will-get-to-...
If the complaint is that people are investing in companies that are a Bad Bet, the solution is simple. Don't buy stocks that are you think are losers. That's the definition of insanity.
If someone wants to blindly invest money with zero diligence, then they have to be willing to accept the returns of a zero diligence bet.
Lots of VCs out there still taking big gambles on the agendaless and unproven ideas.
Any analysis on the asset class is moot.
Most of the VC media is aimed at hiding the fact that its a lottery machine for a pre selected group
Those folks are in these comments. They'll get their pitchforks and torches eventually.
Tyler Cowen is a big component of pre-selecting talented people and not even requiring an idea. I think this is the model of Emergent Ventures (EV), launched in 2018, and is getting replicated in many places.
I think it is regarded as highly successful
Hopefully this one will pass, just as the first did
Firefights with guns, hand-to-hand violence, and real deaths were needed to give unions the leverage they had.
For some reason this history isn't taught in schools.
Why spend the money to build the bigger house when you don’t really enjoy it anyway - when your only motivation is that nobody else’s house is as big.
Third bullet point says "a handful of venture capital firms have become 'do everything' funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses".
Take a look at the bullet points. It's just scattered random conflicting complaints.
VC is small and is now big (okay...)
They're not even VC anymore, they're doing all sorts of other investments (okay and?) Oh and they don't really care about their returns, but they grow fast (what? I'm pretty sure VCs care about returns). You know what else grows fast? Cancer!
Now that they're large, they have power over founders (why? there's other sources of capital). And they use companies to push their politics (seems much more complicated than just paying lobbyists).
And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)
There's an argument against large VC, but this ain't it. Talk about misaligned incentives, how they push aggressive tactics without regard to the founders, who may not be indifferent between a 50% chance of building a company to $10m to a 1% chance of building a company to $1b
Or just say "I don't like the politics of [VC related person]" and save everyone time.
I can understand how the article might conflict with personally held notions and thus might look odd, especially as the weird dealings of the tech accelerationists do not find much press coverage. The only thing I can do is recommending to keep your mind open for new info, the article mentions he will follow up on the bullet points. The author has another previous article [1] that references Paul Krugman's article "The rich are crazier than you and me"[2], that might be an interesting read alongside the other pointers. As an aside, I also recommend to watch the video at the end that goes into Andreessen hiring murderer Daniel Penny.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/opinion/robert-kennedy-jr... 2. https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/
He writes against Big-AI, but supports AI (small?) and copyright theft at the EFF, where he is a board member.
I'm getting tolerated opposition vibes here.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/31/a-group-funded-by-andreess...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/technology/andreessen-hor...
I thought a cancer grew from a defective cell that is able to divide and grow to over take the healthy ones.
>a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts
"A" cancer does not grow from a cell, a cell is a cancer cell if it keeps dividing when it should not. The cancer cells as a collective are the disease referred to as "cancer".
If they had written
"cancer grows from cells that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host"
that would have made more sense to me.
That said, reform would be a Herculean task under the best conditions. Effective change would never be a "one and done" operation. It would be great to have a non-profit like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to carry the mantle.
The Collapse of Lehman Brothers is also not enough for long term change, also apparently.
The hard part is figuring out how to change these structures so that people can actually extract themselves and still build stuff that isn’t toxic and destructive.
Agreed it’s so difficult. And every time I think we have things all figured out, someone flips the table!
I’ve seen some ruthless terms for angels too. My buddy took an uncapped SAFE to get in a deal while the deal runners gave themselves a cap.
I’m a small biz guy and not interested in VC. Very boring.
bix6 alludes to it another comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554814
One guy boots up his pc, looks at one website, closes the tab, closes the browser, shuts down the pc and switches the monitor off. I have to admit the technology looks terrible if used like that.
The advice from our early investors was to basically overhype ourselves, telling that we can transform the world overnight. And also to remove any mentions of our _actual_ product that has real paying users because it can muddy the grand vision.
Another hot thing in the startup world is what I'm calling the "vibe income". It's potential income from a signed MOU or contingent on the success of some trial. So we had to compete with companies saying that they're already having $500k in "income" after just a few months. We naïvely thought that our GAAP income is more important.
I have really bad feelings about this whole situation.
Doing a raise has always been weird, there are lots of things that impact it, and different players in PE have totally different theses and motivations.
As a founder, finding the right investment partner has always been one of the most important and difficult things.
As a rule of thumb, I recommend to founders that only about 50% of the value of the investor is their cash investment. In many cases, less than that.
The things that are at least as important are their advisors (who open doors for you), their portfolio companies that can partner with you, and the alignment of their thesis and worldview.
I don't see any of that as having really changed much recently, other than a tightnening of capital for non-AI companies, but I suspect we're going to see a big shift there over the next 18-24 months, as the pressure from the LPs to deploy stays the same, but fingers get burnt from this bubble.
Also, don't forget family offices and industry VCs (Optum Ventures, etc...) that can automatically check off a lot of those things.
And I feel that this goes far beyond the usual VC risk-taking.
Are you seeing a difference there?
It's as if the whole industry is suffering from a high fever. This is purely my personal vibe, perhaps others might chime in with their subjective opinions.
Mad FOMO, listening to, believing, and benchmarking against actual liars (both obvious and non-obvious).
I was part of a couple raises back then and I remember every founder was being forced to find some blockchain application, no matter how inappropriate, to get any attention from the fad-tech VCs
If you're in the right elite at the right time though, you can make a lot of money while everything falls apart underneath
Can it please finish itself before it eats the table, chairs, and dishes?
The product I am building is a decentralized trust system. The word "trust" is literally in the name. It requires very specific decisions and a very specific organizational and legal structure to be successful. Why? Because anything else doesn't breed trust.
But that's actually the problem. The VCs don't like those things, because in almost every case it relinquishes their control/power. Or, they ask us to do something either questionably or blatantly unethical in order to sweeten the pot. I was one of those founders "unaware of the Cancer Capital situation." After six months of pitching, it's become extremely obvious to me that the current VC system is incapable of funding anything ethical or long-term.
I don't know what the right answer is from here. Our current attempt is founding a syndicate of like-minded individuals to bootstrap a pre-seed. It seems like the only possibility where you might be able to maintain an ethical vision without fighting a cancerous overlord. We'll see how it goes.
Sure you could make some money, but nowhere near the monopoly profits everyone is seeking. A decentralized Google would never be as profitable as a centralized one, so where would a capitalist prefer putting their money?
IMO this is also why decentralized systems or peer-to-peer applications never really caught on. Some point to technical challenges or usability issues or a lack of use-cases, but I believe all of those could have been overcome with enough investment. There just wasn't enough money in them compared to centralization. (It didn't help that the only really popular systems were almost entirely used for illegal or unproductive purposes.)
And these dynamics over time are what have led to the asymmetric Internet today. The Internet was supposed to be equal, with each node capable of being a client and a server and, heck, even a router. But that's clearly not what we have today: networks hostile to P2P connectivity, increasingly powerful centralized services, and decreasingly capable end-user devices.
But I think the broader point I'm making is that what _is_ making all of the money nowadays is increasingly unethical and counter-productive to society. For example, see Kalshi and co. That, in our experience, is what the VCs are in all of the rage for right now, and as I said it's completely antithetical to our vision.
Why did Andrew Carnegie invest in building public libraries? Surely it wasn't because he was expecting a capital return.
The oligarchs (at least some of them) used to feel some responsibility to the betterment of man. It really seems like today's billionaires really only care about money and power and nothing else.
They are out there, but unfortunately very much on the fringe because it's difficult to raise money with that ethos.
"Carnegie spent his last years as a philanthropist. From 1901 forward, public attention was turned from the shrewd business acumen which had enabled Carnegie to accumulate such a fortune, to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to using it on philanthropic projects."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie
Bill Gates is in similar phase of life.
You don't have any God given right to other people's money for high risk ventures. Neither does anybody else. But it's easy to blame "the system" when things don't go our way.
not too long ago we were amazed at Apple hitting $1 trillion mkt cap and elon reaching $100 bil
now we're waiting for the first trillionaires to show up
All the same to me. All of these entities have ruined previous workplaces in one way or another. Effectively stealing years of my life that I put my labor into.
These rich cunts are the reason everything is shittier and the term "enshittification" exists in our modern vernacular
You got a paycheck, no?
This guy has been grifting his entire career but it's those other people who are the problem, guys!
He's not wrong about VC but he's another Chamath - a guy who grifts a thing to death, moves on to the next grift and goes 'look, that grift I'm no longer doing - it's bad, very bad!'
When you get caught stealing candy, saying 'look, he stole more than me!' doesn't work. Were you raised in a human society? I thought people learned these things when they were 7.
He also does this. That's... the entire point of the comparison.
Nice try. Shall we continue to where I start copy/pasting an LLM explaining it to you until you can't pretend to not understand any longer and move on to some other bad faith tactic? I want to see your most advanced bad faith attempt - deflection and playing dumb are for juniors. Show me something good.
It's worth noting North Korea probably is not a failure for Kim Jong Un an his ilk, it's just a failure for most other North Koreans.
That's probably a happy end-state for these "Cancer Capitalists."
We frequently forget “the system” that protects these actors consist of our respect for rule of law and compliance and the enforcement of the laws.
If the cops stop enforcing, and we stop complying, what would protect them?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416055
(this is my crude attempt at karma sharing - I hope that's ok with you!)
I could have sworn that the second posting was automatically collapsed into the first.