Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Based on my experience with venture capital, I’m not convinced venture capital has ever produced anything worthwhile.
Couldn’t agree more. My takeaway from three years working at a VC is that investors are fucking idiots, and lying to get investment is basically normal.
My favorite anecdote from “the cold start problem” is how zoom got funding not because they thought it was a good idea - the investors thought it was a solved problem - but because they were personally friends with the founder of zoom.
That’s the quality of decisions we’re dealing with.
Hey now. It produced a ton of Ferraris.
Good point!
That’s a bit myopic. VC is just a fancy word for large financial backer.
You can basically credit the entire age of discovery (America, Australia, etc.) to “VC” in the form of kings and wealthy elite financing voyages.
I think modern VC goes awry when they become defacto decision makers for the venture in question.
Except for funding the majority of the companies that exist, you mean
Post-1980s tech companies maybe. But not most companies, no.
Well, yeah, it didn’t really exist before the 1970s in its current form. But it’s not just tech, other companies like FedEx also got VC funding in the early stages
By shear numbers, most companies are small mom and pop owned businesses.
Most market theory (ignoring Chicago school bullshit) strongly suggests the VC-started companies that exist today would have been replaced by an exactly equivalent company if the VCs had not been available.
Even for the huge number of companies that have used venture capital, the current evidence I’m aware of suggests that everyone involved ends up worse off: company owners, company leaders, employees, competitors, customers - and now we’re learning that even the venture capital investors, themselves usually end up worse off.
Source: I had to do my homework to decide whether to get involved with VC, and I leapt to the (perhaps stunningly precient /s) conclusion that an effort making almost everyone worse off was probably not actually going to make me better off.