That game is ending.

Large companies now use AI-assisted development teams that can launch your innovative B2B solutions in weeks. Why acquire when their internal team can look at your pitch deck and build a version while you're still raising Series A? Look at recent YC batches, how many AI wrapper companies? How many "Slack for X industry" startups? These ideas aren't bad, they're just not bold, and enterprise teams can now execute them internally faster than startups can scale them. When innovation becomes commoditized, acquisition becomes a luxury enterprises can't justify.

Bold startups usually fundamentally changes business models. The defensibility is in creating systems existing players can't replicate without cannibalizing their revenue streams. Many dominating products are fundamentally extractive in nature. They're designed around maximizing revenue extraction rather than user value creation. When you build something that prioritizes genuine user benefit over exploitation, bold startups expose this fundamental misalignment. A truly better product becomes its own form of market leverage through user-centric design, not artificial scarcity or vendor lock-in.

Meanwhile, we've trained an entire generation of founders to think small. Build something an enterprise might want. Don't disrupt too much. Focus on product-market fit within existing frameworks. Instead of "what impossible thing can we build," it became "what incremental improvement can we sell to Microsoft." This is capital allocation following the path of least resistance. B2B acquisitions looked safer than consumer moonshots.

The world desperately needs better consumer products, but VCs have largely abandoned the space out of fear. Look at what Instagram and TikTok have done to human behavior, addiction driven engagement that's literally rewiring our brains for dopamine hits and shortened attention spans. Spotify has systematically destroyed music economics, paying artists fractions of pennies while training listeners to devalue music entirely. These platforms represent billions of users normalizing fundamentally broken products that make their lives worse. Yet instead of funding someone to take on the giants directly, VCs would rather back an AI wrapper for internal HR teams. We've become so risk-averse that startups optimize the broken system rather than replace it.

I've even seen YouTube videos of YC executives (eerrhhmm, Dalton) dismissing consumer products as dead ends, clearly still traumatized by his own past music startup failures when major labels were run by old man gatekeepers. But these same record labels are now run by millennials who understand how the internet works. These same record labels can't even break artists on their own and depend heavily on artists to use these terrible consumer apps to get traction, leading to even more low hanging music output that these labels invest in, which further normalizes the worst parts of our society. Everything is in lockstep with bad decisions that stem from the fear of being bold in the tech space.

Now VCs face a choice: keep funding acquisition plays that big tech can now build internally, or get back to funding the crazy ideas. The garage innovators are building again. The barriers to creating genuinely new systems have never been lower, but spotting these companies requires VCs to remember what they were originally for, funding ideas too weird, too ambitious, or too disruptive for traditional capital markets.

Will VCs evolve with it, or get disrupted by firms that will?