In the end I made my million(th) sitting behind a cubicle collecting 401k which none of those startups gave me.
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
> Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans
> The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms
> These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice
> Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues.
Hopefully this one will pass, just as the first did
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.
> And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)
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.
You sound like a pretty good dude
The study of Ethics is such a double edged sword. On one hand you have people who study ethics to think about how to treat people well, on the other hand you have people who study ethics in order to treat people as poorly as possible while still being "ethical"
I don't have a ton of firsthand exposure to the decision making process of huge corporations, but I imagine they mostly listen to the second group of ethicists
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.
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
Pretty insane from 100 billion in 2020 to 1 trillion in 2026.
Not a sign of a supremely broken system at all
and I'm not an Elon hater, I just don't see how this system can be sustained
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!'
The game is rigged, operate accordingly. You are managing risk and threat exposure against threat actors who want to obtain and maintain control, influence, and power.
We need an equivalent of the "Fiduciary" word for financial advisors ... but applied to VCs.
"Are you an Artisanal, Free-Range, Fair-Trade™ VC?"
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/spacex-insiders-will-get-to-...
15 days - Pump: get into indexes -> ETFs obligated to buy shares
After - Dump: insiders cash out benefiting from the price premium of demand for shares from ETFs
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.
Those folks are in these comments. They'll get their pitchforks and torches eventually.
Tyler Cowen is a big proponent 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
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.
It’s inherent with true capitalism. You have to be willing to forego some profit to actually treat people right and for some that’s just too much.
> 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
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.
bix6 alludes to it another comment:
I do find myself enjoying my computer / phone less these days though.
I just had a medical emergency in a foreign country and was able to navigate it with relative ease and almost no cost using translation features. I was able to scan and OCR documents with my phone camera which let me easily submit insurance claims, yada yada, a lot of things are much easier and cheaper in this day and age.
I stay away from the "news" websites (ironic given this site is called Hacker News, but it's not as monetized, so I guess it still works) and instagram/tiktok/youtube shorts/x style stuff.
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 have 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.
If you're in the right elite at the right time though, you can make a lot of money while everything falls apart underneath
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.
palata•20h ago
I didn't know that VCs were ever "not cancer", I've always known them like that. Also my experience with startups is that it is a big scam for employees, but I understand it's not always the case (maybe it depends on where in the world?). I have been an early employee in multiple startups that got the founders rich, and what I got from the stocks didn't compensate for the low salary while working there.
Do I understand correctly that when VCs invest, they dilute the employees and somehow the founders can get away without being diluted? That's the only way I could explain the difference between what the employees get and what the founders get if the startup is successful.
And young people are super excited to work in startups because of old stories like "early employees at Google/Facebook became rich", I guess.
cratermoon•4h ago
palata•3h ago
sershe•55m ago
palata•45m ago
Would you mind asking before saying what I have been promised?
Also it feels like you have never been in a startup. The whole language of growth everywhere, the "billion-dollar startup", the "becoming a unicorn", this is all suggesting that "you're part of it and it matters to you if it becomes a unicorn". But it doesn't, really. Because you get diluted.
BeetleB•27m ago
At this day and age, if you don't understand dilution before you join, it's entirely on you.
This isn't a new concept - it was the case decades ago. Even when I left school over 15 years ago, the standard advice when trying to get a job with a startup was "Get a good salary and value the equity at zero."
And class A vs class B isn't even a rich vs everyone else thing. I have class A shares in an LLC, where even the (richer) founders are class B. The operating agreement is that we class A folks are "guaranteed" a fixed rate of return on our investment, and the class B folks don't get anything unless we get at least that rate of return. This is very normal in that industry.
cyberax•50m ago