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.

This reads like someone who can’t make smart bets “before it’s obvious.”

Lots of VCs out there still taking big gambles on the agendaless and unproven ideas.

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 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.

  > 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.

Aka, the classic dynamic of wealth concentration results in power concentration. Great article. One thing it does not mention is how much this small circle of people have got zero-sum leverage over the whole country, because when the surveillance economy collapses, America collapses. This wouldn't be the first time the oligarchy triggers a crisis with reckless financial games.

I’m skeptical of the implicit claim that they’re all the same. It seems rather difficult to prove?

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, so they're not even VC anymore (okay and?) Oh and they don't really care about their returns, but they grow fast (what?). 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. Just say "I don't like the politics of [VC related person]" and save everyone time.