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.
I'm just gonna be straight up that probably none of you have any real experience with VC. Just statistically, it's probably the case. It's anecdotal, but I want to share my story.
I helped found a company about three years ago. It's a software/ services company that focuses on specific kinds of climate change risk. No I won't tell you who we are. Anyways, me and my cofounders are first time founders, although we both have built business segments within companies, this was our first time in our own. We did try for VC that first year. We basically got rejected all around. What I learned is that the basic function of VC isn't to fund good ideas. It's a filter to keep opportunities in the hands of those who already have them. It's a kind of social filter to make sure only the "right" kind of people get funded. It's pure credentialism and institutionalism. Anyways, several of our competitors took the cash. As a result, they ballooned in head count and we're forced to do things the way the vcs expected them to. As a result, almost all of these companies failed or pivoted. We didn't get funded. We got rejected by all fronts. Instead we just built our client base one brick at a time. Well, now their customers are our customers. We're signing deals with the big names and still haven't taken VC money. We've got the best in class technology and they are bleeding money.
VC is a poison pill. It's not there to drive innovation but to filter down who has access to opportunities. Their ideas about what works or doesn't are bad, and largely driven by the culture they are apart of. They worship elitism and credentials, but will the respect for those who are willing to do the work. It's inherently extractive. They add nothing. Want to kill a business? Take VC money.
Kind of right but of course it's not just a filter to make sure the right kind of people get funded.
But it is a bet that only matters if it pays 100 or 1000x. If it's not paying that it's as good as 0. That's why, most of the times, vc money does not benefit the company, unless it manages to have that insane level of growth. It's also frequently not in the best interest of the founder.
This right here has been my experience with VC. I was working for an online retail startup when 9/11 happened. Within days, we were all called into the office to be told we were shutting down because the VCs pulled our funding. This despite the fact that we were only two months away from projected profitability and beating our sales projections every single month. But we weren't the biggest paying bet in the casino, so they dumped us when the cash flow got tight.
That would have been a successful company, but it wasn't good enough for the VC class.
It’s pure credentialism and institutionalism.
Not a coincidence that folks with Ivy League degrees get showered with money, while kids from state schools end up doing all the drudge work that keeps infrastructure running.
VC is a poison pill. It’s not there to drive innovation but to filter down who has access to opportunities. Their ideas about what works or doesn’t are bad, and largely driven by the culture they are apart of. They worship elitism and credentials, but will the respect for those who are willing to do the work. It’s inherently extractive. They add nothing. Want to kill a business? Take VC money.
Its an excellent way to cash out of a mediocre idea. Also an excellent way to elevate a mediocre idea from a regional/niche/insider scam to a national stage.
Like most elements of our meritocracy
This comment doesn't even pass the smell test.
If every company that took VC money failed, VCs wouldn't make any money.
The reality is MOST VC investments fail, but the few who make it are home runs. This is how they make money. The risk/reward of your company was just not a favorable investment for them. Whether it's because you went to an Ivy League or not is irrelevant.
Without VCs, many of those homeruns would never be able to get off the ground and the US economy would be significantly less dynamic
You are free to take your great idea to VC and see if they get funded bro. I think they are a complete joke at this point.
I don't have a good business idea, not everyone has to. That's not even what we're talking about.
VC is clearly not "a joke". All you have to do is Google "major companies that took VC funding" to see the impact of it. Of course this leaves out the thousands of others that failed, but long term the winners are going to have a very positive impact on driving innovation.
You may say "those companies would have succeeded anyway" and maybe so, but I doubt it would have happened nearly as fast, if at all.
VC today isn't VC 20 years ago isnt VC 40 years ago.
VC today has ridiculous expectations on ROI and it re-enforces poor decision making, which, imo, brings down companies that might otherwise have been successful. Its part of a culture that was propped up by access to ridiculously cheap money. Modern VC is a dice roll at best, maybe worse.
The final summary of the article you linked:
"Using 105,950 observations from 32 different studies we find that CVC investments are performance enhancing, for both corporations and start-ups. Our results detect that time, country, and industry moderate the effects. Especially after the Dotcom bubble burst, high performance is detected. Similarly, the performance in the U.S. outreaches the performance of other countries. Due to the high risk of successfully developing a pharmaceutical drug, no statistically significant effect of CVC investments in the health care industry is observed. As expected, strategic performance outperforms financial impacts. Although there is good rationale for a clear strategic focus, the finding that CVC investment does not lead to stronger financial performance is surprising and urges practitioners to rethink their CVC objectives and approach"
Disregarding the fact that this is only looking at CVCs and not traditional VCs, I don't think this really supports your argument that it is a dice roll at best. Seems to me like it is broadly beneficial with some caveats.
Without VCs, many of those homeruns would never be able to get off the ground and the US economy would be significantly less dynamic
Um if we instead taxed those VCs setup a government fund and grant program instead you would have greater innovation, more equitable access and a better solution. VCs siphon IP and manage where wealth can be consolidated, it's a pretty basic concept.
I believe we already do this to some extent. There are government funded grants for all kinds of things. I guess you just want more of that? I think you have to be careful, because that starts to look like the government picking a lot of winners and losers in private industry. Ripe for misallocation of resources.
For everyone debating numbers, billionaires, millionaires, whatever. The absolute numbers are irrelevant, what matters is the wealth gap. If the absolute top of the wealth pyramid, 0.01%, earns more than the bottom 5% combined, it's a problem. A bigger ratio means more wealth concentration, or inequality, whichever term you prefer. The 1% controlling nearly half the wealth of any place, whether city, state or nation, should sound all alarms to do something ASAP to reduce the inequality.
Which never happens, because when you have that much money, you call the shots. Capitalism became a neofeudalism.
I'm gonna say what the author - as well as many here - don't dare to.
We all know modern capitalism is bad, many know capitalism in general is bad and its modern form is inevitable, but that's magically where people stop.
I'm gonna say it. We need to revisit socialism. This is the only way.
What ultimately helped to solve the issue luddites have raised is the rise of socialist agenda, the idea of secure workplace, fair pay, and technology bringing equal prosperity for everyone.
You can relate to socialism whichever way you want, but through the previous industrial revolution the socialist rise was the thing that finally delivered that prosperity, even in capitalist countries, and allowed people to actually benefit from progress. When first states turned socialist, we suddenly got fairer working conditions, free education and healthcare (except for redscared America), and yes - a giant boost in prosperity and equality.
Now, on the brink of the next technological revolution, we either allow those on the top to reap everything they can, or we fight back again to reclaim technology for the benefit of everyone. And socialism is the structure allowing us to do the latter.
We should return to that discourse, no matter how much red scare we face to this day. Saying capitalism is bad is not gonna hurt them. Saying "capitalism is bad, and here's an alternative" will.
I agree.
Like, more people should ask themselves, what is the function of a society? Is it to merely deliver wealth to the ruling class? Is it to create endless growth for corporations? Is it to maintain the status quo at all costs?
No, when all is said and done, the core fundamental of society should be the following, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" meaning, if you are able to be a good teacher/ doctor/ engineer/ farmer/ programmer/ writer etc etc then do that. Do what you do well. Society requires all of the above to function effectively. However, on the other hand, as a reward or payment for this, you should be guaranteed all the things that a human needs, like housing, education, medical care, heat, food, water, transport, electricity, internet access etc.
Make sure everyone has at least what they need, so that people can then focus on what they want and like.
Now, the above lacks nuance and is probably a huge over simplification, but I truly believe modern society should be more in line with this philosophy. But it's not. It is largely designed to send wealth and profit to the 1% and everyone else be damned. And there is no good justifiable reason for it.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for 43 billion. His standard of living didn't change not one iota after the transaction. All he's done is piss people off and drive away staff and users alike since then. He doesn't need 43 billion. Heck, he doesn't even need 1 billion. How many people could be given a home, an education, a clean bill of health with that money. It sickens me to think about it.
But then, if you mention socialism or communism or Marx or Engels, then suddenly, you are the devil incarnate. Like, we don't need to be saluting statues of Lenin or or adding a hammer and sickle to flags, but maybe just implementing legislation that undoes that money siphon from the working class and ensures people have what they need isn't such an evil idea ffs.
Anyhow, feel free to downvote, just my thoughts.
Nothing to downvote, that's spot on
Do you have sources where I can read more about this line of thought?
This is a complex thought, but if you refer particularly to socialism and technology, here are some off the top of my head.
General academic overview: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455750600704638
Video essays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRepEvmCCIg
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=NRepEvmCCIg
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=6WwHvNDrGV0
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Good bot
The socialist rise has been also asociated with stagnation, hunger, neighbors turning neighbors to the secret police, and at least 20 year wide gap in the mindsets of people compared to their western peers. It's inherently violent, authoritarian ideology. It's rising popularity in the developed world is similar tragedy as a rise of fascism. Another violent authoritarian ideology.
Capitalism has been also associated with stagnation(recessions, austerity, stagflation or economies such as Japan's), hunger(poverty, famines), neighbours turning neighbours to secret police(Americans reporting people who have gotten abortions), and at least 20 year wide gap in the mindsets of people compared to their western peers(read this one as conservative Americans and other similar countries vs more liberal and social democracy style countries). It's inherently violent(state violence eg. police in protecting property), authoritarian ideology. Facisms rising popularity in the developed world is a feature of capatilim.
The capitalist rise has been associated with exploitation, mass executions, imperialist wars, banana republics, extension of international slavery, human trafficking, and inhumane living and working conditions for workers (not only for slaves, mind you). Lots of unchecked power and lack of historical precendents have a tendency to build flawed societies, that's no secret.
But, just as with the history of capitalism, now we can learn from the mistakes made and correct the course. We have positive examples (early USSR driven internally by worker's councils, i.e., well, Soviets; Chile with democratically elected socialist leadership; Yugoslavia with League of Communists being elected by the people and republical committees; et cetera et cetera), and we have negative ones (Stalin's USSR, Mao's China etc.). We know what to do, and we are not doomed to repeat this in whole, just as we don't have to come back to slavery despite it being present in capitalist societies before.
On the economic side, a lot of it stems from the original disparity in the amount of capital, so just tracing who got more at the end isn't fair; what is fair is to compare economic dynamics, and on that part socialism wins hands down, especially in times of an industrial revolution. Socialism allows for a rapid change, it is the system that produced some of the highest GDP growths ever recorded, it is the system that took people out of the poverty loop and dustributed the new gains fairly.
But what we're left with if we continue our course under capitalism? Continued concentration of wealth and unchecked power of certain people over our economy. Those people were not elected, they are not responsible to us, they can do what they please with the capital they have accumulated. And they always get more and more, not just in absolute numbers, but percentage-wise too. This goes in full accordance with an economic theory, and this trend will not change any time in the future.
So essentially we're left to three choices:
-Continue with status quo and end up under the control of unelected people with unchecked power (see the first paragraph)
-"Starting again", forcefully redistributing wealth back to an equal state, only to come to this point again later on
-Building a functioning socialist society and finally moving on to the new chapter in the development of humanity.
What do you pick?
What we have now is barely capitalism. Back in the day, companies actually competed. Microsoft wouldn't make a good version of Word for Mac, so Apple reverse engineered the format and created their own office suite that interoperated.
If anyone tried something like that now they'd get sued or get bought. In fact, the practice of simply buying potential competitors is fairly common. Facebook buying upstart social media app Instagram is just one example.
If there's no competition, markets can't work. And to have competition you need to let businesses fail. And to let businesses fail you need a robust safety net so people aren't destitute when some idiot like Musk drives a company into the ground.
What we have now is barely capitalism.
We have some of the most naked and predatory methods of rent seeking imaginable. How on earth is this "barely" capitalism? It is quintessential capitalism. A near-perfect engine of consolidation, profit-seeking, and value growth.
Back in the day, companies actually competed
Competition isn't the goal of existing capitalist enterprises. It raises unit costs and dilutes profit. Competition is only a means by which a large enterprise temporarily undercuts a smaller local enterprise, until it is starved of revenue and fails. To quote Peter Thiel, "Monopoly is the condition of every successful business."
If there’s no competition, markets can’t work.
The purpose of markets is to marry nodes in the supply chain at an auction rate. But once the marriages are made, the market no longer serves a purpose. Markets are only a transitory vehicle leading to full vertical integration of the supply chain.
Once you've achieved a vertical monopoly, your business model pivots to maximizing margins by raising prices and lowering costs. That's how you maximize profits. And maximizing profits is the only real goal of a private business enterprise.
you need a robust safety net so people aren’t destitute when some idiot like Musk drives a company into the ground
You don't want a robust safety net in a capitalist system. Safety nets create a subsidy for unemployment - functionally a wage floor, beyond which people would prefer to be unemployed. Without the threat of poverty hanging over a worker's head, you won't get the lowest possible wage rate for their labor. This drives up costs and cuts into profits, which is antithetical to the goals of a capitalist enterprise.
Musk driving his business into the ground serves the end goals of a capitalist system overall (even if it marginally inconveniences Musk and his lenders in the moment). The failure of his firm releases workers into the unemployment pool and allows competitors to hire them at a discount - potentially displacing existing workers who command a higher salary. While Musk's business flounders, the overall auto market prospers. The profit generated in an individual vehicle sale rises, as supply of vehicles contracts - driving prices up - and cost of labor falls - driving unit costs down.
This is good for the surviving pool of capitalists. Its even good for Musk, over the long term, as a higher rate of profit means more cheap money in the investment pool that he can borrow from in order to pursue his next project.
I'm fucking sick after reading this, where can I learn more?
Wait till you see the shit they pull on Wall Street with your 401k and the market in general. Did you know 90% of trades occur off market and do not hit the tape to affect the prices of stocks? Did you know Bernie Madoffs' invention of payment for order flow is the default model in your market now? Did you know market makers have an exemption to create fake shares for "liquidities" sake. Did you know if you aren't selling or buying in lots greater than 100 you most likely do not effect a stocks price if you are buying with a broker utilizing pfof (basically all of them) yet your financial news will claim retail moves markets.
Community college Econ courses?
If you want a dose of memes with it you could always read the superstonk dd library on the stock market as well.
What do you think other word processors do today? Libreoffice?
No true scotsman would say such a thing.
AppleWorks was never really competitive. But there was a time when Word Perfect and MS Word competed. Even that competition wasn’t decided on merit though. MS leveraged their Windows OS to preference their office suite until all others faded. By then, PDF and the web had stolen a lot of Word’s use cases anyway.
I think we might have to go further back to find good examples. But even then, look at a jackass like Thomas Edison litigating his competition out of business, stealing their secrets, buying them out. This shit goes way back.
I work in a consulting role and the company I am currently working for is a vc funded provider group specialty healthcare docs. It’s all about volume. They’re completely inept in the way they’re running the company. They are incapable of making decisions that need to be made for the future of the organization so they keep pushing them down the road and papering over the terrible fundamentals because for them it’s all about hoovering up practices to gain market power. Everyone is miserable and always fighting at the highest levels. No one has authority over the organization. And people in lower rungs of the org have some of the worst insticts and are rewarded for it. VCs are making bad businesses significantly worse. They all operate under the same fundamental logic:
Get big enough at all costs until you are undeniable.
Jack up prices.
Then reduce the labor force to reap short term profits.
Then sell off to a bigger player without any regard for how the chips fall.
Or keep getting so big that you are unmanageable.
Consumers suffer.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Don't forget if you can get them to ipo, open a family office and setup some equity swaps with the bank to short over the float of the company without having to report it and rake in profit as they collapse from your untenable growth targets as well while letting the ip get gobbled up by your big chips and find the next sucker pitching his 'big idea'.
The American Dream.
Who are all these extremist wackos who don't already want to abolish capitalism?
How about we just regulate the companies instead. I know, it’s shocking to all of the Americans here, but just think about it. When companies are allowed to do whatever they want, it’s like being locked in a cage with a psychopath.
Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. It’s not perfect, but neither is any other system.
You’re confusing capitalism with industrialization.
The development of modern modes of production came about nearly two centuries after the foundation of modern marketplace practices. The Dutch East India Company did not bring people out of poverty. Just the opposite. It served as a means of rapidly conquering and subjugating large indigenous populations, by using the speculative bubbles created during periods of looting to construct large militaries capable of further conquest. The rapid militarization and trans-continental looting/pillaging of the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in the increased spread of contagious disease, the worst genocides committed since at least the Roman era, and the formalization of Colonial Era chattel slavery.
Industrialization, which was a product of the mathematical and material sciences renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, produced huge surpluses in commercial goods and services. Revolutions in textile manufacturing, fertilization, fossil fuel-based transportation and electrification, materials sciences, and medical innovation brought hundreds of millions of people out of the agricultural economy and brought a functional end to a litany of common causes of death. The industrial era was not specific to the capitalist economic mode, but it was practiced most aggressively early on by capitalist states.
But the Industrial Revolution had a huge knock-on effect. Mass media and modern communication reoriented traditional class hierarchies and formed new models for social organization. The seed of socialist theories that had been planted in the 17th and 18th centuries blossomed into massive revolutionary labor movements during the 19th and 20th centuries. This, combined with the industrial collapse of the imperial core in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, signaled the beginning of the end of capitalism as a hegemonic economic force.
By the 1950s, numerous socialist political experiments produced successful industrialized civilizations, some of which even persist into the modern era. Meanwhile, rising standards of living from industrial surpluses in food, fuel, and living space raised living standards globally without regard to one’s economic mode.
The real test of capitalism as an enterprise has kicked in during the last 50 years. By the 1970s, the era of cheap fossil fuel was coming to an end and various economic models were forced to contend with a declining rate of new surplus goods and services. Forced to choose between economic conservation/improved efficiency and a new wave of imperial aggression, the capitalist states have attempted to backpedal into their old traditional colonial models of business. The end result has been a new generation of major military conflicts - from the Vietnamese Jungle to the Iraqi desert - alongside a number of ugly civil wars and domestic insurrections in former capitalist strongholds.
Without a continuous industrial surplus to drive profit, modern capitalist economic models are failing. Quality of life in capitalist states is beginning to decline. And capitalist leaders are turning to more militant methods of seizing natural resources, forcing low-wage labor, and wrecklessly disposing of excess waste.
Capitalism rode the cresting wave of industrialization for a century. But now it is failing. And people in capitalist states - from the UK to Saudi Arabia to the Philippines - are seeing their quality of life erode away at a rapid pace.
Kind of need a valid replacement.
Edit The amount of downvotes versus provision of a valid replacement is telling
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.
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.
VC accomplishments:
✅ Genocide
Hey now. It produced a ton of Ferraris.
Good point!
Except for funding the majority of the companies that exist, you mean
By shear numbers, most companies are small mom and pop owned businesses.
Edit: The VC shills are out in force. Go read an economics paper if you're serious about learning something.
Do you have a source for the claim that VC funded companies would have been replaced by equivalent companies if VCs did not exist? I find that somewhat hard to believe.
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
lol oh yes billionaires care about ethics
They look at ethics the same way I look at any mushroom: with disgust and with plenty of shuttering.
I'm just imagining you hating mushrooms so much, you're up for surrounding it in shuttering and pouring concrete over it
Dizzy Devil Ducky is a mushroom buster
But why would they want any change? You not going to talk these people out of been greedy sociopaths
The concept of loaning money to start a business is just fine.
The culture of venture capital, especially as exemplified by bloody dochebags like Marc Andreesen, is what’s toxic and should be stamped out.
Venture capital isn't "loaning money" though. The structure of the deal is fundamentally different from the terms you'd get from the bank. The bank wants principal + interest. VC wants people in your boardroom and a share of the company itself.
IDK if this difference seems subtle, but it's massive when it comes to the outcome of any company that currently makes a decent product and then gets tainted by the VC poison.
And yes, I agree that a standard loan is perfectly okay. Without that share of the company on the table, the lender can't steer the company off a cliff to increase its profits.
Yeah you’re quite right. Money is given in both cases but what’s expected in return is quite different. Bank debt needs to start getting paid back immediately. Venture capital is potentially never paid back.
The annoying thing about VC is how they fund 20 different things expecting 19 to fail and 1 to grow 100x. They either want to see you grow 100x or die trying. This does not create healthy businesses and in fact encourages finding ways to raid certain areas of the economy for a quick capture of wealth.
As a simple example, I work on a very large app that provides a key service that unlocks access to wealth. We spend a lot of time trying to ensure we serve people equitably. Sometimes this means not just doing the thing that the wealthiest and most powerful 20% of people want, but also serving the other 80% of people. Other times it means not settling for something that’s good enough for the 80% of people who are easiest to serve, but also paying attention to the other 20% of people and their exceptional, hard to solve needs.
VCs don’t want you to do all that. They want you to get into bed with the wealthiest 20% of people and serve 80% of their needs, and then leave.
If your service provides value, doing this reinforces existing power structures. Of course the wealthiest and best enabled people make the most lucrative customers. Serving only them makes them even MORE wealthy and enabled. It’s a bad spiral.
VC doesn’t give a shit. They live to feed that spiral and run away with the cash.
If you really want to see where the poorest and least enabled 20% of people go to get their needs met, it’s the government and public trust. Not fucking big tech. Where’s the big tech VC venture that’s going to solve homelessness, Marc??? Show me the money on that one.
I know they're just trying to sound clever but what a dumb framing. "Oh ho ho Greta Thunberg, you want immediate change, let's nuke the North Pole! Not so into immediate change now, are you?"
Obviously people don't want a thing that vaguely aligns with a phrase they use but which is 100% antithetical to their interests.
Of course they'd be against it. It's basically a free money machine, once you get into it
Getting pretty tired of seeing people skirt around the issue and instead of zooming out a little more and seeing the big picture, are surrendering to existence under capitalism, and make a living telling us how to make the "best" of it (like they're convinced they are? I'm not even sure anymore).
Hey tech billionaires, if you want to talk about radical change, let’s abolish
venturecapitalismImagine that being delivered like a cartoon cigar to all 2000+ of them, and it exploding off their face. That would actually be fucking radical, not this bullshit…
Oh yes. Tethics.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In his new self-published Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Andreessen presents his case for the advancement of technology under capitalism as “virtuous” and capable of creating “abundance that lifts all humans”.
Along the way he champions trickle-down economics (famously effective at increasing inequality), claims technology can solve any problem and suggests that slowing AI development is akin to murder.
Andreessen lambasts academia for being “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences”.
Echoes can be heard of Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous former motto: move fast and break things, of Sam Altman comparing OpenAI to the Manhattan Project, and of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ shared vision of space colonisation.
The future that tech elites imagine looks remarkably similar to the one we’re in: unchecked power, consolidated wealth, low regulation and minimal consequences when technology proves to be harmful.
It is possible for technology to play a prominent and positive role in our collective future but this won’t happen by succumbing to a wilfully ignorant, starry-eyed vision of optimism.
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