This thing! VC was supposed to be the way hard, high-risk/high-value, technically complex, academically-rooted ideas got turned into businesses—because they had no other way to get capital, no collateral for loans, and weren't done cooking the product. It wasn't for *everything*.
I have friends and clients in the game, and I was willing to entertain the idea that it's a way to do some stuff that might be useful and hard to get off the ground otherwise, but without any sort of check, it's monstrous and should no way be the default perspective on technology/business/the world.
But then regulations changed to let institutional investors pour money into venture funds, the law allowed universities to make money from professors' discoveries, and a few VC-funded inventions made a few reactionary people into gazillionaires, and now here we are.
Feb 4, 2026 20:20
