Comment by seattleeng
2 days ago
I think you're almost right
I suspect its more a structural issue
e.g. because of Big VC (a16z, other firms with dozens or hundreds of investing staff), VCs don't stick around firms long enough for real returns (cash distributed) to matter. If you're at a place and your stuff is marked up 10x after 4 years, you just hop to become a GP and try to ride the next markup wave. Even if these people exit VC after 10 years that is still 10 years of deals that all flopped.
This might not even be the individual VC's fault -- there may just be too many venture dollars chasing too few power law returns, so you get a surge of startups circa 2019-2022 that all disappear
> This might not even be the individual VC's fault -- there may just be too many venture dollars chasing too few power law returns, so you get a surge of startups circa 2019-2022 that all disappear
This feels right to me: the common trend between the dotcom bubble, mortgage bubble, tech bubble, blockchain bubble, and now the AI bubble has been big investors very high returns to make up for previous losses, like a gambler trying to win back, and it’s destroyed a lot of companies which had an idea which could have been a sustainable medium-size business but were funded and tried to grow as the next Google/Facebook without apparent recognition of how unusual advertising is for the ability to grow profits rapidly without scaling costs at the same rate.