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Comment by palmotea

10 hours ago

> Again, VCs don't care if you'll make a profitable business some day. They're just interested in if someone else will come along and pay out giant bags of cash for it later in a liquidity event. If they get even one of those successes, all the stupid GH star watching pays off.

And if that's true, they should be slapped, hard. They're no longer performing a socially useful function, and and have degraded towards pure financialization. Some middleman between fools and their money.

As much as I don't like Altman, VC should be pumping money into startups like Helios--companies pursuing cutting-edge technology that could totally fail (yes, that's an organic em-dash).

8 comments

palmotea

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nradov  6 hours ago

You should start your own VC firm, solicit cash from LPs, and invest in companies like Helios. Go ahead, no one will stop you.

antonvs  5 hours ago

Helios? Altman? I think you mean Helion, the fusion company, not Helios (quantum computers). Either way, that’s a pretty hilarious example to use when you’re criticizing VC foolishness. Anyone doing due diligence wouldn’t go near those companies.

Spoiler alert: commercial fusion power may not be practical at all, but if it is, the timescales to delivery are measured in numbers closer to centuries than decades. Don’t fall for the hype generated to sucker those VCs you’re talking about.

cmrdporcupine  10 hours ago

I don't think there's ever been an argument that anybody in a free market capitalist economy has to perform a "socially useful function"?

I do think that ZiRP distorted things extremely badly. There's an entire generation in this software industry that lives around the business-culture expectations set during that time which as far as I could see basically amounted to "I build Uber but for X" (where X is some new business domain).

Perhaps after a bit of a painful interregnum things will be a bit different now that rates are higher and risk along with it.

Also anybody can throw a SaaS together in a few days now. Separating the wheat from the chaff in the next few years will be... interesting.

  • palmotea  10 hours ago

    > I don't think there's ever been an argument that anybody in a free market capitalist economy has to perform a "socially useful function"?

    That's a extremely strong statement, and may only be true in libertarian-land, where pure capitalism is a god to be worshiped and "good" has been redefined to be "whatever the unregulated free market does."

    But in the real world, capitalism is a tool to perform socially useful functions (see the marketing about how it was better able to do that than Soviet central planning). When it fails, it should be patched by regulation (and often is) to push participants into socially useful actions, or at least discourage socially harmful ones.