Comment by walterbell
11 years ago
http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepre...
"...the balance of power between investors and entrepreneurs that marks the early, frontier days of a major technology wave (Moore’s Law and the Internet in this case) has fallen apart. Investors have won, and their dealings with the entrepreneur class now look far more like the dealings between management and labor (with overtones of parent/child and teacher/student). Those who are attracted to true entrepreneurship are figuring out new ways to work around the traditional investor class. The investor class in turn is struggling to deal with the unpleasant consequences of an outright victory..."
This sounds contradicted to the mathematics/empirical/quantitative observations. Startups built on texting two alphabetic characters are attracting million dollar financing rounds. Startups based on erased timeouts of texts are declining 3 billion dolllar acquisition offers. VCs are trying to get deal flow by building the reputation of being the most helpful to entreprenuers. Interest rates are at historic lows and hundred billion dollar pension and mutual funds are pouring money into every 1st to 3rd tier vc to chase returns. tl;dr...this sounds like some bs.
The privilege level of Snapchat's founder would place that particular example closer to the investor segment. Quantitative observations can be complemented by fundamental analysis. tl;dr the articles provide 10 pages of relevant context.
"Privilege level". I guess that means because his dad was already rich, the valuation of billions of dollars for a disappearing text service means nothing, along with the fact that forbes inflated a two-page article into 10 means something. Ok.
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I don't see that... or rather, if it's true here it's true to a significantly greater extent in most other industries.
Money continues to be available, and often lots of it. It's available on better terms than most others in most other professions can even imagine receiving.
To put it bluntly: in most industries you are meat and own nothing and never have any chance of owning anything. This has been the condition for nearly all human beings who have ever lived, today and in the past.
There are also more alternatives to VC today: larger angel rounds, crowd funding, etc. It's also easier to bootstrap since everything (but people) has fallen in price. Those two things together have made the funding environment more competitive for VCs -- they have to offer more value or compete at the higher end.