I’m a VC and agree with much of this. The mega firms have totally warped VC and the desire for massive cash appreciation has led to a host of bad characters getting involved. I still love working with early stage companies but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence. There are so many issues destroying early stage VC right now. We need major policy change / guardrails but that won’t happen.
Based on my experience on the fundraising side, I'm inclined to agree with your perspective. One small nit to pick: I think policy changes can happen. However, it's hard for me to imagine meaningful change occurring before a catastrophic event. How big would the blast radius be? Obviously no one knows, but I hope it's closer in scope to "The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank" as opposed to "The Collapse of Lehman Brothers".
> but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence
Are you able to shed some light on this? It would be interesting to hear what people like you come across.
I agree. Ethics is at the forefront of everything I do both personally and professionally. I used to serve on an ethics in business council. All the investments we make are grounded in genuinely improving the world. It’s unfortunate that so much money flows to “top” VC firms when people like me exist since I reckon I’m much more aligned with what the general population wants.
I was living in SF Bay Area when a16z started. They had good marketing and a good reputation. Their analyst posts were insightful and well received here. My perception of a16z has changed drastically. I’m ashamed just how badly that marketing worked on me in the early years.
I've been in an interesting spot the last few months. I've pitched probably two dozen or so VCs and, and while almost every case showed interest, it was quickly followed by "rules" and "desires" that were antithetical to the product.
The product I am building is a decentralized trust system. The word "trust" is literally in the name. It requires very specific decisions and a very specific organizational and legal structure to be successful. Why? Because anything else doesn't breed trust.
But that's actually the problem. The VCs don't like those things, because in almost every case it relinquishes their control/power. Or, they ask us to do something either questionably or blatantly unethical in order to sweeten the pot. I was one of those founders "unaware of the Cancer Capital situation." After six months of pitching, it's become extremely obvious to me that the current VC system is incapable of funding anything ethical or long-term.
I don't know what the right answer is from here. Our current attempt is founding a syndicate of like-minded individuals to bootstrap a pre-seed. It seems like the only possibility where you might be able to maintain an ethical vision without fighting a cancerous overlord. We'll see how it goes.
> Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans
> The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms
> These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice
> Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues.
Aka the classic dynamic of wealth concentration resulting in power concentration. Great article. One thing it does not mention is how much this small circle of people have gotten zero-sum leverage over the whole country, because when the surveillance economy collapses, America collapses. This wouldn't be the first time the oligarchy triggers a crisis with reckless financial games.
The Gilded Age didn’t just “pass”. It was ended by strong unions and antitrust legislation (and enforcement). Passivity will kill us if we let the oligarchs have their way. Hope is not a plan. Appeasement will have no more success than it did in WWII.
> But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host
I thought a cancer grew from a defective cell that is able to divide and grow to over take the healthy ones.
There is an explicit claim in the essay that says they aren't all the same.
Third bullet point says "a handful of venture capital firms have become 'do everything' funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses".
i can't believe the whole blog post was just the tldr. this is going to be a legendary series of blog posts! j/k i WOULD like to read the long version of this but i probably won't remember to go back to this blog.
VC was good when a guy with no technical skills raised 10s of millions of dollars. That was when VC was good, right?
This guy has been grifting his entire career but it's those other people who are the problem, guys!
He's not wrong about VC but he's another Chamath - a guy who grifts a thing to death, moves on to the next grift and goes 'look, that grift I'm no longer doing - it's bad, very bad!'
Likewise, stock market IPOs are a parody now - not means of getting financing, but dumping the paper on the retail after for the insiders and VCs to realize their gains.
The lockup period is still in effect (for now) but reductions to index inclusion rules expose the stock to passive vehicles like ETFs that are obligated to have a specific allocation on the stock. So now there is an essentially guaranteed demand established by the time the lockup period expires. NASDAQ allows mega-cap companies into the NASDAQ-100 after 15 days which is much shorter than the lockup period for 80% of the SpaceX shares.
15 days - Pump: get into indexes -> ETFs obligated to buy shares
After - Dump: insiders cash out benefiting from the price premium of demand for shares from ETFs
They're solving that problem. Look at Spacex. They not only got the rules changed for fast-tracked inclusion in Nasdaq and Russell indexes to pump the price on their garbage asset, they changed the rules so insiders could bail early. It was a one-two punch in service of making insiders richer at the expense of retail investors. Transparent corruption, where a few billionaires write the rules that allow them to reach into regular folks pockets.
Yes, it's downright stupid to buy into any tech IPO these days. The fundraising and all the growth were done by the A-M rounds, while the IPO is the bag-dump for the last few rounds of investors. Stay far away.
In my ~20 year career half of which were well funded startups I made it to one IPO (multiple sole proprietor sales) with a bigcorp and my prize was having 3 years to buy my stock options at the IPO day strike-price, which was higher than the stock ever was in my last 2-3 years there.
In the end I made my million(th) sitting behind a cubicle collecting 401k which none of those startups gave me.
Can you name a recent IPO that didn't put funds in the corporate coffers?
If the complaint is that people are investing in companies that are a Bad Bet, the solution is simple. Don't buy stocks that are you think are losers. That's the definition of insanity.
If someone wants to blindly invest money with zero diligence, then they have to be willing to accept the returns of a zero diligence bet.
All the same to me. All of these entities have ruined previous workplaces in one way or another. Effectively stealing years of my life that I put my labor into.
These rich cunts are the reason everything is shittier and the term "enshittification" exists in our modern vernacular
VC is basically just plowing capital into people that went to prestigious schools or maybe were at a top company. They collect fees and every once in a while a company hits.
Any analysis on the asset class is moot.
Most of the VC media is aimed at hiding the fact that its a lottery machine for a pre selected group
I think the letter V should be removed from VC to better reflect your point that these are barely ventures - they're more like a rigged casino spin for those that don't have the talent to do the building themselves.
I don't think they are that squeamish about hiding it. VC's talk all the time about investing in people and understanding that their ideas May shift over time.
Tyler Cowen is a big component of pre-selecting talented people and not even requiring an idea. I think this is the model of Emergent Ventures (EV), launched in 2018, and is getting replicated in many places.
This is all silly and as best as I can read it due to very vocal large VC managers having politics the author doesn't agree with.
Take a look at the bullet points. It's just scattered random conflicting complaints.
VC is small and is now big (okay...)
They're not even VC anymore, they're doing all sorts of other investments (okay and?) Oh and they don't really care about their returns, but they grow fast (what? I'm pretty sure VCs care about returns). You know what else grows fast? Cancer!
Now that they're large, they have power over founders (why? there's other sources of capital). And they use companies to push their politics (seems much more complicated than just paying lobbyists).
And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)
There's an argument against large VC, but this ain't it. Talk about misaligned incentives, how they push aggressive tactics without regard to the founders, who may not be indifferent between a 50% chance of building a company to $10m to a 1% chance of building a company to $1b
Or just say "I don't like the politics of [VC related person]" and save everyone time.
> And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)
Not if this were something healthy. This wouldn't be the first time joe average is holding the bag when the rich set the house on fire again. The USA economy is particularly brittle (as in: not diversified) in that regard.
I can understand how the article might conflict with personally held notions and thus might look odd, especially as the weird dealings of the tech accelerationists do not find much press coverage. The only thing I can do is recommending to keep your mind open for new info, the article mentions he will follow up on the bullet points. The author has another previous article [1] that references Paul Krugman's article "The rich are crazier than you and me"[2], that might be an interesting read alongside the other pointers. As an aside, I also recommend to watch the video at the end that goes into Andreessen hiring murderer Daniel Penny.
"politics the author doesn't agree with" = racism, hatred, calls for ethnic cleansing, dismantling of the democratic government, open support for fascism... all being coordinated and advanced by a cabal of extremely wealthy VCs. Yeah those politics.
Do you think people who suspect tolerated opposition would not also criticize A16Z? How about investigating controlled opposition financed by A16Z or others?
I’m a VC and agree with much of this. The mega firms have totally warped VC and the desire for massive cash appreciation has led to a host of bad characters getting involved. I still love working with early stage companies but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence. There are so many issues destroying early stage VC right now. We need major policy change / guardrails but that won’t happen.
Based on my experience on the fundraising side, I'm inclined to agree with your perspective. One small nit to pick: I think policy changes can happen. However, it's hard for me to imagine meaningful change occurring before a catastrophic event. How big would the blast radius be? Obviously no one knows, but I hope it's closer in scope to "The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank" as opposed to "The Collapse of Lehman Brothers".
Y'all need ethics is what ya need.
I agree. Ethics is at the forefront of everything I do both personally and professionally. I used to serve on an ethics in business council. All the investments we make are grounded in genuinely improving the world. It’s unfortunate that so much money flows to “top” VC firms when people like me exist since I reckon I’m much more aligned with what the general population wants.
I was living in SF Bay Area when a16z started. They had good marketing and a good reputation. Their analyst posts were insightful and well received here. My perception of a16z has changed drastically. I’m ashamed just how badly that marketing worked on me in the early years.
I've been in an interesting spot the last few months. I've pitched probably two dozen or so VCs and, and while almost every case showed interest, it was quickly followed by "rules" and "desires" that were antithetical to the product.
The product I am building is a decentralized trust system. The word "trust" is literally in the name. It requires very specific decisions and a very specific organizational and legal structure to be successful. Why? Because anything else doesn't breed trust.
But that's actually the problem. The VCs don't like those things, because in almost every case it relinquishes their control/power. Or, they ask us to do something either questionably or blatantly unethical in order to sweeten the pot. I was one of those founders "unaware of the Cancer Capital situation." After six months of pitching, it's become extremely obvious to me that the current VC system is incapable of funding anything ethical or long-term.
I don't know what the right answer is from here. Our current attempt is founding a syndicate of like-minded individuals to bootstrap a pre-seed. It seems like the only possibility where you might be able to maintain an ethical vision without fighting a cancerous overlord. We'll see how it goes.
I'd be interested to hear how it goes.
Well, is there a clear route to being a >$10B business? If not, it's probably not a good match for VC. But that's OK.
Unfortunately your product doesn’t fit into Peter Thiel’s "vision" of the world.
It’s the second gilded age
Hopefully this one will pass, just as the first did
All things pass. The question is what the fallout will look like for everyone who doesn't have their hand in the cookie jar.
I'm more interested in what happens to those with their hands in. They need to lose those hands.
The Gilded Age didn’t just “pass”. It was ended by strong unions and antitrust legislation (and enforcement). Passivity will kill us if we let the oligarchs have their way. Hope is not a plan. Appeasement will have no more success than it did in WWII.
The long arm of history bends towards progress. Not because progress happens spontaneously, but because people bend it
> But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host
I thought a cancer grew from a defective cell that is able to divide and grow to over take the healthy ones.
"defective" is a label that we impose on the cell. The cell doesn't know it.
I’m skeptical of the implicit claim that they’re all the same. It seems rather difficult to prove?
There is an explicit claim in the essay that says they aren't all the same.
Third bullet point says "a handful of venture capital firms have become 'do everything' funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses".
Maybe VC always has been VC? Maybe the cancer was always inherent to the system and the author only just now noticed it?
i can't believe the whole blog post was just the tldr. this is going to be a legendary series of blog posts! j/k i WOULD like to read the long version of this but i probably won't remember to go back to this blog.
VC was good when a guy with no technical skills raised 10s of millions of dollars. That was when VC was good, right?
This guy has been grifting his entire career but it's those other people who are the problem, guys!
He's not wrong about VC but he's another Chamath - a guy who grifts a thing to death, moves on to the next grift and goes 'look, that grift I'm no longer doing - it's bad, very bad!'
Likewise, stock market IPOs are a parody now - not means of getting financing, but dumping the paper on the retail after for the insiders and VCs to realize their gains.
Aren't all the insiders restricted from dumping their shares for a set number of months?
The lockup period is still in effect (for now) but reductions to index inclusion rules expose the stock to passive vehicles like ETFs that are obligated to have a specific allocation on the stock. So now there is an essentially guaranteed demand established by the time the lockup period expires. NASDAQ allows mega-cap companies into the NASDAQ-100 after 15 days which is much shorter than the lockup period for 80% of the SpaceX shares.
15 days - Pump: get into indexes -> ETFs obligated to buy shares
After - Dump: insiders cash out benefiting from the price premium of demand for shares from ETFs
They're solving that problem. Look at Spacex. They not only got the rules changed for fast-tracked inclusion in Nasdaq and Russell indexes to pump the price on their garbage asset, they changed the rules so insiders could bail early. It was a one-two punch in service of making insiders richer at the expense of retail investors. Transparent corruption, where a few billionaires write the rules that allow them to reach into regular folks pockets.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/spacex-insiders-will-get-to-...
No. Look at the SpaceX lockup. It’s staggered with various groups getting ability to sell earlier than others. Well ahead of 6 months.
Yes, it's downright stupid to buy into any tech IPO these days. The fundraising and all the growth were done by the A-M rounds, while the IPO is the bag-dump for the last few rounds of investors. Stay far away.
But serioslly when IPOs were not a sad joke? In early 1990s? But I think never.
In my ~20 year career half of which were well funded startups I made it to one IPO (multiple sole proprietor sales) with a bigcorp and my prize was having 3 years to buy my stock options at the IPO day strike-price, which was higher than the stock ever was in my last 2-3 years there.
In the end I made my million(th) sitting behind a cubicle collecting 401k which none of those startups gave me.
At this point we must have a drink to that.
Can you name a recent IPO that didn't put funds in the corporate coffers?
If the complaint is that people are investing in companies that are a Bad Bet, the solution is simple. Don't buy stocks that are you think are losers. That's the definition of insanity.
If someone wants to blindly invest money with zero diligence, then they have to be willing to accept the returns of a zero diligence bet.
VC, private equity, angel investor, vulture capitalist.
All the same to me. All of these entities have ruined previous workplaces in one way or another. Effectively stealing years of my life that I put my labor into.
These rich cunts are the reason everything is shittier and the term "enshittification" exists in our modern vernacular
VC is basically just plowing capital into people that went to prestigious schools or maybe were at a top company. They collect fees and every once in a while a company hits.
Any analysis on the asset class is moot.
Most of the VC media is aimed at hiding the fact that its a lottery machine for a pre selected group
I think the letter V should be removed from VC to better reflect your point that these are barely ventures - they're more like a rigged casino spin for those that don't have the talent to do the building themselves.
You should add that they use pension funds to do this too. Easy to make stupid bets when it's not your money.
I'll say it directly, as _they have_: they are attempting to recreate fuedalism.
Those folks are in these comments. They'll get their pitchforks and torches eventually.
VC is also exercising incredible power over media and politics. That's part of the article's point: VC isn't just about VC anymore.
I don't think they are that squeamish about hiding it. VC's talk all the time about investing in people and understanding that their ideas May shift over time.
Tyler Cowen is a big component of pre-selecting talented people and not even requiring an idea. I think this is the model of Emergent Ventures (EV), launched in 2018, and is getting replicated in many places.
I think it is regarded as highly successful
This reads like someone who can’t make smart bets “before it’s obvious.”
Lots of VCs out there still taking big gambles on the agendaless and unproven ideas.
This is all silly and as best as I can read it due to very vocal large VC managers having politics the author doesn't agree with.
Take a look at the bullet points. It's just scattered random conflicting complaints.
VC is small and is now big (okay...)
They're not even VC anymore, they're doing all sorts of other investments (okay and?) Oh and they don't really care about their returns, but they grow fast (what? I'm pretty sure VCs care about returns). You know what else grows fast? Cancer!
Now that they're large, they have power over founders (why? there's other sources of capital). And they use companies to push their politics (seems much more complicated than just paying lobbyists).
And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)
There's an argument against large VC, but this ain't it. Talk about misaligned incentives, how they push aggressive tactics without regard to the founders, who may not be indifferent between a 50% chance of building a company to $10m to a 1% chance of building a company to $1b
Or just say "I don't like the politics of [VC related person]" and save everyone time.
I can understand how the article might conflict with personally held notions and thus might look odd, especially as the weird dealings of the tech accelerationists do not find much press coverage. The only thing I can do is recommending to keep your mind open for new info, the article mentions he will follow up on the bullet points. The author has another previous article [1] that references Paul Krugman's article "The rich are crazier than you and me"[2], that might be an interesting read alongside the other pointers. As an aside, I also recommend to watch the video at the end that goes into Andreessen hiring murderer Daniel Penny.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/opinion/robert-kennedy-jr... 2. https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/
"politics the author doesn't agree with" = racism, hatred, calls for ethnic cleansing, dismantling of the democratic government, open support for fascism... all being coordinated and advanced by a cabal of extremely wealthy VCs. Yeah those politics.
Anil Dash writes what people want to hear (except for boring medical analogies).
He writes against Big-AI, but supports AI (small?) and copyright theft at the EFF, where he is a board member.
I'm getting tolerated opposition vibes here.
So A16Z is the largest spender on politics, but Anil Dash's "momma is.."
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/31/a-group-funded-by-andreess...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/technology/andreessen-hor...
Do you think people who suspect tolerated opposition would not also criticize A16Z? How about investigating controlled opposition financed by A16Z or others?