Wow, TIL a16z hired the NYC subway guy as a partner purely as a political stunt. This on top of the $115M in the midterms, them no longer legally being a VC firm, and recent discussion on dark patterns in their portfolio [1]. I'm inclined to agree with the thesis of the article especially with regards to this firm. Looking forward to the other articles in the series.
a16z has always struck me as the shadiest vc - i associate them with NFT's, crypto and god knows what. They personify the amorality of chasing money over anything (Maybe indicative of SV culture these days in general).
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.
I think “regular” VCs are one of the cohorts of people I feel worst for! I have a lot of friends who got into the business wanting to help entrepreneurs, and now they’re stuck on a cap table with folks who they’d never want to do business with. It’s not any different than the founders or employees who don’t want to be saddled with these guys, either.
The hard part is figuring out how to change these structures so that people can actually extract themselves and still build stuff that isn’t toxic and destructive.
I'm in a startup, and we are (somewhat lazily) trying to do Series A fundraising. We _are_ a company that has AI as a part of our app, but not an LLM company.
The advice from our early investors was to basically overhype ourselves, telling that we can transform the world overnight. And also to remove any mentions of our _actual_ product that has real paying users because it can muddy the grand vision.
Another hot thing in the startup world is what I'm calling the "vibe income". It's potential income from a signed MOU or contingent on the success of some trial. So we have to compete with companies saying that they're already having $500k in "income" after just a few months. We naïvely thought that our GAAP income is more important.
I have really bad feelings about this whole situation.
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.
Let's keep praying for fewer and fewer regulations, it's going great!
I didn't know that VCs were ever "not cancer", I've always known them like that. Also my experience with startups is that it is a big scam for employees, but I understand it's not always the case (maybe it depends on where in the world?). I have been an early employee in multiple startups that got the founders rich, and what I got from the stocks didn't compensate for the low salary while working there.
Do I understand correctly that when VCs invest, they dilute the employees and somehow the founders can get away without being diluted? That's the only way I could explain the difference between what the employees get and what the founders get if the startup is successful.
And young people are super excited to work in startups because of old stories like "early employees at Google/Facebook became rich", I guess.
Startups define different classes of stock. The class A shareholders are the founders and investors. Everyone else gets class B shares. The A class shares don't get diluted, and they are inherently worth more anyway.
I was thinking about this the other day in regard to Flock. There's simply no way this company will fail, despite the public outcry, because the rich people in charge will not _let_ it fail.
Of course it can fail, just like the AI circular investment moves can fail just like the Soviet Union failed. Too much decisive power in too few hands, disconnected from reality, disconnected from competition, disconnected from outside community criticism. It fails open loop. A lot of money can temporarily buffer the failure, but already we see world wide inflation and interest rate increases from the open loop decisions of the most powerful class.
Strong agree, spot on. There will always be wealthy folks behind the scenes who will arrange for the capital theatrics to land the way they want (Loopt was a failure and Sam Altman still ended up running YC because of vibes, Leopold Aschenbrenner blew up Situational Awareness and wealthy friends [Griffin and Citadel] bailed him out, for example). The best you can do is political recourse (note the wide social efforts to vote out folks who support data centers, and to have Flock contracts cancelled) and decouple from needing anything from any company who is controlled by these folks through cap tables, network, etc.
The game is rigged, operate accordingly. You are managing risk and threat exposure against threat actors who want to obtain and maintain control, influence, and power.
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.
Indeed. I was once an Andreesen fan (many years ago). I've been trying to like him despite all the negatives for many years, but reading this I just can't any more.
VC General Partners (managers of the VC fund) are already fiduciaries with responsibility to the fund's Limited Partners (people and institutions which invest in VCs). Their fiduciary responsibility is to maximize return on investment.
> 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 root of the problem I think was caused by allowing institutional funds to invest money in VC firms. You combine that with the majority of the value being generated before they go public and you have a stock market which no longer works as a way to raise money for the company but as a way for VC´s to exit their positions and offloading companies on the public and funds.
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'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 think the problem is that decentralization is almost by definition antithetical to the ability to capitalize on something. As you indicated, decentralization means diffusion of control and power, which are essential to capitalize on that thing. Why would a VC or any capitalist invest money if they cannot see a way to earn back multiples?
Sure you could make some money, but nowhere near the monopoly profits everyone is seeking. A decentralized Google would never be as profitable as a centralized one, so where would a capitalist prefer putting their money?
IMO this is also why decentralized systems or peer-to-peer applications never really caught on. Some point to technical challenges or usability issues or a lack of use-cases, but I believe all of those could have been overcome with enough investment. There just wasn't enough money in them compared to centralization. (It didn't help that the only really popular systems were almost entirely used for illegal or unproductive purposes.)
And these dynamics over time are what have led to the asymmetric Internet today. The Internet was supposed to be equal, with each node capable of being a client and a server and, heck, even a router. But that's clearly not what we have today: networks hostile to P2P connectivity, increasingly powerful centralized services, and decreasingly capable end-user devices.
Yeah, you need to look away from private equity investment. Mutuals, co-ops, LLPs, there's lots of other models, but VC and PE money is not where you want to be.
> 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.
I would not focus on individual cells but the ability to grow super fast, which itself is not a defect since it's important during development, but the checks on this ability can be removed by later mutations/metabolic issues
Speaking of accountability, if you look around and see the tech enshitified you have no one else to blame but the biggest investors in the vicinity. Like it or not they are building your future and more often than not it's just a byproduct of whatever the hell they think they're doing, not a deliberate milestone, which makes it even worse.
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.
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.
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 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 proponent 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.
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
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!'
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.
Wow, TIL a16z hired the NYC subway guy as a partner purely as a political stunt. This on top of the $115M in the midterms, them no longer legally being a VC firm, and recent discussion on dark patterns in their portfolio [1]. I'm inclined to agree with the thesis of the article especially with regards to this firm. Looking forward to the other articles in the series.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416055
a16z has always struck me as the shadiest vc - i associate them with NFT's, crypto and god knows what. They personify the amorality of chasing money over anything (Maybe indicative of SV culture these days in general).
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.
I think “regular” VCs are one of the cohorts of people I feel worst for! I have a lot of friends who got into the business wanting to help entrepreneurs, and now they’re stuck on a cap table with folks who they’d never want to do business with. It’s not any different than the founders or employees who don’t want to be saddled with these guys, either.
The hard part is figuring out how to change these structures so that people can actually extract themselves and still build stuff that isn’t toxic and destructive.
Sometimes I wonder if people will one day wake up and just ditch all the tech. That's seems to be the only way to be out of this mess.
Hate to sound like a Marxist but... this is what happens when capital has this much power and labour has so little. Eventually the system eats itself.
If you're in the right elite at the right time though, you can make a lot of money while everything falls apart underneath
I'm in a startup, and we are (somewhat lazily) trying to do Series A fundraising. We _are_ a company that has AI as a part of our app, but not an LLM company.
The advice from our early investors was to basically overhype ourselves, telling that we can transform the world overnight. And also to remove any mentions of our _actual_ product that has real paying users because it can muddy the grand vision.
Another hot thing in the startup world is what I'm calling the "vibe income". It's potential income from a signed MOU or contingent on the success of some trial. So we have to compete with companies saying that they're already having $500k in "income" after just a few months. We naïvely thought that our GAAP income is more important.
I have really bad feelings about this whole situation.
Is it possible to list the mega firms?
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.
Let's keep praying for fewer and fewer regulations, it's going great!
I didn't know that VCs were ever "not cancer", I've always known them like that. Also my experience with startups is that it is a big scam for employees, but I understand it's not always the case (maybe it depends on where in the world?). I have been an early employee in multiple startups that got the founders rich, and what I got from the stocks didn't compensate for the low salary while working there.
Do I understand correctly that when VCs invest, they dilute the employees and somehow the founders can get away without being diluted? That's the only way I could explain the difference between what the employees get and what the founders get if the startup is successful.
And young people are super excited to work in startups because of old stories like "early employees at Google/Facebook became rich", I guess.
Startups define different classes of stock. The class A shareholders are the founders and investors. Everyone else gets class B shares. The A class shares don't get diluted, and they are inherently worth more anyway.
I was thinking about this the other day in regard to Flock. There's simply no way this company will fail, despite the public outcry, because the rich people in charge will not _let_ it fail.
Of course it can fail, just like the AI circular investment moves can fail just like the Soviet Union failed. Too much decisive power in too few hands, disconnected from reality, disconnected from competition, disconnected from outside community criticism. It fails open loop. A lot of money can temporarily buffer the failure, but already we see world wide inflation and interest rate increases from the open loop decisions of the most powerful class.
Strong agree, spot on. There will always be wealthy folks behind the scenes who will arrange for the capital theatrics to land the way they want (Loopt was a failure and Sam Altman still ended up running YC because of vibes, Leopold Aschenbrenner blew up Situational Awareness and wealthy friends [Griffin and Citadel] bailed him out, for example). The best you can do is political recourse (note the wide social efforts to vote out folks who support data centers, and to have Flock contracts cancelled) and decouple from needing anything from any company who is controlled by these folks through cap tables, network, etc.
The game is rigged, operate accordingly. You are managing risk and threat exposure against threat actors who want to obtain and maintain control, influence, and power.
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.
Indeed. I was once an Andreesen fan (many years ago). I've been trying to like him despite all the negatives for many years, but reading this I just can't any more.
To be fair to yourself, a16z could have changed over that time, and the marketing was honest early on.
> Those firms also stop legally even being venture capital firms
We need an equivalent of the "Fiduciary" word for financial advisors ... but applied to VCs.
"Are you an Artisanal, Free-Range, Fair-Trade™ VC?"
VC General Partners (managers of the VC fund) are already fiduciaries with responsibility to the fund's Limited Partners (people and institutions which invest in VCs). Their fiduciary responsibility is to maximize return on investment.
all of the institutions that built our current era of prosperity have been corrupted.
It’s the second gilded age
Hopefully this one will pass, just as the first did
The root of the problem I think was caused by allowing institutional funds to invest money in VC firms. You combine that with the majority of the value being generated before they go public and you have a stock market which no longer works as a way to raise money for the company but as a way for VC´s to exit their positions and offloading companies on the public and funds.
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".
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 think the problem is that decentralization is almost by definition antithetical to the ability to capitalize on something. As you indicated, decentralization means diffusion of control and power, which are essential to capitalize on that thing. Why would a VC or any capitalist invest money if they cannot see a way to earn back multiples?
Sure you could make some money, but nowhere near the monopoly profits everyone is seeking. A decentralized Google would never be as profitable as a centralized one, so where would a capitalist prefer putting their money?
IMO this is also why decentralized systems or peer-to-peer applications never really caught on. Some point to technical challenges or usability issues or a lack of use-cases, but I believe all of those could have been overcome with enough investment. There just wasn't enough money in them compared to centralization. (It didn't help that the only really popular systems were almost entirely used for illegal or unproductive purposes.)
And these dynamics over time are what have led to the asymmetric Internet today. The Internet was supposed to be equal, with each node capable of being a client and a server and, heck, even a router. But that's clearly not what we have today: networks hostile to P2P connectivity, increasingly powerful centralized services, and decreasingly capable end-user devices.
I'm not saying the VC scene is great, but I mean what's in this for them?
Yeah, you need to look away from private equity investment. Mutuals, co-ops, LLPs, there's lots of other models, but VC and PE money is not where you want to be.
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.
Are you able to say the product you're working on? It sounds really interesting.
I'd be interested to hear how it goes.
Unfortunately your product doesn’t fit into Peter Thiel’s "vision" of the world.
For a couple years, I officed out of a VC firm. It was terribly helpful in taking off the shine.
> 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.
I would not focus on individual cells but the ability to grow super fast, which itself is not a defect since it's important during development, but the checks on this ability can be removed by later mutations/metabolic issues
Speaking of accountability, if you look around and see the tech enshitified you have no one else to blame but the biggest investors in the vicinity. Like it or not they are building your future and more often than not it's just a byproduct of whatever the hell they think they're doing, not a deliberate milestone, which makes it even worse.
Maybe VC always has been VC? Maybe the cancer was always inherent to the system and the author only just now noticed it?
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.
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.
Aren't all the insiders restricted from dumping their shares for a set number of months?
But serioslly when IPOs were not a sad joke? In early 1990s? But I think never.
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 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.
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.
You should add that they use pension funds to do this too. Easy to make stupid bets when it's not your money.
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 proponent 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
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, 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
> Effectively stealing years of my life
You got a paycheck, no?
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!'
You should ask Chamath how he feels about empowering workers through unions.
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...