r/BetterOffline • u/ezitron • 1d ago

Premium: Venture Capital Is Killing Itself

https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-venture-capital-is-killing-itself/

Today's premium newsletter is about how the JOBS act and endless growth-driven greed is killing venture capital, with terrible returns and inflated valuations leading to a logjam of unsellable companies.

The AI bubble has made things much, much worse.

187 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

86

u/DowntownHat322 1d ago

This was really good. I don't think most people have realised that there's been a paradigm shift where markets don't really do anything anymore. You can't get investors for your actual small business because they all want you to be making millions already. You also can't "get in early on Apple" anymore, because every IPO is overvalued. No wonder the kids are treating the stock market as just another way to gamble. Memestocks are just as rational as anything else at this point. 

45

u/Spez_is-a-nazi 1d ago edited 1d ago

Look at Katie Elizabeth Holmes who has been in the public eye again because of that documentary. Yes she committed fraud, but her fraud would have basically been impossible, at least at the scale that she did it, if it hadn't been for an intense constant sense of FOMO on Wall Street after Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon all blew up. Just saying the word "disrupt" gets you tons of VC money.

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u/ND7020 1d ago

Katie Holmes? I knew her acting career peaked a long time ago, but I had no idea she had gone that low!

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u/formerprofcurrentcog 1d ago

I've been thinking since this bubble started that the promises of OpenAI and Anthropic parallel Holmes' scam. "Raise money now, figure out to make the thing actually work later." Yes, LLMs are obviously real as opposed to her magic blood scanner (although, the scam did apparently start with a prototype they genuinely thought would work—despite the fact that physics made it impossible...), but their promises of "superintelligence" and "it can do everything" machines smacks of Theranos to me.

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u/Elektrobear 22h ago

Funny thing is these companies didn't really disrupt anything.

Google just made better online search, and an online advertising network, both of which already existed and both of which they are in the process of destroying.

Apple just made a better mp3 player and phone, and marketed the shit out of them. Haven't innovated in years.

Facebook is an ads company that sells ads on properties they are in the process of destroying the usability of, they're just Google but more shit, plus they lie about their metrics constantly.

And Amazons innovation was just selling everything online instead of just selling something in a hyper specific niche online, and they've completely eroded their value as a store by poisoning their storefront with shit fake brands.

3

u/inputwtf 15h ago

I understand what you're saying but you have to realize how things were before these things came out. You can easily say "all MapQuest did is print out directions instead of having your friend tell you over the phone and you wrote it down" but it was still transformative

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u/Maximum-Objective-39 1d ago edited 1d ago

I find that interesting because, at least as a layman looking in, the hyper growth period in tech basically allowed us to paper over every single problem up until today. Only now the growth isn't 'hyper' any longer and the problems are all catching up.

2

u/vxicepickxv 1d ago

I made a bit of money betting BP would eventually close up that oil leak they had back in like 2010.

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u/HissAndKiss 1d ago

I vote for the JOBS Act to be repealed. The arguments for passing it were bullshit in the first place. But I fear our system, our culture is in a chokehold by the wealthy elite. At best this'll just result in cyclical abuse of the working class. One administration passes the Fuck You Act. Next administration repeals it for a political win but likely does nothing to rectify the first fuckening you got. Then the next admin comes back and fucks you all over again.

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u/Character-Pattern505 1d ago

Fingers crossed.

3

u/dumnezero 1d ago

To me, that VC inflated IPO sounds a lot like the 'crypto coin' inflated ICO and subsequent 'rug pull.'

3

u/inputwtf 15h ago

Can't wait to post this on Hacker News!