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Hey tech billionaires, if you want to talk about radical change, let’s abolish venture capitalism
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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This comment doesn't even pass the smell test.
If every company that took VC money failed, VCs wouldn't make any money.
The reality is MOST VC investments fail, but the few who make it are home runs. This is how they make money. The risk/reward of your company was just not a favorable investment for them. Whether it's because you went to an Ivy League or not is irrelevant.
Without VCs, many of those homeruns would never be able to get off the ground and the US economy would be significantly less dynamic
You are free to take your great idea to VC and see if they get funded bro. I think they are a complete joke at this point.
I don't have a good business idea, not everyone has to. That's not even what we're talking about.
VC is clearly not "a joke". All you have to do is Google "major companies that took VC funding" to see the impact of it. Of course this leaves out the thousands of others that failed, but long term the winners are going to have a very positive impact on driving innovation.
You may say "those companies would have succeeded anyway" and maybe so, but I doubt it would have happened nearly as fast, if at all.
VC today isn't VC 20 years ago isnt VC 40 years ago.
VC today has ridiculous expectations on ROI and it re-enforces poor decision making, which, imo, brings down companies that might otherwise have been successful. Its part of a culture that was propped up by access to ridiculously cheap money. Modern VC is a dice roll at best, maybe worse.
The final summary of the article you linked:
"Using 105,950 observations from 32 different studies we find that CVC investments are performance enhancing, for both corporations and start-ups. Our results detect that time, country, and industry moderate the effects. Especially after the Dotcom bubble burst, high performance is detected. Similarly, the performance in the U.S. outreaches the performance of other countries. Due to the high risk of successfully developing a pharmaceutical drug, no statistically significant effect of CVC investments in the health care industry is observed. As expected, strategic performance outperforms financial impacts. Although there is good rationale for a clear strategic focus, the finding that CVC investment does not lead to stronger financial performance is surprising and urges practitioners to rethink their CVC objectives and approach"
Disregarding the fact that this is only looking at CVCs and not traditional VCs, I don't think this really supports your argument that it is a dice roll at best. Seems to me like it is broadly beneficial with some caveats.
Um if we instead taxed those VCs setup a government fund and grant program instead you would have greater innovation, more equitable access and a better solution. VCs siphon IP and manage where wealth can be consolidated, it's a pretty basic concept.
I believe we already do this to some extent. There are government funded grants for all kinds of things. I guess you just want more of that? I think you have to be careful, because that starts to look like the government picking a lot of winners and losers in private industry. Ripe for misallocation of resources.