This is a great, insightful comment, and I agree with everything you said except for the part about FriendFeed. 1) Unfortunately, VCs have to care about financ

This is a great, insightful comment, and I agree with everything you said except for the part about FriendFeed. 1) Unfortunately, VCs have to care about financial impact over everything else. That's the only thing their LPs pay them for. So an amazing mission-driven company with a modest exit will make a VC and their LPs much less happy than a company that doesn't do anything particularly meaningful but exits for $2b. Put differently, if I invest in 50 companies that make the world better but don't product great returns, I won't have a job in 5 years; if I invest in 50 companies, one of which exits for $10b, I'll be able to raise VC funds for a long time. 2) That said, I bet FriendFeed was a fantastic exit for investors and employees. The acquisition was for a combination of cash and .5% of facebook's stock (https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/the-cost-of-friendfeed-roughly-50-million-in-cash-and-stock/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/the-cost-of-friendfeed-rou...). That .5% would have appreciated about 15x by the time Facebook IPO'ed a few years later, and even more if investors are still holding on to the stock. (source: I'm a VC.)