Can a lot of this be distilled into differing risk aversions between the investors and the founders? Two major reasons here seem to be 1) VCs not wanting to si

Can a lot of this be distilled into differing risk aversions between the investors and the founders? Two major reasons here seem to be 1) VCs not wanting to sink time into a failing startup (force downside) and 2) markups in valuation are preferred by VCs (force upside). But directionally these incentives are the same for founders. Founders probably want to work less if their startup is failing (per person*years they put in). Founders also prefer the case where they're valued a lot and worth a lot. Magnitude-wise these motivations are very different between founders and investors. For founders, a failure means lost years of their lives -- forcing a downside is a lot more painful. Founders also celebrate the home-run as much as the VCs (in fact probably for the biggest home runs, the founders get out more than an individual VC right?). This could create an asymmetry whereby founders are in no hurry if hurry could mean failure, and the model above is classical risk aversion. Conversely, VCs don't mind that much if your chance of failure goes up by a few percentage points. Aaron also tacks on some new ingredients: VCs like to see markups for it's own sake (to solve the monitoring problem between LPs and VCs). I have no doubt with his experience the mechanisms are absolutely correct, just wondering if the majority of the underlying generator of these symptoms is underlying risk aversion.