That's definitely a theme that Matt Levine touches on a lot, especially when he talks about the WeWork and Uber IPOs: basically in the private VC market, your i

That's definitely a theme that Matt Levine touches on a lot, especially when he talks about the WeWork and Uber IPOs: basically in the private VC market, your investors either pass on the investment, or they invest. They cannot short. So the investors participating in your market (not the ones who chose to sit on the sidelines) are already selected for being the people that are overly positive or at least believe in the vision. Even if they have suspicions, their incentive is to pump pump pump the valuation and the narrative so they can ultimately dump the company onto the public markets. This largely worked for Uber, but not for WeWork. Once you're public, you're exposed to short sellers and 10000x the scrutiny. To expand more, if you're in the private market and don't believe in X company, you could invest in a competitor Y instead of shorting company X, but only if you think the market opportunity is legit and company X is going about it wrong and that company Y is any good. Pretty narrow case. Matt Levine has a half-funny half-serious suggestion for essentially shorting in the private VC markets if you think the whole market is crap: found a company and have VCs pay you a shit ton of money to run it, and take a golden parachute before the house cards falls.