> The VC funding model also seems to go against this idea. As far as I understand it (I don't work in SV, so my understanding is all second-hand), the approach

> The VC funding model also seems to go against this idea. As far as I understand it (I don't work in SV, so my understanding is all second-hand), the approach is to fund lots of companies hoping that a few will make it big and accepting that most would fail. This is in complete contradiction with the idea of small, non-hierarchical enterprises. The VC funding model uses the expectation that a few will make it big and the others will fail or be let go. However, they do spread out funding among many initially smaller companies, and to some extent grant a lot of autonomy to each company to decide for itself what to do with the money, including spend it poorly. Because VCs already expect many to fail, they are not panicked about it. I think that's relatively non-hierarchical, compared with the alternative where a big investor takes over a company and dictates how to run it. So it's not clear to me whether VCs are a cause of hierarchy overall when considering all companies in the world, or if they are merely incentivising growth in some, while providing more flexibility to others to do their own thing than if modern VC did not exist.