I understand the concept you are trying to convey but you are using the wrong words, and as a result you come across as naive and uninformed. You are making an

I understand the concept you are trying to convey but you are using the wrong words, and as a result you come across as naive and uninformed. You are making an observation about a VC's motivation and strategy. But the words you are using make it sound like you are talking about the structure of their investment. There is no distinction between a corporation and "the actual business" of the corporation from the point of view of an equity investor. An equity investor buys shares of the corporation, and that's it. An investor might be motivated to make that investment because they want a return, or they might be motivated to make that investment because they are passionate about what the corporation does, but either way, they buy the same stock. There are not separate investment mechanisms contingent on an investor's motives. It is true that VCs are motivated entirely by ROI, and this is an important thing to understand, but rendering that as "VC's don't invest in businesses" is wrong. It turns an important insight into a deepity [1]. (I suspect that this particular aphorism models itself after Ray Croc's famous quip that he was not in the hamburger business but the real estate business. But in his case it was actually true. Ray Croc never sold a hamburger. He sold franchises to people who sold hamburgers. That really is an important structural difference, and it's the reason that Ray got much (much!) richer than any of his franchisees. But in this case, the aphorism is flat-out wrong. There is no structural difference between what a VC does and what any other equity investor does, with the single exception that VCs never invest in companies that have already gone public.) [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:deepity https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:deepity