The problem is not venture capital as a concept, but the actual venture-capital environment we have. The focus is entirely on low-percentage but very high-retur

The problem is not venture capital as a concept, but the actual venture-capital environment we have. The focus is entirely on low-percentage but very high-return unicorn chasing, and it's easy to see why, but there are some ill effects. When VCs pick winners with huge cash injections, instead of letting the market decide, you get a lot of shitty companies crowding out better ones. By "better" I mostly mean more stable and sustainable, still producing far better-than-inflation returns but not enough to be "interesting" to the kingmakers. Instead we get wild boom-and-bust cycles, even for the successful ones. But "better" could also mean doing less social harm, since the primary way to stand out in such a crowd is to show the greatest willingness to abandon all guardrails. That's why so many of the unicorns have made our lives worse, and also why we've recently had such a rash of outright frauds. The profit motive is great, when the market is truly open. When so much of a market is controlled by a tight circle of people gambling with other people's money and everyone's future for their own sole benefit ... not so much. VC as it currently exists has empirically been bad for far more people than it has benefited. I don't know the solution. I don't know what kind of regulation (if any) would fix this without throwing the free-market baby out with the oligopolist bathwater. I;m no fan of central planning, that's for sure, but I sort of feel that's what we already have and what we need to get away from. And yeah, I know this is quite possibly the worst environment in which to express such a sentiment. If you disagree, maybe at least have the courage and courtesy to express that in the form of a coherent counterargument.