> Why does everything need freaking VC investments? I share this frustration. Putting aside the ambitions of founders and initial investors in order to address

> Why does everything need freaking VC investments? I share this frustration. Putting aside the ambitions of founders and initial investors in order to address your question about "everything"... I think it comes down to tech being perennially talent constrained. It might not feel like that right now after a year or two of big layoffs, but every time that has happened, another long hiring boom has started within a couple of years. If there were enough competent engineers (in this case, ones that aren't going to get the company in the news for things like cryptography mistakes or sloppy data handling), then that would change all of this. But there aren't, so these companies are left competing for the scarce talent. You need a large pool of resources for that competition. VC money (eventually replaced by liquid stock grants) is often the easiest source of that. So, VCs can help a company keep and add talent, but in return they want hypergrowth.