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> Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a compan
by exceptione 1mo ago
> Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans
> The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms
> These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice
> Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues.
Aka the classic dynamic of wealth concentration resulting in power concentration. Great article. One thing it does not mention is how much this small circle of people have gotten zero-sum leverage over the whole country, because when the surveillance economy collapses, America collapses. This wouldn't be the first time the oligarchy triggers a crisis with reckless financial games.
- sghiassy 1mo agoIt’s the second gilded age Hopefully this one will pass, just as the first did
- rglover 1mo agoAll things pass. The question is what the fallout will look like for everyone who doesn't have their hand in the cookie jar.
- Henchman21 1mo agoI'm more interested in what happens to those with their hands in. They need to lose those hands.
- Ifkaluva 1mo ago“Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains. Thieves of public property, in riches and luxury”. —Cato the Elder
- mcmcmc 1mo agoThe Gilded Age didn’t just “pass”. It was ended by strong unions and antitrust legislation (and enforcement). Passivity will kill us if we let the oligarchs have their way. Hope is not a plan. Appeasement will have no more success than it did in WWII.
- malfist 1mo agoThe long arm of history bends towards progress. Not because progress happens spontaneously, but because people bend it
- TheOtherHobbes 1mo agoThe default oligarch orientation is to treat workers as slaves to the maximum possible extent. Firefights with guns, hand-to-hand violence, and real deaths were needed to give unions the leverage they had. For some reason this history isn't taught in schools.
- mcmcmc 1mo agoMaybe not yours but it was taught at my mediocre public school. We definitely covered Fort Frick, the Pinkertons, the Haymarket bombing, formation of the IWW and AFL-CIO, etc. For some reason people just tend to not pay attention or remember anything from their high school history classes.
- psadauskas 1mo agoThe first one passed with a lot of regular people losing their homes, their jobs, and even their lives. I wish just for once we could have the wealthy elites get their comeuppance without it also screwing over everyone else.
- fxd 1mo agoOne way to have the biggest house on the block is make sure nobody else can build. Why spend the money to build the bigger house when you don’t really enjoy it anyway - when your only motivation is that nobody else’s house is as big.
- monknomo 1mo agothere were substantial crashes and booms during the gilded age as well, it wasn't uncommon to go bust and lose a house before the great depression. The panic of `73 is pretty comparable with the great depression, for example
- ericmcer 1mo agoMy paranoid brain thinks the new "Every baby gets a $1000 investment account" is a lame effort on their part to keep it going. For an extremely low price tag they can give every child & parent skin in the game. For someone struggling seeing their kids account go up a $100 might compel them to support the bloated financial/banking industry now that they get a few drops from it.