> VC-funded startups are mostly a mechanism for taking parental wealth and influence (a socially unacceptable thing for the child to live off of) and laundering

> VC-funded startups are mostly a mechanism for taking parental wealth and influence (a socially unacceptable thing for the child to live off of) and laundering it into shares of newly-created businesses, so that the sponsee looks like a genuine tech entrepreneur rather than the beneficiary of a managed outcome (acqui-hire!) put together by his parents' friends. By "mostly," to what greater-than-50% degree to which they are this sort of mechanism do you have in mind? Are founders of greater than 50% of startups actually children of people that work at VC firms? (In actual reality, they aren't.) > There is a lot of technology work, even right now, that improves peoples' lives in immensely meaningful ways. Perhaps the people doing such work are a "silent majority" of technology. The problem is that you never hear about it on Hacker News or TechCrunch, and the contemporary crowd of Valley king-makers runs away from it. This is completely false because we hear about technology improving people's lives all the time here, and usually when I see anything about snapchat or Valley kings it's because you decided to talk about it. > If something is worth doing, it's usually hard to do and even harder to control. Well uh, that's a nice premise, but it's actually often easy to do things that are worth doing. Especially when there's a new untapped market. > If several of the constraints are socioeconomic arrangements (e.g. Joffrey must get at least $10M and a VP-level position in the inevitable acqui-hire; and we must let Squabbling Hen Capital in on this deal, with a board seat, because we owe them a favor) then it becomes a lot harder to actually do anything useful. Instead, it becomes "tech is hard, let's go Snapchat". Which VP-level positions at Snapchat are held by the sort of people you refer to?