I’m a VC and agree with much of this. The mega firms have totally warped VC and the desire for massive cash appreciation has led to a host of bad characters getting involved. I still love working with early stage companies but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence. There are so many issues destroying early stage VC right now. We need major policy change / guardrails but that won’t happen.
VC is basically just plowing capital into people that went to prestigious schools or maybe were at a top company. They collect fees and every once in a while a company hits.
Any analysis on the asset class is moot.
Most of the VC media is aimed at hiding the fact that its a lottery machine for a pre selected group
I think the letter V should be removed from VC to better reflect your point that these are barely ventures - they're more like a rigged casino spin for those that don't have the talent to do the building themselves.
I've been in an interesting spot the last few months. I've pitched probably two dozen or so VCs and, and while almost every case showed interest, it was quickly followed by "rules" and "desires" that were antithetical to the product.
The product I am building is a decentralized trust system. The word "trust" is literally in the name. It requires very specific decisions and a very specific organizational and legal structure to be successful. Why? Because anything else doesn't breed trust.
But that's actually the problem. The VCs don't like those things, because in almost every case it relinquishes their control/power. Or, they ask us to do something either questionably or blatantly unethical in order to sweeten the pot. I was one of those founders "unaware of the Cancer Capital situation." After six months of pitching, it's become extremely obvious to me that the current VC system is incapable of funding anything ethical or long-term.
I don't know what the right answer is from here. Our current attempt is founding a syndicate of like-minded individuals to bootstrap a pre-seed. It seems like the only possibility where you might be able to maintain an ethical vision without fighting a cancerous overlord. We'll see how it goes.
> But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host
I thought a cancer grew from a defective cell that is able to divide and grow to over take the healthy ones.
> 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.
There is an explicit claim in the essay that says they aren't all the same.
Third bullet point says "a handful of venture capital firms have become 'do everything' funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses".
i can't believe the whole blog post was just the tldr. this is going to be a legendary series of blog posts! j/k i WOULD like to read the long version of this but i probably won't remember to go back to this blog.
Likewise, stock market IPOs are a parody now - not means of getting financing, but dumping the paper on the retail after for the insiders and VCs to realize their gains.
The lockup period is still in effect (for now) but reductions to index inclusion rules expose the stock to passive vehicles like ETFs that are obligated to have a specific allocation on the stock. So now there is an essentially guaranteed demand established by the time the lockup period expires. NASDAQ allows mega-cap companies into the NASDAQ-100 after 15 days which is much shorter than the lockup period for 80% of the SpaceX shares.
15 days - Pump: get into indexes -> ETFs obligated to buy shares
After - Dump: insiders cash out benefiting from the price premium of demand for shares from ETFs
They're solving that problem. Look at Spacex. They not only got the rules changed for fast-tracked inclusion in Nasdaq and Russell indexes to pump the price on their garbage asset, they changed the rules so insiders could bail early. It was a one-two punch in service of making insiders richer at the expense of retail investors. Transparent corruption, where a few billionaires write the rules that allow them to reach into regular folks pockets.
Yes, it's downright stupid to buy into any tech IPO these days. The fundraising and all the growth were done by the A-M rounds, while the IPO is the bag-dump for the last few rounds of investors. Stay far away.
In my ~20 year career half of which were well funded startups I made it to one IPO (multiple sole proprietor sales) with a bigcorp and my prize was having 3 years to buy my stock options at the IPO day strike-price, which was higher than the stock ever was in my last 2-3 years there.
In the end I made my million(th) sitting behind a cubicle collecting 401k which none of those startups gave me.
This is all silly and as best as I can read it due to very vocal large VC managers having politics the author doesn't agree with.
Take a look at the bullet points. It's just scattered random conflicting complaints.
VC is small and is now big (okay...)
They're not even VC anymore, they're doing all sorts of other investments (okay and?) Oh and they don't really care about their returns, but they grow fast (what? I'm pretty sure VCs care about returns). You know what else grows fast? Cancer!
Now that they're large, they have power over founders (why? there's other sources of capital). And they use companies to push their politics (seems much more complicated than just paying lobbyists).
And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)
There's an argument against large VC, but this ain't it. Talk about misaligned incentives, how they push aggressive tactics without regard to the founders, who may not be indifferent between a 50% chance of building a company to $10m to a 1% chance of building a company to $1b
Or just say "I don't like the politics of [VC related person]" and save everyone time.
"politics the author doesn't agree with" = racism, hatred, calls for ethnic cleansing, dismantling of the democratic government, open support for fascism... all being coordinated and advanced by a cabal of extremely wealthy VCs. Yeah those politics.
I’m a VC and agree with much of this. The mega firms have totally warped VC and the desire for massive cash appreciation has led to a host of bad characters getting involved. I still love working with early stage companies but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence. There are so many issues destroying early stage VC right now. We need major policy change / guardrails but that won’t happen.
Y'all need ethics is what ya need.
VC is basically just plowing capital into people that went to prestigious schools or maybe were at a top company. They collect fees and every once in a while a company hits.
Any analysis on the asset class is moot.
Most of the VC media is aimed at hiding the fact that its a lottery machine for a pre selected group
I think the letter V should be removed from VC to better reflect your point that these are barely ventures - they're more like a rigged casino spin for those that don't have the talent to do the building themselves.
I'll say it directly, as _they have_: they are attempting to recreate fuedalism.
Those folks are in these comments. They'll get their pitchforks and torches eventually.
VC is also exercising incredible power over media and politics. That's part of the article's point: VC isn't just about VC anymore.
You should add that they use pension funds to do this too. Easy to make stupid bets when it's not your money.
I've been in an interesting spot the last few months. I've pitched probably two dozen or so VCs and, and while almost every case showed interest, it was quickly followed by "rules" and "desires" that were antithetical to the product.
The product I am building is a decentralized trust system. The word "trust" is literally in the name. It requires very specific decisions and a very specific organizational and legal structure to be successful. Why? Because anything else doesn't breed trust.
But that's actually the problem. The VCs don't like those things, because in almost every case it relinquishes their control/power. Or, they ask us to do something either questionably or blatantly unethical in order to sweeten the pot. I was one of those founders "unaware of the Cancer Capital situation." After six months of pitching, it's become extremely obvious to me that the current VC system is incapable of funding anything ethical or long-term.
I don't know what the right answer is from here. Our current attempt is founding a syndicate of like-minded individuals to bootstrap a pre-seed. It seems like the only possibility where you might be able to maintain an ethical vision without fighting a cancerous overlord. We'll see how it goes.
> But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host
I thought a cancer grew from a defective cell that is able to divide and grow to over take the healthy ones.
It’s the second gilded age
Hopefully this one will pass, just as the first did
All things pass. The question is what the fallout will look like for everyone who doesn't have their hand in the cookie jar.
I'm more interested in what happens to those with their hands in. They need to lose those hands.
I’m skeptical of the implicit claim that they’re all the same. It seems rather difficult to prove?
There is an explicit claim in the essay that says they aren't all the same.
Third bullet point says "a handful of venture capital firms have become 'do everything' funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses".
Maybe VC always has been VC? Maybe the cancer was always inherent to the system and the author only just now noticed it?
Anil Dash writes what people want to hear (except for boring medical analogies).
He writes against Big-AI, but supports AI (small?) and copyright theft at the EFF, where he is a board member.
I'm getting tolerated opposition vibes here.
i can't believe the whole blog post was just the tldr. this is going to be a legendary series of blog posts! j/k i WOULD like to read the long version of this but i probably won't remember to go back to this blog.
Likewise, stock market IPOs are a parody now - not means of getting financing, but dumping the paper on the retail after for the insiders and VCs to realize their gains.
Aren't all the insiders restricted from dumping their shares for a set number of months?
The lockup period is still in effect (for now) but reductions to index inclusion rules expose the stock to passive vehicles like ETFs that are obligated to have a specific allocation on the stock. So now there is an essentially guaranteed demand established by the time the lockup period expires. NASDAQ allows mega-cap companies into the NASDAQ-100 after 15 days which is much shorter than the lockup period for 80% of the SpaceX shares.
15 days - Pump: get into indexes -> ETFs obligated to buy shares
After - Dump: insiders cash out benefiting from the price premium of demand for shares from ETFs
No. Look at the SpaceX lockup. It’s staggered with various groups getting ability to sell earlier than others. Well ahead of 6 months.
They're solving that problem. Look at Spacex. They not only got the rules changed for fast-tracked inclusion in Nasdaq and Russell indexes to pump the price on their garbage asset, they changed the rules so insiders could bail early. It was a one-two punch in service of making insiders richer at the expense of retail investors. Transparent corruption, where a few billionaires write the rules that allow them to reach into regular folks pockets.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/spacex-insiders-will-get-to-...
Yes, it's downright stupid to buy into any tech IPO these days. The fundraising and all the growth were done by the A-M rounds, while the IPO is the bag-dump for the last few rounds of investors. Stay far away.
But serioslly when IPOs were not a sad joke? In early 1990s? But I think never.
In my ~20 year career half of which were well funded startups I made it to one IPO (multiple sole proprietor sales) with a bigcorp and my prize was having 3 years to buy my stock options at the IPO day strike-price, which was higher than the stock ever was in my last 2-3 years there.
In the end I made my million(th) sitting behind a cubicle collecting 401k which none of those startups gave me.
At this point we must have a drink to that.
This reads like someone who can’t make smart bets “before it’s obvious.”
Lots of VCs out there still taking big gambles on the agendaless and unproven ideas.
This is all silly and as best as I can read it due to very vocal large VC managers having politics the author doesn't agree with.
Take a look at the bullet points. It's just scattered random conflicting complaints.
VC is small and is now big (okay...)
They're not even VC anymore, they're doing all sorts of other investments (okay and?) Oh and they don't really care about their returns, but they grow fast (what? I'm pretty sure VCs care about returns). You know what else grows fast? Cancer!
Now that they're large, they have power over founders (why? there's other sources of capital). And they use companies to push their politics (seems much more complicated than just paying lobbyists).
And did you know pension funds invest in this stuff?(which is bad?)
There's an argument against large VC, but this ain't it. Talk about misaligned incentives, how they push aggressive tactics without regard to the founders, who may not be indifferent between a 50% chance of building a company to $10m to a 1% chance of building a company to $1b
Or just say "I don't like the politics of [VC related person]" and save everyone time.
"politics the author doesn't agree with" = racism, hatred, calls for ethnic cleansing, dismantling of the democratic government, open support for fascism... all being coordinated and advanced by a cabal of extremely wealthy VCs. Yeah those politics.