False Prophets of Tech

The worship of founders who got wealthy without ever creating a business needs to end. I get that these businesses have employees, and that’s positive, but selling your company and having it lose hundreds of millions of dollars forever as part of a public company is not successful, and the era of that methodology being praised is expiring quickly.

Someone is taking the loss, and that someone is the public. Although the loss is often absorbed as part of a larger umbrella venture, the behavior is supporting a value-destruction methodology that’s only propped up by VC gamblers and legacy cheap LP capital that needs to be deployed. 85% of the time (or more), those VCs have never run a successful enterprise and never will. Many of their LPs didn’t earn the money they invested in the fund either — they often inherited it directly or indirectly through a spouse’s family having a business or trust fund.

It comes down to this: getting rich for doing nothing and providing something that is unsustainable to the world but still magically extracting large sums of cash is a parasitic behavior that we must eliminate from our marketplace if we want to begin improving our markets.