For decades, venture capital was associated with creative destruction. Recently, it has drifted toward risk-averse incrementalism, serving the incumbents it used to disrupt.
The quarter-mile analogy holds up scarily well all the way to the "cursory lap around a track" ending. What's less clear to me is whether LPs actually have a way out of this, since even the ones who want patient capital still get judged against funds that chased the ARR sprint and won on paper. Has anyone actually tried an incentive structure that breaks the cycle, or is it just a handful of firms opting out and eating the career risk?
There appears to be a gradually emerging class of venture capital firms (which is really just the "old" venture capital") that opt out of this myopia. Firms like Chaotic Capital who took a swing on Valar Atomics when it wasn't at all clear about the financial or regulatory future of that technology.
It's tiny right now, but the hope is that it keeps developing.
in its terminal state, it's a glorified motor show, nobody cares about the race anymore' is such a brutal ending line, and Decision Justification Theory is the sharpest concept in here, so much of what looks like analysis is really just picking the choice that's hardest to be blamed for later
The quarter-mile analogy holds up scarily well all the way to the "cursory lap around a track" ending. What's less clear to me is whether LPs actually have a way out of this, since even the ones who want patient capital still get judged against funds that chased the ARR sprint and won on paper. Has anyone actually tried an incentive structure that breaks the cycle, or is it just a handful of firms opting out and eating the career risk?
There appears to be a gradually emerging class of venture capital firms (which is really just the "old" venture capital") that opt out of this myopia. Firms like Chaotic Capital who took a swing on Valar Atomics when it wasn't at all clear about the financial or regulatory future of that technology.
It's tiny right now, but the hope is that it keeps developing.
in its terminal state, it's a glorified motor show, nobody cares about the race anymore' is such a brutal ending line, and Decision Justification Theory is the sharpest concept in here, so much of what looks like analysis is really just picking the choice that's hardest to be blamed for later
Brilliant piece!
Thank you Guillaume! Glad you enjoyed it.