No, VCs not SPACs. They say “reduce friction” and “fail fast”. They do multiple rounds injecting capital into companies that lose money for years, and sometimes do not ever generate any profits or even any revenue. David Heineier Hansson and thr Basecamp guys for example have railed against this for two decades.

Example of a huge fund now deemed worthless by investors, who invested in some of the top Web2 projects (NOT Web3): https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2020/04/05/exclusive...

Actually, if that’s all VCs and Wall Street did, then that would be fine for society because they’d basically build useful money-losing businesses that served a ton of people. But some VCs go further. They encourage companies to build a monopoly and extract rents forever. Most of Big Tech ended up this way, and there is a reason many people are not happy. Peter Thiel is open and honest about his opinion that “competition is for losers, build a monopoly”: https://onezero.medium.com/competition-is-for-losers-how-pet...

This has a huge effect on society. Take the Facebook example… Mark Zuckerberg was programming geek who liked Open Source. Microsoft offered him $1 million for a producy he built in High School. He refused, and put it up as open source.

In college, he hacked together projects like Facemash and Facebook using PHP. What people don’t know (and what was left out of the movie) is that Mark Z wanted to create Wirehog, a (gasp!) peer to peer, decentralized file sharing system. I was at the first TechCrunch Disrupt when Sean Parker was interviewed on stage. He proudly recounted how “we put a bullet in that thing”:

https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/

We being him and the VCs. You see, Sean Parker once upon a time was ALSO a guy who built a successful product that was by and for the people — Napster. And it also went up against a different industry that liked monopolies — er I’m sorry, intellectual property. They formed associations like MPAA and RIAA that sued Napster and destroyed it. But Parker learned the VC gane after that. He started Plaxo. He discovered Mark Z the way talent scouts discover artists for record labels, and brought Mark together with Peter Thiel. Clarion Capital turned $500K into $5 Billion.

So they took an open source-loving software-hacking geek like the ones you should celebrate in Hacker News, and turned him into a corporate golden boy who runs a monopoly, bullies and buys up the competition. And you are conditioned to support that so that you, too, can get funded by the VCs. Closed databases and recurring revenues are good. But the Open Web with Web3 and open protocols without middlemen — they’re bad because some middlemen — the very phenomenon Web3 smart contracts are supposed to replace, did what they usually do: amassed money and power from millions of people promising instant gratification and then started having their own private ideas about how to use that money and power.

The thing is that when a VC-funded company has an IPO, the shareholders push Facebook to extract rents forever. And the VCs groom them to do so. So if the VCs are good at their job and the company becomes a wall street darling, that essentially means the investors will be extracting rents from both sides of the ecosystem, and encourage monopolistic practices and intellectual property enforcement lest people defect to open source marketplaces and, say, Uber drivers keep more of their money.

And as for Peter Thiel? He went on to build precrime software for the government.

Tell me where I’m wrong.