I'm of two minds about this.

On one hand, I sympathize with Ms. Morrill's position. I could see myself running a 50-person tech company. By the time it was public, I'd be looking for a replacement and planning to cash out. I hate having to justify my own work to people less intelligent than I am, and that becomes your life when you're the CEO of a publicly traded company.

"Unwashed masses" was off the mark and probably unneeded-- the actual enemy isn't 100-IQ average Americans (who, since it's 2015 and not 1347, are probably as clean as we are) who prefer fishing over running tech companies-- no one has a problem with them-- but management consultants and VC-land celebrities who think they're what I actually am (Dunning-Kruger) and are just so hilariously not, but somehow end up in charge despite their intellectual mediocrity. Still, I understand her sentiment completely and I feel the same way. If I'm CEO, then as soon as my job is begging for permission to do great work and justifying time and expense to inferior copies of myself who have no insight but all the power, instead of just fucking doing great work, then please cash me out and fire me.

On the other hand, I don't think that the VCs are, on the whole, better than the mainstream business elite. Person by person, they're worse: less intelligent, less capable, far more immature, and a hell of a lot worse in terms of organizational and social insight. The steel company CEO may not understand Haskell, but he fucking knows how to lead people and run a complex human organization. The typical Sand Hill Road VC doesn't know either and is, therefore, pretty fucking useless except for the fact that he's a gatekeeper to the man-child oligarchy that holds all the cards. The main benefit that you get as a private company (cf. Ms. Morrill) isn't that you're accountable to a higher quality of people (because VCs are not that) but that you're accountable to fewer people and, therefore, have a better chance of drawing only aces. If you're accountable to as many people as you are, once public, the probability of drawing all aces becomes really low-- and the 3's and 4's (which are found in both decks) often have better social skills and become the dominant decision-makers.

The major reason why VCs want to keep companies private, furthermore, has nothing to do with "long-term vision". Sand Hill Road is essentially taking equity-market strategies (namely, insider trading and market manipulation) that have been illegal for nearly a century on the public market, and applying them to private markets. If you use inside information to beat up the public market, you go to jail. If you pick up a phone and tell your buddies to dump their Quuxbin stocks all at once you can corner it on the cheap and put your underachieving, favor-dependent friends into executive positions... then you're guilty of market manipulation and go to jail. That kind of stuff happens (legally or at least quasi-legally) all the time in Silicon Valley.

The Sand Hill Road cartel (or, as I prefer it, man-child oligarchy) shows us a parallel universe in which pump-and-dump is the norm and businesses soar or fail not according to market demand for their (typically uninspiring) products, but based on the fluctuating needs of self-interested, careerist investors. This is not only ethically problematic, but it also contributes to the geographic concentration of technology funding, which has become toxic (both for the residents of the Bay Area, who pay obscene rents, and for the capital-deprived "flyover" rest of the country). See, anyone who wants to know why VC is so Bay Area-centric need only pay attention to what the VCs are actually doing. Because so many of the conversations that VCs have would utterly fucking ruin them if ever printed, they have to work face-to-face. That doesn't mandate a specific area (e.g. San Francisco) but it does require geographic concentration.