[wpietri]

I am blaming Silicon Valley for building a hype machine that valued appearance over substance, short-term paper gains over long-term value creation. Again.

And I'm hardly the only one saying this. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark, made it clear that we've been dealing with a bubble, and said that the best possible thing that could happen was "a return to an appreciation for sound business execution". [1]

Nobody minds minds that we have companies that fail. That's the game. But when we create companies that burn ten million, a hundred million, maybe a billion dollars and never could have succeeded, then that is a major fuckup that is on us.

Even if you don't care about wasting OPM at that scale, just think of the number of seed and A-round companies that Theranos's $686.3M could have funded. If our job is to make interesting mistakes, we should be maximizing the amount learned per venture dollar.

[1] http://abovethecrowd.com/2016/04/21/on-the-road-to-recap/