[bryant]

The implication is that venture capitalism and large/entrenched investment firms in particular can consider diversified investment in innovative startups to be their "moat."

I'm not entirely sure I agree, but I see the line of reasoning, and I can in a way validate in my own mind how some might see this statement as genuinely profound.

[tptacek]

For it to be a competitive "moat" (a forbidding competitive advantage), don't they have to be making money? As an asset class, venture capital has comparatively pitiful performance.

The top VCs --- the ones that actually generate reliable market-beating returns --- certainly have a "moat": the best dealflow. But that's unrelated to the snark from the comment upthread.

[joshrivers]

VC doesn’t need to be the asset class benefiting, does it? Doesn’t most of the cream and benefit of innovation in the startup space end up getting purchased by first the big tech firms (Cisco, Oracle, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google), second the S&P500, and rarely the public markets?

I remember the panic of the ‘90s about the coming disruption from internet technologies, but at best it has been a horizontal revolution, rather than a vertical one, and the same wealth and power centers have survived.

You would think that a new, superior set of technology and process would revolutionize, say, the hiring process. Instead, the brute force of lots of money provides a moat where HR, hiring managers, teams, and candidates are protected from meaningful disruption and progress.

All that said, my comment is almost certainly nonsense. I was referring to the broad sway of competitive advantage and the inertia of inadequate equalibria (more nonsense, surely). If you believe I am not properly building a warrant against the technical meanings on investment analysis terminology, you are right.