[svskeptic]

This is great observation and speculation on what could happen and where would it come from.

I've had multiple conversations with top-10 VC firm partners during our unsuccessful pitches where one of the sticking points is 'unfair-advantage'. 'How can you lock $user_group/$partners into this transaction/partnership?'

Peter Thiel: "Monopolies are a good thing for society... The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices."

What the world needs is perfect competition. VCs profess that they live in a capitalist system and work within its constraints, but just about all want to capture some part of it, preventing competition from coming in.

One way to limit competition? Get the government to do it for you. Regulatory Capture.

So, excuse me, if I don't buy this coming from a VC. And I won't buy it from any other VC as well. They are arguing for them to be in control of capture. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

[pmarca]

Most of the companies we fund are trying to go disrupt someone else's "dominant market position".

[akiselev]

So that they can take over the dominant market position, eventually using the exact same tactics to keep entrants out. Anything less would run afoul of shareholder primacy so unless VCs take an active role in promoting ethical behavior from their portfolio, those words are empty as this blog post. Anyone who wasn't born yesterday knows that human beings won't do something that is in direct opposition to their interests (the exceptions to this rule became nurses and doctors and social workers, not VCs) and without an honest to goodness change in laws, reasonable people know that VCs won't change their behavior. Since most portfolio companies are in competition with someone - a fact almost every investor in the industry is cognizant of - anything short of actually spending money on lobbying to change laws and promote their enforcement is an empty gesture.

[pmarca]

You'll never guess what happens next.

[svskeptic]

And none of them try to lock customers, partners or decision makers from going away in any underhanded way, right? Just pure offer-the-best-and-they-will-stick-with-us. And if someone does it better than us and takes them away from us, shame on us!

[petra]

Nah. Most often a16z, as other VC's, invest in platforms.

What do platforms often do: take an industry, served by many businesses, often small ones, and concentrate it.

Than, the platform does most of the repetitive, scalable, work, while leaving entrepreneurs with doing all risky work, and little place for hiring employees.

As for the employees, their work is commoditized, they get ton of competition which to leads to really deteriorating pay and work conditions, and labor laws are often broken right and left.