[Barrin92]

>This summer, three of the TikTok's most popular stars, Josh Richards, Bryce Hall, and Griffin Johnson, decided to become angel investors.

The three influencers are part of a broader group of TikTok celebrities called the Sway House and have attracted a fair share of scandal and controversy, including for throwing a large, unmasked party during the pandemic. But tech founders have mostly welcomed them with open arms.

Honestly what this reminded me of is the paper on Veblerian entrepreneurship[1]. People like this might have their finger on the pulse when it comes to entertainment content, or social media, but I have no idea how they're supposed to make informed technological decisions in the more narrow sense of the term. Venture capital seems to be more and more invested in entertainment, lifestyle, and content creation rather than deep technological and material innovation.

[1]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3479042

[hardwaresofton]

> Honestly what this reminded me of is the paper on Veblerian entrepreneurship[1]. People like this might have their finger on the pulse when it comes to entertainment content, or social media, but I have no idea how they're supposed to make informed technological decisions in the more narrow sense of the term. Venture capital seems to be more and more invested in entertainment, lifestyle, and content creation rather than deep technological and material innovation.

The same way I imagine random VCs and new funds do it -- hire experts and consultants until they get a feel for the field and more importantly connections to more private placements.

Money is capital because it allows you to do these things -- you don't have to be an expert in a field if you can just hire one.

Also, do we know how much alpha is actually generated by VCs as opposed to random scattershot (especially in a certain niche) and getting lucky?

[lawrenceyan]

That's mostly just because you don't hear about the deep technological and material innovation investments. If you're generally in the loop though, you'll know.

[mywittyname]

> Venture capital seems to be more and more invested in entertainment, lifestyle, and content creation rather than deep technological and material innovation.

We've reached the maturity point in technology where innovation isn't really necessary for a successful business. It is possible to build a successful, scalable site/platform using commodity engineers. A team of three or four competent engineers should be able to put together a backend platform in AWS to support a site and a few mobile apps in six months.

The difficult part today is the actual business. These people are smart to get into VC, since they understand the hard part and can afford to pay for the easy part.