[bluishgreen]

"For the last few months, I've been cautiously testing a radical-sounding hypothesis on smart people: entrepreneurs are the new labor. Or to put it in a more useful way, the balance of power between investors and entrepreneurs that marks the early, frontier days of a major technology wave (Moore's Law and the Internet in this case) has fallen apart. Investors have won, and their dealings with the entrepreneur class now look far more like the dealings between management and labor (with overtones of parent/child and teacher/student). Those who are attracted to true entrepreneurship are figuring out new ways to work around the traditional investor class. The investor class in turn is struggling to deal with the unpleasant consequences of an outright victory." (2012)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepr...

[rogerkirkness]

My experience has been the opposite: investors are very smart late career people who defer, encourage and support. Compared to the "CEO fired for missing the quarter" days, it's very civilized, arguably strongly biases towards founders tbh.

[josh2600]

This mirrors my experience.

Strong investors now will literally assign their voting shares to the ceo and not take board seats even in a Series B round.

[tyre]

This couldn’t be further from the reality.

Valuations on early stage companies have never been higher—we’re talking eight figures for pre-revenue businesses—which means millions of dollars before hitting the ~20% equity for a round.

Founders sometimes have shares worth multiple votes, the board is entirely them (since the huge supply of money gives them leverage), and VCs are so afraid of being labeled “founder unfriendly” that they defer almost entirely to founders.

Whether it’s good or bad is a much longer thing (some of each, of course) but it’s certainly not founders working for investors. It’s never been less so.

[telotortium]

michaelochurch has pointed this out for a while now (at least since 2013 on his old blog).

[dustymcp]

i think alot of tech companies working with crypto can say this.