[tombert]

Yeah, I'm a bit burnt out on startups personally. They tend to give somewhat mediocre compensation, and they give you a bunch of shares with some bloated arbitrary value number to make up for it.

Obviously it would be awesome if those shares end up being as valuable as they claim it is, but honestly it just kind of feels like lottery tickets. Most startups don't end up becoming the next Amazon or Apple, and as such those shares end up not being worth anything.

[bmitc]

I think startups and venture capitalism is destroying the economy. I think this is pretty clear qualitatively, but I'd also like to start investigating it quantitatively.

[tombert]

It certainly feels a bit ponzi-ish to me. Historically it feels like you raised funds by IPO-ing immediately and going from there. With VC, it seems like the plan is "waste VC money until we IPO, and then it the public's problem, not ours", and everyone who can realistically make money exits.

I suspect a place to start investigating would be to try and find the number of dollars being spent by the VC firms in relation to how many startups go belly-up. It certainly feels like startups are more volatile than ever but I don't have any data proving that.