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Much as I'd like to believe it, there are some things that can't be bootstrapped. Actually there are many things. We just don't do them because the VC's aren't funding them either. Perhaps they'll go back to it. Funding is the art of boss-picking. Who gets to be a boss, and who has to implement someone else's idea and have a boss? Funding goes to a (Person, Idea) pair-- a 2-tuple, in other words. Now, the problem. Person-picking is fairly useless. It's not that good management isn't important, but there's no correlation between being fundable (i.e. attractive to VCs, probably because one went to the same boarding school) and being a good executive. Idea-picking is important, but very hard to do. Now, there are obvious Ideas that deserve funding. Cancer research, clean energy. The issue is that most of us who are intellectually honest know that we don't make a credible (Person, Idea) pair with the meatiest Ideas (because others know a lot more than we do). The higher the quality of Idea, the fewer Persons there are for whom there's a credible pair. (This social-media nonsense is mostly low-quality ideas that a 5-year-old could execute.) So, what do you have in VC-istan? You have narcissists who say, "I don't care what the Idea is, but I deserve to be the Person because, goddamn it, I have an MBA." They continually pivot until they find something a VC will fund. Typically, they land on Ideas for which it's easy to have a (Person, Idea) match, which tend to be those that involve no vision or real technical meat except for "scaling", which isn't that hard if you're half-decent at hiring technical people. |