Yeah, but ycombinator's involvement seems like it would keep vcs on their best behavior. It's (I believe) common knowledge that all the founders and the yc principals share info on vcs, so screwing founders (for real, not just in the founders' opinion) has much higher costs.
The VC industry is ripe for disruption it would seem?
I wonder how quickly the landscape would change if billionaires from various other fields started investing arms to fund tech. Considering the trend in club football where billionaires who have nothing to do with football started investing in football clubs all over Europe. The way they went about running the whole business changed the face of club football forever. Disruptive is mildly putting it as European football's premier footablling body (UEFA) has tried to regulate the flow of cash and has imposed strict investment guidelines ever since, to cope with it. Sort of.
Instead of having VCs who don’t respect hackers and work hard to rip them off on behalf of their LPs, you’d have VCs who don’t respect hackers and also don’t understand technology, which sounds like a great way for their LPs to lose all their money.
I wanted to say “this is how pets.com got funded” but actually it turns out pets.com was started by the CEO who led Berkeley Systems, the flying toaster people, into an acquisition where she got laid off; and she was funded by Hummer Winblad and Amazon. And so while Julie Wainwright may not have exactly been Brin and Page getting funded by Andy Bechtolsheim, she certainly had experience managing technology companies, and her VCs certainly knew what they were getting into. And other ridiculous stories from the same time, like FireDrop/Zaplet (business plan: send DHTML by email) had similarly impeccable pedigrees (funded: US$90M by Kleiner, Joe Kraus, Bill Joy, Esther Dyson, et al.)
So, how much worse would it get, really? Hundreds of billions of dollars a year of investment capital desperately chasing any Ivy League graduate who knows how to tie a tie and promises to hire an army of monkey programmers just as soon as they get funded?
If the evidence from football is anything to go by, billionaires adopting startups to run as their personal fiefdom would have even the most activist and unethical VCs seem like a founder's dream by comparison.
The emergence of liquid secondary markets for companies not big enough to IPO would be the founders' dream; suddenly the long term sustainability of the business would matter as much as numbers of potential acquirers and potential for aggressive growth.
Agreed, although GetSatisfaction describes itself as "the leading customer engagement platform" - a broad area like customer engagement seems like it has gigantic revenue potential and if they're the leading business in that sector..
> Taking VC is like getting the world’s worst boss: Shitload of opinions, undue level of influence, never actually shows up for work.
https://twitter.com/monstro/status/587413328055635968