Letters to a Young VC: Letter Six
A collection of letters encompassing simple insights and recognition of foundational shifts that any bright minds trapped within the old norms of a VC mindset can use to break free, whether they are just starting their journey or reflecting back on what they wish someone had told them in their early days.
Letter Six in the Letters to a Young VC series is now live.
Read the full piece on Mirror here.
Short Excerpt:
Exit strategy.
Who benefits most from timing the right moment, right from the start, to race for the exits?
The hint is in the title of this Letters to a Young VC series. Of course, it’s the finance bros, the institutional financiers, the LARPers of venture capitalism.
That’s what it’s all built for, after all: the exit, the exit, the exit. Race for the exit!
The most opportune moments of escape from hyper leveraged positions for those running a greater fool Ponzi. Where all they’re really ever invested in are the moments when they can dump on the flipside of the market.
Because in their minds, that’s all there is. There is no primary wealth creation worth serious attention.
If you believe that, even if you’re willing to look at the sources of primary wealth creation at all, you’d think of it from that perspective as power plants and mining and all of the other things that simplistically hearken back to the battle for control over land.
It’s just all the same old kind of tribal aristocracy bullshit for leverage over each other.
This complex of different groups, homogenous within themselves and not all that different from each other when you scratch beneath logos and symbols, all scrambling to get a larger slice of a basically limited, mostly unchanging, illiquid, and often diminishing pool of existing resources.
Place your bets on mining rights, drilling exploration, or other ways to identify where there might be a resource you didn’t realize was there before, or has new demand in the market — in the conventional casino model of economic thinking it’s all marginal and derivative of the fundamental scramble for control over a relatively static, or even diminishing, set of land rights.
It feeds into continuing this entrenched mental model and worldview of why nations exist, why borders exist, why militant nationalism becomes a necessary sacrifice of personal rights for the public good in the minds of those who adhere to this twisted model. All a function and extension of a civilised, civilising, and even virtuous influence in their convoluted self-justifications. They’re not just being exploitative, they say.
