To Less Efficient Startups
Anil Dash,
A Blog About Making Culture,
Oct 01, 2012
Anil Dash, I think, gets to the heart of what's wrong with today's startup culture: "From an economics standpoint, the hugely successful tech companies of our time are marvels of efficiency because it used to take a company with hundreds of thousands of employees to generate so much market value. Unfortunately, this "progress" in efficiency means a concentration of generated wealth among an even smaller, more exclusive cabal of winners when one of these companies succeeds.
Instead of generating tens of thousands of middle-class jobs as industrial-age titans did, these companies make a few dozen people truly extraordinarily wealthy, and then give generous payouts to a few hundred people who were already on a path to success by having been privileged enough to go to top universities and by having the identities that tech and engineering cultures are biased toward today. There is effectively no blue collar path to success, notwithstanding the much-vaunted stories of tech company chefs entering these companies in the kitchen and exiting as millionaires."
The venture capitalists don't fund ideas, they fund people - and if you look at those people they elect to find, it's people like them, people who, as Dash says, went to the right schools and knew the right people.
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