> Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term?
To be fair, the fate of most of them is actually to fail. Hence this amplified effect of why VCs need such a standout massive return to make the fund model work.
That said, while it seems like it to us normal folk, in the grand scheme of VC, $25M is not really "a bunch of money". In 2021, a16z led or co-lead $3.2B [1] in funding rounds. I can't find a publicly available stat for how many rounds that entailed, but napkin math says 100–300. Of course the distribution is not linear, but if we take the 200 investments midpoint, that's a $16M check on average.
The additional $70M here follow-on is the real story. It looks like they are not giving it a label, though Crunchbase lists the $25M from a16z a year ago as Series B, so I'm inclined to call this new round the Series C.
> My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding.
IMO tech, startups at least, are not long-minded like this in general. Companies regularly come and go in 6–24 months. Good luck convincing the current and next waves of CTOs of not using venture-backed tech [that saves them tons of time for great prices right now]. And then portcos also often make deals with other portcos... the cycle feeds itslef in more ways than one.
It's like trying to change the color of the ocean with one single cup of red dye. At the end of the day, this is just a rounding error.
But also, Big Tech will end up acquiring many of the standouts a la Firebase or Heroku. Resisting the model won't upend or stop it.
To be fair, the fate of most of them is actually to fail. Hence this amplified effect of why VCs need such a standout massive return to make the fund model work.
That said, while it seems like it to us normal folk, in the grand scheme of VC, $25M is not really "a bunch of money". In 2021, a16z led or co-lead $3.2B [1] in funding rounds. I can't find a publicly available stat for how many rounds that entailed, but napkin math says 100–300. Of course the distribution is not linear, but if we take the 200 investments midpoint, that's a $16M check on average.
The additional $70M here follow-on is the real story. It looks like they are not giving it a label, though Crunchbase lists the $25M from a16z a year ago as Series B, so I'm inclined to call this new round the Series C.
> My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding.
IMO tech, startups at least, are not long-minded like this in general. Companies regularly come and go in 6–24 months. Good luck convincing the current and next waves of CTOs of not using venture-backed tech [that saves them tons of time for great prices right now]. And then portcos also often make deals with other portcos... the cycle feeds itslef in more ways than one.
It's like trying to change the color of the ocean with one single cup of red dye. At the end of the day, this is just a rounding error.
But also, Big Tech will end up acquiring many of the standouts a la Firebase or Heroku. Resisting the model won't upend or stop it.
[1]: https://news.crunchbase.com/liquidity/under-the-hood-a-decad...