Thank you for formally describing what's been bothering me about the VC system.
To me, we're living in a bizarro reality that's the opposite of the original 90s vision of the web. The idea then was that geeks living in their parents' basements could build stuff like Netscape, eBay, PayPal, etc on a shoestring budget in the low $10,000s and disrupt established monopolies/evil-corps (Microsoft at that time) in the status quo.
But today that's been replaced by VC gatekeeping, so now we have to live where the "network" is, San Francisco or wherever, and rub shoulders with someone who knows a VC and has access to the millions of dollars needed to start a startup and hire programmers for $150k per year or more. Maybe we build SAAS products and need a network of salespeople too. And advertising isn't enough, now we have to find an influencer to endorse our product because merit isn't enough. This is how meritocracy becomes illusion.
I mean that's cool and everything, it's fun to make money, but we're still under the yoke like any other job. The dream of real independence is all but dead. We find ourselves locked into a mature and successful model whose main product is a failure rate so high that many of us haven't had a win in our entire careers. We just try to rescue project after project, fail, and our work gets thrown away. For every winner, there are 10, 100, 1000 or more losers who tried to build the exact same thing and got beaten to the finish line.
I would propose that a better system looks like the opposite of all this. Rather than putting all of our eggs in one basket with unicorns, we should be casting a wide net. I still believe that nearly every programmer would work for room and board if it meant total control of their creative vision. Small teams paying perhaps $24k or $36k per year to each developer, with enough runway to last at least 2-3 years. Focusing on getting real work done above all. And most importantly, creating a pay-it-forward culture with a broad goal like providing UBI within our lifetimes to free people from servitude. Meaning something like a tech guild where members take an oath to pay some portion of their earnings into a pot shared by everyone. 1% of a successful billion dollar exit is $10 million, enough to materially change the lives of perhaps 100-1000 other developers at $10-$100k each. Imagine what could be done with 10%, or 50%.. instead of having 1 trillionaire who owns the world with all of us becoming renters.
This voluntary wealth redistribution is a soft form of (cough) socialism. The inevitable conclusion of this line of thought is that our current crony capitalist system is not compatible with a benevolent future for tech workers. Currently every innovation enriches a handful of key players at the expense of everyone else. We feel this everywhere, in the long hours, lack of pay raises, ever-increasing rents, loss of personal autonomy. And soon in our unemployment as AI solves the last challenge of computer science, programming itself.
This is why I've been disappointed with HN lately, for not anticipating these eventualities. I'm saddened that it's abandoned its original vision of handing out life-changing grants to a large number of promising developers and projects. And worry now that maybe its participation in the doubling-down on winner-take-all capitalism is speeding us faster towards the looming cliff. For all of their resources, if they can't change course, I wonder if they're really who they think they are, or just another arm of the status quo. I really hope I'm wrong, because I love most of what they're doing, but I can't shake the feeling that something's off.
Edit: after writing this, I realized that it's aligned with academia, where successful alumni pay into a trust/endowment whose interest/dividends pay for future students' education, even at the most exclusive schools like Harvard. NASA maybe follows this model somewhat, using government funding to invent solutions used by the public. So maybe the private sector simply can't do this, and our resources might be better invested somewhere else where they can help the collective good.