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Wikipedia is the biggest thing that comes to mind for me.

However, I think that falls pretty squarely in the "internet" era rather than the "VC" era of your point. I'm not sure if that gets at the spirit of your argument (which I generally agree with).

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But WP isn't a VC company, and it's not publicly traded, is it?

It's not venture-funded (thankfully), but it's definitely tech/internet to the bone.

No, I don't believe it is. I think it's part of the WikiMedia foundation, which itself is a non-profit. Could be wrong on that.

I interpreted the word "institutions" pretty broadly here though, since the original comment was talking about a whole "era". Not trying to disagree with the gist of the original comment, just making discussion about an edge case I thought of.

That's my point. Non-profits like WP or even benevolent dictatorships like Valve seem immune to this. It's once you get a pure-profit incentive through VC funding or public trading that you get this kind of "we can't have nice things" where public goodwill gets pillaged into money.

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