ever since I was a little girl I dreamed of joining a struggling second tier competitor

people love to fucking play VC. drag venture guys who dress up, drop the "right" jargon, slap “partner” on their bio, and treat capital like a sacred and secret priesthood they were destined to be a part of. good people are on the other end of that check. founders who have bet on the next five years of their life, employees who moved cities and took equity instead of salary, spouses who sign up for the risk, kids whose college funds are now riding on whether some wannabe drag investor decides the company is “category-defining”. GTFOH this shit is not a game. families are at risk every time some mid to low IQ status addict with a checkbook, pretends they know how to allocate capital. 90 percent of venture investors have been conditioned to optimize for looking like a winner more than for helping anyone to win. thats just fact. who gets hurt when the act ultimately fails? the founder who left a stable job, burned the bridge, told their parents this was the move, and is running on four hours of sleep and pure unadulterated delusion. spouse gets it next. they covered health insurance, kept the kids quiet during late night calls. when a company dies that household absorbs real fucking damage...debt, resentment, turmoil. employees next. ones who took below market cash for the equity story. brushed off with “talent that can just get another job.” some of them moved for this. some of them have kids in school. some of them already turned down safer offers because the founder sold them a future that an investor’s ego just eliminated overnight. then there is the downstream. the customers who built workflows around a product that gets abandoned when the board prioritizes the next raise over shipping real shit. the early believers who introduced the founder to their network and now look stupid asf. the next founder who watches the whole thing form the sidelines and decides the only rational move is to never trust anyone with a check again. the snowball effect. the market does not care that the VC was “just following process.” the amount of pricks I have met that just "learn" the language of “conviction” and “founder-market fit” and “asymmetric upside” and they use it as a shield for their own incompetence and fears. if a company goes sideways they reframe it as “we were early” or “the founder wasn’t coachable.” most times they do not actively want to hurt anyone. they simply do not care enough about the specific humans in front of them to override the bullshit status games. you need creativity and a strong desire not to be conditioned to be a great investor in my view. you need to be a good hearted person who treats every interaction with respect. it is not fucking hard. respect is not softness. When you skip it, you are being a dickhead who has confused the ability to write a check with the right to treat people humanly great vc - high IQ enough to see the structural problems in a business model before the founder does. unfiltered enough to say the thing that everyone else is avoiding. YET, still human enough to always acknowledge that the PERSON has a family and a finite number of years they can afford to waste.

A liberal arts degree is the biggest hedge against becoming a member of the permanent underclass Learn to think for yourself, and deeply