Vero

something people don't understand about boot strapping vs hedge funds, unicorn tech cos, raising VC, the Sell Side -- it sounds all well and good. your mom is proud of you. but you're what I call a "placeholder for capital" you're basically some arbitrarily pedigreed set of traits that exists to stick to a script the script varies but at a basic level you're risking an order of magnitude more money, economic value, market cap - etc - than your own net worth. and this introduces moral hazard that the business operator needs to account for to ensure the value of his/her investment. these firms say they want entrepreneurs but they really want franchise operators. there's some formula and you're basically operating a tech enabled McDonalds that produces a number of widgets "politics" or "corporate culture" are basically mechanisms to ensure that you are a script follower, the same way that McDonalds wants to ensure that its franchises are operating according to spec. there are some semi subversive scripts - pioneered by the Paypal mafia, or Solomon brothers - which value creativity. But they're still ultimately scripts if you work at Palantir, Tesla, or a prop trading desk you still exist within the frame of someone else's vision even if you're encouraged to deviate from social norms. you're almost even more violently aligned with Elon's Vision, Karp's Manifesto or whatever new set of norms the meta-society creates for you so start your own company? venture backed entrepreneurship is the same thing. VCs like people from certain background because they understand the need to mash employees into scripts. if you start your own company and raise a seed round vastly more than the $ in your bank account, the VCs who gave you that money are world class at making sure you get zero-ed if you don't follow their growth plans, take their intro meetings, hire the right ppl etc. And they give you the money because you've shown a background at whatever insider company of following scripts. the problem - their fund structures are optimized for 100x ROIs or zeros. which is of course, totally crazy and not aligned with individual expected value calculations. VCs don't want crazy people they want people who are willing to follow the 100x or zero script the dirty secret is that the 100x-es are pre-architected by a mafia - which basically manufactures a hockey stick revenue line into an IPO by self dealing contracts to one another before dumping on public investors the reason why Silicon Valley exists and has never been disrupted by remote work - is precisely because the economic value has never been in coding. it has been in architecting exit liquidity which needs to be done in person it's a carefully choreographed charade where the mark is public company investors. and - because policymakers periodically bail out the entire market, it's actually society at large that pays for the entire song and dance but it's a game. it's not actually real. there are occasionally real companies or innovations - but the vast majority of "placeholder for capital" situations are just giant P&Ds run by supposedly respectable people this is the meta for why QQQ always goes up against ARKK or so called innovation ETFs. ironically big companies are less bureaucratic because their economic outcomes aren't entirely determined by pump & dump economics. After the IPO of a "script" company there's a dawning realization that the engineered hockey stick was just for the dump. And the employees who stick around are bag holders. The good ones demand progressively higher SBC to offset the resulting moral panic and soak shareholders in the process. In crypto - it's also why SBF being removed from the Solana ecosystem is so good. Because real innovation is only possible when you kneecap the scam culture behind much of the Valley's growth you often see Sam Altman alluding to the fact that he doesn't follow any Y Combinator best practices. That's because, the big joke - is that OpenAI is the only real company that he's ever been associated with. He was a master of "The Script" and knows all the ways that the script breaks down. So when he encountered real technology - he was able to break all the rules of Playwriting to engineer an unprecedented outcome OpenAI is interesting because it's a large scale deviation from the script run by a master of Pumpenomics. What I find very interesting is something that Altman keeps repeating - that in the age of AI, you're going to see the first Boot-Strapped Unicorns. This is a sacrilegious statement -- as part of the script is telling founders that they can only make it if they're part of the coterie of elites who architect inevitability and IPOs. The people who have spent years in the trenches and have the intestinal fortitude to bootstrap things. Who have learned to ignore the script - even when in the short term that seems insane. These are the people I truly value. They've seemed mad - in a world run by Inevitability Architects. But as the world itself plunges away from the script, into something different. The people willing to veer off course, and chart their own paths - who are capable of following The Script - but have chosen not to. They will inherit the future.