The performance and longevity of Silicon Valley are correlated to the supply of “greater fools,” with its home-grown subpriming desperately chasing a few outliers who managed to ignore Silicon Valley’s dogmatic arbitrage.
Indeed, venture capital as the arbitrage of innovation, by its collusion, excessive deal syndication, and deal fragmentation, on the whole, has become fundamentally incompatible with finding outliers. A system of grandiose dysfunction enslaving wannabe entrepreneurs to precisely the uniformity that will not systematically produce venture-style returns, yet remains capable of making yet another herd of innocent “greater-fools” believe it is supporting a new outlier-in-the-rough.
Let me remind you Elon Musk, at his crucial early inflection points with Tesla, succeeded despite, not because of the role of venture capital. None of the venture firms in Silicon Valley could see the forest through the trees.
What is needed is more venture capital firms to chase the risk innate to unprecedented foresight (not the extrapolation of hindsight) with a timely opportunity contributing to new freedoms and renewable strength for humanity. In essence, the antithesis of the current state of venture capital. I plan to start a new type of venture firm after I put the invention of a new operating system for humanity on the rails.
Today, much of technology is a mindless and hyper-inflated cash-cow, much like the cigarette industry used to be 30 years ago. In blissful ignorance that the improper arbitrage of innovation, combined with undemocratic and intransparent governance embedded in technology, with poor foundational security and ignorant personal and public privacy, doused in stifling absolutism incompatible with the relativity innate to humanity, is already contributing to severe humanitarian distortion and damage. Damage in the long run less apparent in causal effect, yet more devastating in consequence than the respiratory disease as the third-leading cause of death from smoking. I can name many dire consequences already when pressed but beyond the scope of this question.
I say all that with a lump in my throat as a life-long technologist, disgusted by how many times I see mediocre technology sold as snake-oil to the unsuspecting public as the last in the chain of innocent “greater-fools.”
So, to sum up, my answer; as long as there are “greater-fools,” there will be people taking cunning advantage of them, and Silicon Valley and its disciples will happily continue to reverberate and inflate its ill-formed relevance.
