VC-Backed Startups are Low Status
What matters now is identity, community, belonging, and being out in the world, experiencing life in various ways. This means the intersection of who you work with, why you’re building, and what you’re building really matters and will directly reflect your values and your ability to be in communities. The vibes must be good at your company to have... See more
Michael Dempsey • VC-Backed Startups are Low Status
Second, there are early cohorts of founders who will aim to find vibe-alignment with their capital. This is the bull case for more opinionated or smaller firms at the early-stage. I’m talking my own book here, but as the mission actually starts to matter again (not in the “wink-wink” sense), if a core value-add of VCs has been “brand halos”, then... See more
Michael Dempsey • VC-Backed Startups are Low Status
When institutions start to lose their soul, the people inside them start to care about different things. Aesthetic warmth, values coherence, institutional vibe. These are now functioning as primary signals for where elite talent goes (and more importantly, stays), and by extension, which companies breakaway and which don’t.
Michael Dempsey • VC-Backed Startups are Low Status
The relationship between founders and their investors reflects a status shift too. Venture capitalists have been dehumanized.8 When firms were led by individuals with recognizable taste and conviction, founders treated allocation as something worth thinking about. Now the partners are interchangeable, the institutions behind them are... See more
Michael Dempsey • VC-Backed Startups are Low Status
They never saw the craft part of the industry and thus are not rejecting something they once admired because they never saw the version worth admiring. This manifests itself as a nihilism that perhaps is a sadder form of status erosion than disillusionment.
Michael Dempsey • VC-Backed Startups are Low Status
The venture-backed startup path doesn’t have its 2008, but instead has has something more diffuse and possibly harder to reverse: cultural exhaustion.
Michael Dempsey • VC-Backed Startups are Low Status
The noise outpaces the signal as the system is optimized to produce as many founders as possible, as safely as possible. The legible thing becomes the average thing, and thus the average thing becomes the low-status thing.