The gap between knowing the current thing is broken and not yet seeing the next thing clearly is where a lot of talented people are sitting right now, somewhat frozen. This is the uncomfortable part of any status transition in times of mass volatility. You can feel the old thing losing its pull before the new thing has revealed itself.

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

The venture-backed startup path doesn’t have its 2008, but instead has has something more diffuse and possibly harder to reverse: cultural exhaustion.

When the institutional machine needs to deploy billions of dollars, it indexes toward ideas that Make Total Sense in the few themes in the tech zeitgeist at any given moment. And thus the ecosystem orients itself to produce a steady stream of companies that are legible and reasonable enough in a Monday partner meeting