David Bloom

This is a story of why flows are often a bigger driver of valuation than fundamentals.

The supply/demand dynamics in the private markets create a persistent, valuation-agnostic bid for top private companies: an order of magnitude more capital pointed at companies than the amount they can productively absorb. Those same businesses, if they were to go... See more

If you are an experienced founder with lots of money or social capital, leave the next food delivery startup to the Level 1 neuromancer, and ask yourself: what would the world look like if our best players took on good quests?

Are you on a good quest now? Be honest.

Moreover, many self-titled public intellectuals are not even particularly intellectual. They are just... public.

As The Consensus Capital Machine has raged on, it has only further eradicated the survivability of contrarian perspectives.

I believe that the North Star for YC shifted from helping people understand how to build a company to maximizing the number of companies moving through the funnel.

Where startups used to be the tool of choice for rebels to break barriers, they’ve increasingly become a consensus norming funnel.

But the poison of Consensus formation has spread from capital deployment to culture formation. The prevalence of normativity infects every aspect of our lives . Independent critical thinking gives way to cultural adherence within the party line as contrarianism dies.

Here are some general thoughts:

Most funds don’t lose (by which I mean: they do not beat the benchmark, or even the S&P 500) because they’re foolish; they lose because they’re uninstrumented, by which I mean:

• They mistake deal flow for alpha;


• They optimize for access to founders instead of access to rules, budgets, and buyers.


• They staff platform teams but not policy teams;


• They

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