Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break
medium.com
medium.com
Is this really the number 2 reason? Like, is the suggestion here if we got white men to start Zebras then Zebras would be more popular?
The other obnoxious thing is that they don't actually provide evidence for this; they cite that very few women get VC money and then claim that it's because they're running Zebras. And it's not relevant to say they start "30 percent of businesses" because I doubt that's 30 percent of software businesses.
2). "We believe that developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time. These alternative models will balance profit and purpose, champion democracy, and put a premium on sharing power and resources. Companies that create a more just and responsible society will hear, help, and heal the customers and communities they serve ... The capital system is failing society in part because it is failing zebra companies: profitable businesses that solve real, meaningful problems and in the process repair existing social systems." Conflating start-ups (and business) with charities. Using an inefficient model for resource distribution in enterprise.
3). "Think of our most valuable institutions — journalism, education, healthcare, government, the “third sector” of nonprofits and social enterprises — as houses upon which democracy rests. Unicorn companies are rewarded for disrupting these, for razing them to the ground. Instead, we ought to support companies that provide extreme home makeovers." Resistance to change.
4). Encouraging "sustainable prosperity" for a startup whose main goal is to become a profitable business, instead of exponential growth.
5). "Sustainable, 2x exit." Slowing down future entrepreneurial pursuits with an arbitrarily exit limiter.
6). "Plurality." I assume this means "heavily democratic," which is deadly for startups.
7). "Win-win instead of Zero-Sum." I.e I assume "compromise." Self-explanatory (SE).
8). "Cooperation instead of competition ... mutualism." SE.
9). "Shared resources instead of hoarded." See: #2
10). "Seeks enough instead of more." SE.
There's more, but there's a quote about how much effort it takes to retort bullshit in comparison to how little it takes to spout it.
The author brings heavy socialist overtones and a naive worldview on how businesses work. I'm not one to deny other's opinions solely because they have no experience, but in this case most of her points can be invalidated by going out and testing her zebra plan.
VC isn't broken. It is what it is. It's that way because it's what people find to be most profitable. People often assign moral value to things where morality is irrelevant or was never intended in the first place.
Looking at https://www.southwest.com/flight/routemap_dyn.html and my memory of cities convention venues, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Nashville seem like good options
Probably not gonna happen, but it sure is tone deaf as shit to have this convention in SF.
Literally most of the American economy, most of the GDP, used to be made up of "zebras," maybe still is. People sensibly and boringly making dependably useful goods and performing useful services at reasonably transparent prices.
What's great about that from an investor's point of view is that you can buy in and expect a reasonably solid rate of growth, especially when you optimize for the long term and ignore the short-term fever-dreams and diaper-crappings of the market.
Nowadays though, that part of the economy (the real part, the "zebra" part) has been faltering for several reasons I won't get into. That means you can't count on those steady or even decent returns in traditional places anymore. Which in turn means there's a lot more money out there circling the block, looking for a place to park where it won't lose value.
That is how the Silicon Valley venture capital ecosystem exists at its current size. When rich people can put their money in traditional places like refrigerator manufacturers, and confidently earn a decent return, they don't (not as much) go looking so hard for something better. They might take a small bit of their their portfolio and play around with it, but there won't be a huge "bubble" like you've got now.
SV is a market all right, only the good being "demanded" (by VCs) and "supplied" (by startups) is "growth potential." High demand in that market is possible only because the rest of the economy, the zebra economy, is so lackluster. And because everyone plausibly believes computers can extract value from a system in a disproportionate way that might pay off --- which is true by the way!
Anyway, all that easy money looking for a place to park, means at least some of the deals are fake and some of the startups are fake, and most of the valuations are fake, and all the fakery leads to all sorts of rampant doucherie to use the French term.
I don't believe so. Their values are "Hey, let's promote a system of motivations that we think is objectively better rather than the reality we are currently in, that hasn't changed much in the past 2000 years."
Sure, if you can change human nature or the prisoner's dilemna, have at. Otherwise, writing articles like this might as well just end with "and they lived happily ever after".
Just what that alternate model might be... I'll keep searching. In the meantime, co-ops are promising. There aren't many tech co-ops; most seem to be farms. But maybe.
"Companies We Keep" - an introduction to co: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005KTT65Q/ref=oh_aui_sear...
And if you look at "big tech", past and present, the survivor companies mostly have it in their culture to pragmatically engage in monopolistic behaviors: IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Autodesk, etc.
There's a big gap between that and the Stallman-style hard "free software" position, which also drives a lot of presently used fundamental software technologies. F/OSS has ultimately had a sort of accelerationist effect on the market by raising baseline capabilities, increasing the leverage of startup companies to challenge incumbents. In some respects, F/OSS is losing because the platforms most used are also generally more locked down and black-boxed than in the past. In others, F/OSS is winning, because people will no longer pay for certain categories of software.
These kinds of challenges define what the marketplace is today; verticals where a monopolistic, marketing-driven approach is bolstered by tech get a lot of press hype and VC interest, while pure engineering and social-benefit companies tend to live in the background, scraping by with a "side hustle" that funds their core mission, or if they're a little more naive, aiming to get acquired before their money runs out.