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Comment by oneelectron | Hacker News Reader

SPACs are 30 years old. See the history section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_acquisition_co...

They also have a poor reputation, and for what seems like a good reason. It's a risky proposal that generally attracts a get-rich-quick kind of community. Examine the Nikola company and tell me how comfortable you'd be investing a sizeable chunk of your net worth in that.

I can't predict the future, but I can bet $10k I will die before SPACs get to even half of VC funding. Side pot of $1k that 50% of them fail their investors, and another side pot that one in the next decade will be a historically spectacular failure.

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I’m aware that it’s not new but Virgin Galactic’s SPAC ushered in a new era of blank check companies being spun up, which is why I’m bringing it up.

Look at the recent S-1 filings...there are already 64 “acquisiton” firms that have filed in August alone https://sec.report/Form/S-1

Is this a short term SPAC bubble? Very possible. But SPAC investors and founders are much wiser now, and if done right it’s entirely possible to completely side step traditional VC if the “good ones” prove to be successful.

I see that it could displace VC somewhat in dollar amount, but there are some serious bottlenecks around filing with the SEC and getting listed to where it'd be prohibitive for a large number of companies to start that way. It's definitely a lot harder, more all-or-nothing, and more time consuming than getting a million-dollar SAFE and building a prototype. And SPACs are also dependent on consuming those "traditional" companies to fulfill their empty promise. What feels most intuitive though is the propagation/decline of SPACs will simply be based on the successes/failures of the SPACs we're watching now. Tech and finance seem to have few mechanisms outside of pattern matching what got their predecessors rich.

yeah I’m not suggesting that SPACs are appropriate for pre-product startups. I see them replacing VCs in what would otherwise be a growth stage round eg post Series A/B.

So we will still have angel and seed/early stage investors, but I see SPACs easily competing with what would otherwise be large late stage or growth rounds that the big VC firms are most active in.

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