> Venture capitalists are a primary source of vigor [1] for the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Silicon Valley, and venture capital as an asset class largely punches above its weight.

Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but this is the first sentence in a post written by an investor about an investor. So, ya know, I'm a bit skeptical.

The cited paper does very little to make me feel any better. For one, it's not a history paper - you know... the closest bit of academia to the "study of what happened." It's an economics paper that uses some sort of system model to argue for what links / nodes are valuable in the "silicon valley network."

Yeah, nah. Systems like these rely on far to many assumptions-from-no-where to make compelling arguments about how the real world works. One can massage these models to output pretty much any result one wants (tweak the constants a bit in favor of the venture capitalists, if you so desire).

I'll also note I stopped reading the post there. The rest of it might be inspired, but I couldn't make it through that first sentence.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0308514090278682...