Bill Gurley thread on State of Silicon Valley startup scene moving forward

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19 points·fullshark··5 comments

Absolute BS, VCs knew years ago that all of this would come crashing down at some point but still raised insane funds because they could live off of the fees and knew that were other clowns down the line ready to mark up their deals. There's a reason why they were all rushing their juiced up donkeys on the public market through direct listings and SPACs in 2020, and it's because it was their only chance to dump them on retail investors before everything crashed.

None of these VCs will be giving up their tahoe homes or rushing back to the office because of this downturn.

What a shock that an owner is trash-talking worker power. Employees are winning better conditions because we no longer accept worse conditions, it's math actually. Startups can have cheaper workers if that's who they want.

Reading the tweets it seems like he’s pulling a sleight-of-hand. He’s describing the cost of capital for startups, then describing the effects of a weaker market for software engineers.

Those are two separate things, but he doesn’t bother to prove there’s a correlation between the two. High burn rate startups are not the marginal buyer of software labor, their inability to budget does not need have any impact on the job market for engineers. In fact, their cost constraints make it more likely they’ll try to compete more on culture type benefits like wfh where they cannot outbid competing firms.

Yeah isn’t a startup getting money from a VC because they don’t qualify for 100s of millions of dollars in loans?

Especially Bill- he made his dead unicorns speech back in 2015.

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