Are we supposed to blame people for putting money in a bank that had a solid track record since the 1980s, and didn't have any regulatory red flags? Are we supposed to blame VCs for not knowing about the bank's investment problems when the regulators who were supposed to know about them didn't know either? Should we blame founders for taking banking advice from their funders and boards of directors?
Are we supposed to forget that the era of easy money the article dislikes was created by the Fed, and that the duration risk on long-term securities that doomed SVB was also realized because of the Fed's reaction to its previous mistakes?
We should blame everyone, including the government, for this mess.
When people like the author single out VCs and rant about AI being a boondoggle it's clear they just don't like or understand tech. Tech has been the space program of our generation.
We now carry devices in our pockets that put more information at our fingertips than entire civilizations could access throughout all of human history. Mobile payments have enabled entrepreneurial capitalism in impoverished parts of the world. Anywhere we are, we can get a map of our location and directions to anywhere we want to go.
The scale and technology that makes remote work even possible for much of the population didn’t even exist a decade ago. Some pieces existed but they never would have scaled the way we needed them to. If you didn’t lose your job during the pandemic, you ought to be grateful to the major cloud providers for the fact that your video conferencing software was able to function while you and almost everyone else were piling onto it. You should also be grateful there were multiple delivery companies able to bring you groceries and restaurant food when you weren’t allowed to leave the house. I know restaurants are grateful for the delivery services — so many more would have gone out of business if in-person transactions were the only way to sell their product!
Anyone who owned a total market index fund in the past decade has benefitted massively from the success of big tech, including most pension funds, university endowments, and many individuals. The creation of wealth has been enormous in scale and enormously socially beneficial.
VCs made all those good things possible and if we also get dog-walking services and NFTs of monkeys that's a small price to pay.