Putting this on my CV
The real problem is that it was a confidence scam, they were hyping everything to cash out and rip off ordinary people.
If a company folds days after the IPO then you probably have a point, but that rarely happens. Many of the companies that IPOd in the last two decades are still trading, and the ones that are not have been scrutinized quite a bit to see what went wrong and how a re-run can be avoided.
I'd be very wary of anything that tries to get a listing without going through the regular IPO process, for instance SPACs and direct listings. The chances of getting scammed there are much, much higher than in the normal IPO process which has many rules and transparency requirements.
I don't think they're the same, but they share quite a few things in common. There's a lot about affecting the public perception, getting the public to act on that perception, and then executing at the most opportune time to take advantage of that public perception. Crypto takes this to 11 by minimizing the actual product and maximizing the impact of affecting public perception, but I can see how VC people could see the crypto cycle as an extension of what they already do.
The main indicator of whether it was intended to be a scam is possibly best indicated by how much they liquidate in that last step. If they still have a large position after the main hype and growth cycles are done (and it's not mandated by some outside force), then whether it goes south or not they probably weren't intending to scam. If they jump ship when they can, well why were they hyping it so much prior to that if not to scam other people into funding their exit?
For seed capital it's even worse there it easily averages to a decade for an exit. My oldest investments go back to 2007, and that's for the ones that 'made it', the bulk of them dies long before that.
On my own investments (quite a few by now; > 20) I've seen one big exit, one smaller one but still successful, and a number of acquihires. Besides the ones that crashed the remainder is still in play and probably will be so for years to come. And probably there will be one more big exit in there, I don't expect any of them to IPO.