Amazing person doing amazing things has an option to not take the money and have 100% of the upside of his amazingness.
What people seem to forget is that it's about risk.
VC investing is high risk. For every 10 investments, 1 is wildly profitable and the other 9 are failures or low returns.
For that reason the ROI for that 1 out of 10 success cannot be "fair" by your metric - VC has to make enough to cover the 9 losses and some profit.
What the amazing person gets from the deal is knowing that even in the likely 90% case of failure, he won't sink in debt to fund his work.
Other systems can be envisioned: for instance, a basic income or a negative income tax would remove much of the risk that individual programmers, inventors and tinkerers face when trying to pursue their visions.
Capital infrastructure is one input among many to any industrial process. I place about the same value upon it as the electrical and sewage infrastructure we build our businesses upon. No reason to revere it more than our other infrastructures.
I would deny both the sewage system and the capital system the verb "create" in this context.
All of which are irrelevant in this case, of course. Which just means the case of Tumblr provides more clarity into the reality of these processes. The case holds for the data centers along Kifer Road as well.
And of course, this required capital is only the expropriated wealth from workers that have gone before. The old rip-off money to pay for the new rip-off. Which will go to future ripoffs. What does the marco.org link on the front page say? "I look back on Tumblr's crunch times with mixed feelings...I won't make yacht-and-helicopter money". This is the guy who hit the jackpot of his startup job.
Plus where are these SV offices located? On the old hunting grounds of the Ohlone. Now owned by landlords talking about how they're giving their land as input to this ecosystem.
I'm concerned with the facts of the past, not whatever sappy liberal sentiment might be attached to these facts.
I know you're probably happy with your, Dave and Jeremy's big payout recently, but at the end of the day, whether it's OK with your or not - you were all still on some level ripped off.
If Tumblr didn't have a way to put capital to use, why did they take almost $100MM in funding? What do you allege they did with it?
You've put a glossy veneer on your argument to be sure, but when I dig into it even a little bit, it seems like there's nothing inside it. That's too bad, because I don't like the venture funded startup ecosystem, and I wish people mounted more effective arguments against it.