Well Marc, one problem is the world of VC-driven innovation. Building truly revolutionary work takes time and commitment, while the VC ecosystem and entrepreneurial culture actively works against this.
- Telling founders to be underpaid and commit their entire finances to the success of their startups forces startups to spend more time finding product-market fit than building what the world needs long-term.
- Hiring employees at below market salary and offsetting with equity incentives people to think short-term. You need to move towards going public and increasing valuation if you want to keep your talent.
- The funding round model forces short-term thinking by constantly forcing companies to prove their vision has a market in a short amount of time. How do you prove that a two-decade project has legs in the first 5 years? The path I've seen is people reducing their ambitions to find traction.
- The VC industry does not value positive social externalities in any appreciable way. Fast growth and revenue is all that matters and we celebrate the companies that achieve that by causing negative externalities.
There's a reason that the most impactful real-world innovation I can think of comes from people like Bezos and Musk who can afford to think in terms of decades.
Maybe VCs are not the vehicles for long-term innovation. Or maybe the leaders of the VC industry could look inwards and find changes to how they approach innovation that could help solve these long-term problems.
When you have extreme wealth and influence, there is an inherent responsibility to ask whether 'you' are doing enough.