The worst part about what I see here is the inequity or imbalance of what we're seeing about where money gets allocated, and the material effects of what that inequity brings about. It's not "I have a good idea and a great team" it's "I am X, or know Y" and... ugh.
There's gobs of amazing technology being built by people who just love to build, have great ideas, and huge talent (now exponentially compounded by LLM assistance, even) -- and 99% of it is ignored by people with $$ and none of them will be paid to work on these things -- let alone get funded to build a business around them -- and the reason isn't the inadequacy of the technology or "lack of a workable business plan": it's lack of social connections or pedigree.
And what this tells me is two things
1. there's a fundamentally sickness to the VC culture coming out of Silicon Valley and it's gotten worse not better with the new restraints in the post-ZIRP era. It's an echo chamber and a social circle, not a means for creating new profitable companies or good infrastructure, and it serves mainly just to feed a pipeline of acquisitions into much bigger fish rather than building tomorrow's new businesses or ideas. This is very different from 80s, 90s tech culture that I grew up in.
2. there's clearly a desperate need for more actual incubators or labs for actual technology, paying people to build "good stuff" independent of the vagaries of what VCs and their ivy league friends are able to pitch.
Frankly: The $$ out there in heavy circulation has been mostly corrosive, not helpful.