I generally bemoan the reality that Bay Area (and increasingly global) startup culture is devolving into an MBA-ified zero-sum tournament (akin to the law school/firm example Peter Thiel talks about in Zero to One), both for founders and VC participants The anatomy of the tournament: > VC firms (big firms carrying more weight) "request" startups in areas that are highly likely to have a highly valuable ($10B+) winner in the future > Upstream, many small seed funds that act as feeders to big firms begin investing in these areas (to serve their purpose as feeders -> show markups to LPs) > As much of this capital is in the Bay Area, it's easier to track the tournament by encouraging geographical concentration of the tournament participants (e.g. "you must be in SF if you're building AI apps"). Something like a VC-sanctioned hackerhouse is the extreme form of this > Syndicates of small seed funds will back the first wave of teams to stay in the business (the unfunded are eliminated, on to the next tournament) > Teams continue to get eliminated, with capital concentrating into fewer and fewer companies. > Ultimately, a handful survive. Big firms plow money into these tournament finalists to kingmake them as the category winners (ton of seed fund capital burned btw as collateral damage to enable the winners for the big firms to choose from) imo almost all the moves you see in mainstream Bay Area venture cater to the facilitation of this tournament. The technical "MBA" type (i.e. those that can build but are inherently interested in social cachet) is typically the one that participates (as "winning" in the tournament i.e. raising big fundraising rounds) generates social cachet (akin to getting into a good law school, or landing a shiny consulting job in a prior era).
