If you mentally say “well 90% fail so I’ll just throw in this dog shit to see what happens” then you increase the failure rate.
And if that's true, they should be slapped, hard. They're no longer performing a socially useful function, and and have degraded towards pure financialization. Some middleman between fools and their money.
As much as I don't like Altman, VC should be pumping money into startups like Helios--companies pursuing cutting-edge technology that could totally fail (yes, that's an organic em-dash).
I do think that ZiRP distorted things extremely badly. There's an entire generation in this software industry that lives around the business-culture expectations set during that time which as far as I could see basically amounted to "I build Uber but for X" (where X is some new business domain).
Perhaps after a bit of a painful interregnum things will be a bit different now that rates are higher and risk along with it.
Also anybody can throw a SaaS together in a few days now. Separating the wheat from the chaff in the next few years will be... interesting.
That's a extremely strong statement, and may only be true in libertarian-land, where pure capitalism is a god to be worshiped and "good" has been redefined to be "whatever the unregulated free market does."
But in the real world, capitalism is a tool to perform socially useful functions (see the marketing about how it was better able to do that than Soviet central planning). When it fails, it should be patched by regulation (and often is) to push participants into socially useful actions, or at least discourage socially harmful ones.
I didn't say I agree with it.
You said:
>>>> I don't think there's ever been an argument that anybody...
I just made a such an argument, and the fact that I'm not alone can be inferred from the actions of the government in regulating capitalism. Also, if you read the newspaper, it's fairly frequent to see an op-ed decrying some particular market entity, and advocating for something to stop what they're doing.
Also you'll note I wasn't arguing "everyone at all times needs to perform a socially-useful function," but rather "we've identified a particular important area where the social utility is too low, lets do something about that problem."