While that's completely true, I do think it misses a key underlying point: VCs (and many breeds of investor) are not ultimately selecting for value creating ideas, or for their friends: they're selecting for investments they believe _other people_ will pay more for later.
In the case of startups, those people are most likely other VCs (at later rounds), private equity (at private sale) or retail investors (at IPO).
Very rarely is the actual company profitable at any of those stages, demonstrably and famously.
So the whole process is selecting for hype-potential, which itself is somewhat correlated to the usual things people get annoyed about with startup cliches: founders who went to MIT; founders who are charismatic; founders who are friends with VCs; etc...
So yeah, they invest in their friends, but not because they're their friends. Because they know they can more reliably exit those investments at a higher value.
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, this is a fascinating hypothesis and honestly super believable. It makes way more sense than the intuitive belief that there’s actually something under the human skin suit understanding any of this code.
Context: micro (5 person) software company with a mature SaaS product codebase.
We use a mix of agentic and conversational tools, just pick your own and go with it.
For Unity development (our main codebase and source of value) I give current gen tools a C- for effectiveness. For solving confined, well modularisable problems (eg refactor this texture loader; implement support for this material extension) it’s good. For most real day to day problems it’s hopelessly confused by the large codebase full of state, external dependency on chunks of Unity, implicit hardware-dependent behaviours, etc. It has no idea how to work meaningfully with Unity’s scene graph or component model. I tried using MCP to empower it here: on a trivial test project it was fine. In a real project it got completely lost and broke everything after eating 30k tokens and 40 minutes of my time, mostly because it couldn’t understand the various (documented) patterns that straddled code files and scene structure.
For web and API development I give it an A, with just a little room for improvement. In this domain it’s really effective all the way down the logical stack from architectural and deployment decisions all the way down to implementation details and debugging including digging really deep in to package version incompatibilities and figuring out problems in seconds that would take me hours. My one criticism would be the - now familiar - “junior developer” effect where it’ll often run ahead with an over engineered lump of machinery without spotting a simpler more coherent pattern. As long as you keep an eye on it it’s fine.
So in summary: if what you’re doing is all in text, nothing in binary, doesn’t involve geometric or numerical reasoning, and has billions of lines of stack overflow solutions: you’ll be golden. Otherwise it’s still very hit and miss.
The idea that a Labour Secretary of State would be phoning up the Cabinet Office screaming down the phone at them about interaction design on the website while a Tory one would just have their feet up is ludicrous and you know it.
This feels super unfair to the gov.uk experience design which for me stands out head and shoulders above any other web workflow delivered by the public sector I've ever come across.
Pages are snappy, terse, consistent, clear and unsurprising. I agree this specific example feels a bit dark-patterny and occasionally stuff like self-assesment can have more steps than necessary, but overall it's really high quality.
In comparison the process for getting a DUNS number felt like going through some kind of a psychological experiment.
Finally, this:
> a party in power famous for paternalism
is just enclowning yourself with a partisan and non-sequitous point.
If your theory is that this global push by legislators to introduce age restrictions is actually a secret Trojan horse to harvest government IDs orchestrated by the platform owning capitalists…how do you account for the fact said capitalists have been desperately lobbying against it for years?
Yeah, definitely boils down to how much of a factor the aesthetics of the 'tiny carts' is for you in the whole experience. I can imagine some creative modding that would make a collection of themed USBs just as appealing, if not more :)
While that's completely true, I do think it misses a key underlying point: VCs (and many breeds of investor) are not ultimately selecting for value creating ideas, or for their friends: they're selecting for investments they believe _other people_ will pay more for later.
In the case of startups, those people are most likely other VCs (at later rounds), private equity (at private sale) or retail investors (at IPO).
Very rarely is the actual company profitable at any of those stages, demonstrably and famously.
So the whole process is selecting for hype-potential, which itself is somewhat correlated to the usual things people get annoyed about with startup cliches: founders who went to MIT; founders who are charismatic; founders who are friends with VCs; etc...
So yeah, they invest in their friends, but not because they're their friends. Because they know they can more reliably exit those investments at a higher value.