How Venture Capitalists Are Fixing the Technology Market

In this article, I want to discuss the CONDITIONS OF THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY that make market fixing possible. These are the structural factors and frameworks that are in place to enable market fixing by venture capitalists. And we will discuss some of the methods that venture capitalists use, *within* those conditions, to make beneficial changes happen across the market. 

Throughout, we will use some recent examples where we can clearly see market manipulation playing out, such as the “crypto winter” and cascading tech layoffs, as well as several of the specific in-motion VC plots —  building out an autonomous military under the banner of “American Dynamism,” for one. And we’ll take a brief look at “Web 3.0” too. 

That is the real cherry on the top, when we start to apply the concepts to the actual occurrences in the market. 2022 was a fantastic year for this exercise in the sense that venture capitalists were doing a TON of market fixing, they pulled it off with almost zero mention, their version of events simply does not match up, and everything was extremely well documented. They got cocky. Big time. Which means we can catch them red-handed.

So we have some great real life material to work with. That said, this is an extremely big topic and one I will continue to write about, so look at this as an introduction, as an early exploration. 

What I’m aiming for is a bit of a “a-ha” moment in terms of your understanding of what is happening in tech. Marx debunked the notion of the “market” as some unknowable force or alchemy, which is how most of us understand it: something which is impossible to truly know due to its complexity and unpredictability. This posits a type of level playing field when it comes to the players, which simply does not exist. So herein, we aim to accurately describe, and provide an ANALYSIS, of this material system and its function. It is fully possible for people outside of the industry to come to know at least some basics about this. 

Before we get into the details, I invite you to consider this fresh look at what exactly, DID happen in the technology industry in 2022; despite popular belief that it was a really tough year for startups and venture capitalists and crypto, data significantly contradicts the notion that tech was facing depressed conditions… at all:  

In fact, a recent industry report on venture capital in 2022 from Pitchbook and the NVCA, states “In raw numbers, 2022 was a great year for the VC industry, with most indicators of market activity at or near record highs.” Not only that, VCs were sitting on record amounts of cash, money that’s standing by ready to deploy into the market… what they call in the industry “dry powder”, close to $300 billion of it. (We’ll talk more about this later). 

And VCs GOT more money to invest than ever before, raising a record amount to splurge on startups: “2022 saw $162.6 billion closed across 769 funds, setting an annual record for capital raised and the second consecutive year exceeding $150 billion.” Over 35 firms got more than a billion. 

And yet, VCs left the market choked, starving growing startups of $42.8 billion of needed funds, which they could have easily supplied — especially those in the seed stage, who only required a few billion to get through. These tiny startups are at the very bottom of the tech ecosystem and thus its very foundation; fucking with the seed stage causes visible cascading effects around the industry, and VCs could have easily kept those from going off. They CHOSE not to. 

And yet this HYSTERIA: techlandia buzzed and frothed about how the market was down and the financial indicators were red and that they needed to tighten ship and be more efficient and oh yeah, sorry about the lay-offs everyone — sparking contagious and multiple rounds of layoffs of 97,000 people last year; these layoffs have been a continuous drumbeat into this year as well, as, vaguely, “market conditions” are pointed to with no other justification. Because there isn’t a justification. 

In the middle of all of this upheaval, over the course of the last year, financial indicators flipped from what analysts call a “startup-friendly” investment environment (favoring these small business owners) to an “investor friendly” environment. So basically, as the VCs started to put the squeeze on the market, they had more leverage with startups they might be able to invest in… boiling down to VCs being able to get a larger share in the company for less money; startups were losing bigger and bigger parts of their company in exchange for funding.

Weird.  

In fact, this is the consistent FACTUAL report about 2022 in startups and venture capital: contrary to reports, the VCs had an amazing year, record amounts of cash, the deal conditions favored them getting more stake in a company for less investment money, many of their long-term bets, like AI and defense startups, were getting to a new stage of growth and ahead of targets. It was all apple pie and ice cream!!! 

The only metrics that were supposedly down to justify the “downturn”? Low and behold, metrics that venture capitalists themselves have almost complete control over: 

• Portfolio-wide layoffs, causing cascading reactions across the sector

• Number and size of investments made

• Dry powder deployment

• IPOs within the portfolio 

• Acquisitions (typically brokered by VC from a startup to a larger company, maybe even to another company within its own portfolio)

• The “tone” of the industry and industry coverage, the major messages being crafted and sold across the industry 

I can see your wheels a ‘grinding! 

So, I have to break it to you now: yes, crypto had an amazing year too, contradicting the story you’ve heard, ad nauseam, without contradiction, in a never-ending media circus, that crypto is in the fucking bin!! 

Yes, I am suggesting that they faked the crypto winter as well. 

Unlike what you have probably heard, crypto absolutely kicked ass last year. During 2022, huge numbers of institutional investors in crypto, from Wells Fargo to Morgan Stanley to Blackrock, signed on in myriad and substantial ways as crypto made huge coups in the traditional financial system that had long held crypto at arms length, if not outright condemning it. Coinbase inked a deal with Mastercard with the goal of being able to use crypto via Mastercard credit card. You can now use your cryptocurrency on PayPal, a massive distribution point (and not unexpected because the people running the crypto market fixing hearken back to PayPal.) Huge corporations like Walmart and Nike got on board too. FIFA launched a crypto wallet for the World Cup. Tesla went in with crypto startups on Bitcoin mining. Even Disney made a deal. This was happening continuously throughout the year; while everyone was calling crypto dead, a massive integration project into the global infrastructure and the financial infrastructure was taking place underneath the “frozen” surface. In 2022, while everyone freaked the fuck out, crypto made HUGE inroads towards a world where it is a recognized and powerful, soverign part of the global financial system. 

These are the signs of a new stage in crypto, not its end … still very much in its infancy even as it is declared dead. Goldman Sachs issued its first crypto-backed loan. The CEO of Blackrock said “I believe the next generation for markets, the next generation for securities, will be tokenization of securities,” yet another sign that the integration of traditional financial infrastructure had begun (or perhaps, a sign that the venture capital financial attack had truly opened). 

And despite all of the apocalypse handwringing, the global number of crypto owners grew 39% in 2022 to 425 million people; at this formative stage, this is a fantastic indicator when you’re talking about building out an actual economy around this thing, especially when you consider that everyone spent much of the year wailing that the whole thing was over. Additionally, the Central African Republic adopted BTC as legal tender — the second, following El Salvador and its “Bitcoin city”.  In fact, “August and September [when crypto hysteria was at its heights!!!] saw exceptionally strong monthly growth rates of 5% and 8.1%, respectively.” (Pitchbook is a phenomenal resource btw and I encourage you to use that; a lot of the data in here comes from their research). Their recent note on this topic states: “Despite the deteriorating investments into crypto throughout 2022, the year in aggregate set records in both invested capital, at $26.2 billion, and number of deals, at 2,541. The previous record was set in 2021, at $25.1 billion across 2,490 deals.”

Wow, folks. Can I get a warrant? 

You’ll note that the venture capitalists sure didn’t *behave* as if there was a crypto winter… because they knew there fucking wasn’t one. A16z, who we will discuss more soon, funded a giant number of cryptocurrency startups last year, and raised a new huge multi-billion dollar funding round for their crypto practice. 

There’s actually a huge amount of data to support the idea that 2022 was a banner year for crypto, allowing them to really get the institutional backing, adoption, develop the startup ecosystem, and even gain adoption as legal tender. I would look at it as a year of maturation in the crypto space and a time when some really important foundations were being established at a high rate, and with really strong figures overall to boot. 

Everything indicated a banner year… except the price. 

Which was low as shit. 

A steal, if you will, because 

… all the major players I mentioned above, were able to scoop up crypto, bizdev, blockchain infrastructure and whole startups, dirt fucking cheap, in a purposefully depressed market. It is my belief that the primary motivation for rigging the “crypto winter” — heavily using the media and FUD — was to entice institutional and corporate formations that have been too risk adverse to get on board and get them on at a low price. A signing bonus; perhaps even an assurance of some short-term money and volume and transaction and adoption when the VCs take their foot off the throat of the market. (And you’ll notice, crypto is RAPIDLY stabilizing and is on track to have a great year in the financials). All the new cronies are about to get an almost immediate payoff!! 

Weird!!! 

And that is a very different story than this so-called “crypto winter” hysteria, which would have you believe that Bitcoin startups and VCs were dying and investors were losing all their money and startups were going belly up and the bubble was bursting and crypto as a whole is falling apart and VCs need to pull back and everyone’s worried about the funding environment and crypto is just a scam or like a dorm room Ponzi scheme, and it’s falling apart, and the price is plunging and plunging and plunging… 

 Okay, then why does literally nothing EXCEPT the price, point to cryptocurrency even being jeopardized in any way? Why was crypto momentum off the charts in a huge number of key areas but the erstwhile charts were in the pits? 

The FTX scandal? At the time that the FTX scandal went down, the cryptocurrency market had a market cap between one and 3 trillion bucks, and the total losses to FTX, total, have been estimated around 8 billion — of which they’ve already recovered more than half. While in such a massive environment even those small percentages represent heft, it is SUMMARILY unreasonable, unnecessary, and unindicated, to crash an entire global market over this. The FTX losses, were incredibly idiosyncratic in structure, and represented at the time, out of the total crypto ecosystem, below even 1% and as low as .2%. Especially when you consider 5 billion of that 8 was recovered at the beginning of this year, the argument that FTX is justification for the crypto winter simply does not hold snow, especially when everything else in the system was looking great and just clipping along. 

So why was FTX, a relatively small company moving a relatively small amount of cash in a very early market, being positioned as its utter downfall, especially while all other systems were flashing green? Why has that story been hyped into the top of the world while the many, many positive indicators about crypto were ignored, particularly by press which has never taken this seriously, at all? 

Why is the news STILL filled with articles about FTX? 

FTX is serving multiple purposes for venture capitalists: the illusion of a material cause for the crypto winter AND a blood letting of the sort that Theranos achieved: everyone crowed victory and meanwhile the entire biotech sector got back to business testing *checks notes* brain implants designed by fascist billionaires with no regulation or oversight. Because hey, we took care of Theranos, right? We took care of FTX, right? Got the bad blood out? 

Really common PR trick, not even anything new to note here. 

In fact, during this whole supposed calamity, both the VCs *and* the major tech companies were in great shape and making huge strides on the agendas and the crypto ecosystem was flourishing. 

There is even less substantiation for the layoffs in the sector. Yes, they’re still investing money in the Metaverse and spending money on it — BECAUSE IT HASN’T REMOTELY FAILED, IT HASNT EVEN LAUNCHED YET —  but Facebook still laid off all those people even though its 2022 revenue only went down 4% from 2021, hit a record 2 billion *daily* users, and bought back $27.93 billion of stock over the year it went into “hardcore mode” and fucked all those employees over. 

Many of the big companies who participated in these layoffs were making 1-2 million dollars *per employee* during the same period and in Facebook’s case, it actually COST THEM MONEY to do the layoffs. Everyone was saying that this was all a financial necessity but suddenly Meta’s Q4 earnings report saw their stock skyrocket 17%?

Weird!!! 

So what the FUCK has been going on people because if you actually look at *what actually happened* in tech last year, as opposed to *what wildly incorrect speculations and opining* has been going on, you see that they whole thing has been cherries on cherries on pie this entire time and you are going to start to see what I think of as: the weirdness. 

And it just goes deeper and deeper and the more you dig the more you find. 

There was literally nothing about 2022 that justified the worker-hostile environment, brutal layoffs, purposeful squeezing and stressing of the market that happened, the introduction of percarity into the market, the reduction in compensation that comes with mass layoffs. The only metrics that were meaningfully down were metrics that VC and tech elite themselves have DIRECT control over. Valuations, number of deals, size of deals, headcount, comp structure, etc. 

There was no economic need whatsoever for tons of these layoffs, outside of getting a better foothold on the workers. They WANTED to lay people off. They didn’t HAVE to. Just like how venture capitalists were sitting on a record high of cash, but startups were withering away with lack of funding and the ecosystem fell short of its financial needs for no reason while VCs just sat as startups bled and flopped about like a fish at the bottom of a boat… watching and waiting for the desperation to set in. While everyone ran around like Chicken Little squalling about crypto, massive institutional investors were suddenly picked up slashed crypto assets and VCs were signing up tons of new crypto companies under punishing, extractive terms? Weird! 

A major reason why all of this can happen at all, is because the direction of the industry is emerging from a really small number of firms and people, who have such incredible power that are able to make these kinds of coordinated moves that singularly affect the industry, that sway it on purpose, including through rank conspiracy. This is what a monopoly looks like when taken to its nth degree, which is that singular companies are not simply monopolies in their sectors, but rather that all companies within the ecosystem are conducted by a monopoly of venture capitalists and tech elite. 

VCs and tech elite, are actively and visibly controlling and managing the market using collusion, cronyism, fraud, threats, political and election interference, city/land takeover, bribery, and a number of other market-fixing mechanisms, such as cronyism, manipulation of the labor market, ownership/destruction of the media, control of social platforms, concentrated control over startups, creation of arbitrary “categories” for investment, and a totalitarian/authoritative, top-down structure across the industry, a culture of containment and secrecy, a corrupt media primarily funded by VCs. And more!!! 

They have been doing this for well over a decade, and this idea of the “startup economy” and the “tech economy” are just covers for a level of corruption and a level of wealth/power concentration that, is gonna blow your fucking mind and make you understand why we have to stop these fucks. 

This is so much bigger than Madoff, and almost no one knows it but you and I. This is about the crypto market being a financial conspiracy, this is about artificial intelligence and its direction being a financial conspiracy created by THE EXACT SAME PEOPLE as the crypto thing, extremely small group of people. It is about the capture of what should be a vast and diverse and divergent ecosystem and the turning of that into the personal kingdom of a very narrow set of interests in which all things are artificial inventions and billions of lives are regularly tampered with in order to ensure massive returns on investments to venture capital firms. 

The tech industry is NOT a multi-faceted, complex ecosystem that is driven by some complex interaction between the industry and “the market” or “adoption” or “consumers”. It is not driven by “users” (traditionally known as people), in fact, it takes little input from anyone except the CIA and VCs and tech elite. The idea that people or industry “adopt” technology is a lie. The idea that the direction of the tech industry follows what users or society wants or needs is a lie. The idea that they use the data they collect about us to learn about us and give us the features they think we would like is a lie. The idea that the direction of the tech industry is the inevitable course of human innovation is a lie. The idea that people working in technology are free to explore other directions outside those that VC indicates is a lie. The idea that the academic community creates some kind of outside check on this industry, is a lie — academia also follows VC orders. The idea that there are competing entities within the tech ecosystem, or that whatever competition that exists is providing some kind of virtuous tension here, is totally false. The bubbles aren’t real. There is no crypto winter. The layoffs aren’t necessary. The valuations are made up. Many of the exits and acquisitions are sweetheart deals and arranged marriages officiated by the same couple dozen people. 

Companies and their founders as a concept are not even the major unit of study; the CORRECT units of study are venture capital firms and their PORTFOLIOS of hundreds or thousands of startups. Startups are the engines of VC money and power; they are a team of horses under the same crop. 

What you think is the tech industry — unpredictable and uncertain, too technical to comprehend, too big to be reasoned about  — actually comes down materially to some very basic conspiracies, frauds and financial crimes, by a limited group of actors. Which we are here to discuss. 

You’ll note that this material analysis, is very different from the typical “critical” analysis of tech, which paints venture capitalists as ego-drunk, man child dilettantes who are just pulling consecutive runs of elementary, short term scams and schemes from which they escape unscathed and enriched via some function of their privilege. Au contrar, these are psychopaths committing profoundly serious, sinister and deeply organized, criminal conspiracies spanning decades. 

You will find that as always, I have great respect for the subject and subjects and their agency as willing and knowing participants in global-scale financial crimes. Other, foolish, inaccurate, infantilizing lenses have done a very grave disservice to study of the field, particularly of its economics, because if you can’t admit that venture capital has serious material dimensions and isn’t just a joke with nothing but air to back it, you can’t admit that its actual finances exist, much less are worthy of investigation.                                                                                                  

All right, let’s get into the CONDITIONS OF THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY that permit the level of market manipulation that is occurring, the conditions which factually and materially describe what is happening in the industry and make it incredibly vulnerable to fixing by small groups of bad actors. 

1. 

The first condition to notice is that venture capitalists are pretty much the only way to get funding if you want to start a technology startup. That’s it. Point blank period. You’re gonna have to go to them to get the money. They run the game. 

This is the case for startups at any stage of the funding lifecycle, NOT just first rounds. PitchBook recently published an article with the heading “Slump puts startups’ fates in hands of all-powerful VC Insiders”: stating, 

“Sure, there were some large-scale layoffs at companies that overstretched during the bull cycle as well as spectacular failures in the highly speculative crypto industry, but judgment day has yet to come for most startups. That day is still coming however, and in many cases, companies' existing investors will play the role of God in deciding their fate.” 

It is widely acknowledged that VCs are king; while “non traditional investors” do contribute a significant amount of money to startup investment, it is generally at the later stages of the company so they are further out from the actual choices about WHAT WE BUILD; they are simply putting late money behind the much earlier and more formative “bets” of VCs. VCs are the ones who are envisioning and raising these startups from the ground up. 

And alternative sources that may exist, perhaps even some form of grant and academic funding, those are themselves very tied up with the VCs and tech elite. For example, the academic system doesn’t have the money or ability to fund these expensive startups, and it also relies on the industry to hire its graduates and collaborate with, and tech money in numerous ways supports the schools and the research and drives its direction. Academic teams in the US have been working in incredible lockstep with venture capitalists, which we can see very clearly in OpenAI. Actual alternatives to traditional VC includes … angel investing (which is basically just mini VC) and raising… debt. Great! 

 This is simply the way the industry runs. VCs are the gamut, they are the gate keepers, they are the bosses, they pick, they decide, everything is up to them. They tell the market what they want built; the market builds it. This is very different from the idea that the ecosystem somehow organically is producing the ideas/concepts that the VCs then collect “the best of” and invest in. It is more accurate to say that VCs declare areas they want to “build” in and startups form, move, pivot, dance, crawl, to fit into that master agenda for the whole industry. 

A startup thinks about its VC and *maybe* its customers; a VC is thinking about putting dozens or hundreds of startups together, in formation, to drive forward major agendas across time. In the last bubble it was big data collection (surveillance), the gig economy, social media and SaaS. Now it is artificial intelligence, crypto and the metaverse. 

VCs pick most everything that gets funding not only when the startup is just a few people but also throughout the entire lifecycle of the company, up until they are able to sell it or IPO or maintain it usefully and/or profitably as a private entity. The big giants, FAANG, all have their own venture arms where they invest and groom startups for acquisition and so on. Venture capitalists and tech elite fund all this shit. Period. Nothing starts, nothing moves, nothing grows, nothing gets money or gets money taken away, without their say so. 

2. 

Not only do venture capitalists control the money, but they are able to very easily stop and start it; they have the money on a faucet which allows them to easily create the illusions of bubbles starting and bursting. This is what we refer to as “dry powder” — the significant stores of cash that VCs keep on hand to shell out to startups. And it is one of the best levers for artificially boosting or depressing the entire startup ecosystem that they have: they turn on the krill, and the whole system begins to grow. They turn it off, the die-offs begin. 

The whole thing, like pretty much everything else in life, can be modeled on the ocean ecosystem. Venture capitalist provide essentially the shallowed estuary of the monopoly where small plankton, krill, tiny baby fish, and other such early-stage creatures begin to grow — these are the startups, and the basis of the tech ecosystem. When you see die-offs in those groups, it has an impact on the entire ecosystem. Ecological musings aside, deployment of capital, period, controls weather or not the startup ecosystem is flourishing and alive or dead and picked over; it is literally nothing more magical then the venture capitals tightening or loosening the purse strings. They want there to be a “crypto winter”? They hold back the money… and it stacks up so when the time is right they can create an artificial bubble with the exuberant release. 

They want there to be “industry-wide” firings? They hold back the money. And that’s exactly what we saw last year: VCs just sitting on a bunch of cash they had ready to go, and with no reasonable cause whatsoever, while they squeeze the market to get cheap assets and to give great deals to their buddies at Goldman Sacks and fucking Blackrock. They don’t have to give a reason, they don’t have to give a good reason, they don’t have to argue their case for starving the ecosystem, they don’t have to have any kind of community discussion about it. It is entirely within their control whether they do this or not. 

So while supposedly the entire venture capitalist community was shitting its pants last year while everything appeared to be crashing? Pitchfork hints at the reality, in which rather “US venture capitalists are… waiting to deploy their record $300 billion of dry powder until a more favorable dealmaking environment comes along. Startups are going to need to increase their runway by cutting costs and reducing headcount or by taking on more investor-friendly deal terms to get new capital injections.” 

Not even buried in the report, is pretty clearly laid out that VCs are simply CHOOSING to apply this pressure; they are sitting on resources, not passing on any actual economic downward pressure that doesn’t exists, but CREATING it. And this favorable dealmaking environment? That is what “comes along” naturally after they turn the screws on the market and there is more competition for funding, so they can get more with less from startups and also get them more in line with venture capital goals to fund very specific areas. 

People were and are saying that the market is struggling, but scratch the surface, and you find that the same venture capitalists who are reporting on this as a fact of the market,  or at least craftily alluding to it, are in fact the ones creating it. 

3. 

OK, so we have our main characters: venture capitalists. But even within this relatively small pool, like we see in every other area of capitalism, we have a hyper concentration of control and wealth, where the number of VC firms that are pushing real weight around is actually very small and the vast part of the field is very small players who aren’t able to push an agenda in any real way. 

In fact, there are just few handfuls of them who are able to affect the industry as a singular force of consciousness, in any kind of meaningful way. We have a lot of concentration going on and that has actually been accelerating over time. 

There are about 1,000-2,000 VC firms in the US, depending on your source. And there’s about 71,153 startups in America. In this set up, VCs comprise just 1-3% of the total firms involved in this ecosystem, determining the fate of these 71,000 startups.  That is just not enough, or a diversity enough, of entities making these choices… especially when you consider that only a really small percent *of those* VC firms are doing the majority of the heavy lifting. Think about this as a pyramid where you have this vast startup ecosystem on at the base, and then a layer of VC firms over that, and then a layer of the most elite VC firms over that, from whom we can reliably determine the behavior of the market. 

More important than how *many* VC firms there are, is how many of of those are actually worth anything that matters outside of doing very limited investments for pretty limited investors. The median fund size of a VC firm --  last year was something like 50 MILLION, not BILLION, which sure, buy yourself a couple rounds… on the other hand, blue-chip startups often have *series As* above and beyond 50 million. It’s just not enough to sway the market; you’re a follower, not a leader. 

A good rule of thumb is that if you’re talking about a number below one billion dollars, you’re not looking at enough to do any serious damage in this environment. It’s just too fucking big. One of the biggest obstacles with this work is trying to successfully convince people that 50 million can be a very small amount…. because we’re working with trillions of dollars here. 

To prove this out, let’s say we take a VC firm that has a $50 million fund size. The total amount raised by startups last year, was $238,000,000,000, or 238 billion dollars — a really good, grounding number to keep in mind as we look at this initial survey of this market. And lets say this VC’s funds are being doled out to the market over 3-10 years. You’re obviously not going to just blow all your money in a single year. So even if you take that fund and you divide it equally, investing aggressively in rounds of startup funding across only three years, you’re looking at having contributed just .07% of just one year’s total raise by startups each of those years. 

.07% is nowhere near enough to materially change the course of an industry of this dimension, so that’s not a market-fixing, market-swaying level configuration, even if you hook up with a bunch of other smaller funds. The VAST majority of VCs just do not have the type of cash to throw around that’s going to make a dent as far as driving the overall direction of the industry. You basically have legions of tiny VC fish and then just a few huge ones, just like everywhere else in capitalism. In fact, the concentration of wealth and control in VC accelerated a lot last year: “The year saw an increasing amount of capital concentrated in larger-sized funds led by experienced managers within the Bay Area and New York VC ecosystems… $114.8 billion, or 70.6% of the capital raised, was committed to funds of $500 million or more.” 

So what we’re seeing is that WITHIN venture capital itself you have a power law distribution where the biggest firms are the ones doing most of the work and the heavy lifting and moving the most of that money. The champions, the heavyweights. Some of these more famous top firms are Sequoia, Inconiq, Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint and Bessemmer. Down the list a bit you get to smaller but more also brand name firms like Sequoia, Greylock, and so on. 

You don’t have to go far down the list before you crash through that impact threshold and you’re looking at reams of VCs with less than one billion under management that really aren’t going to be able to drive any kind of big external agenda. 

4. 

Let’s take a moment to get to some APPLICATION, and applying some of this type of thinking, to, you guessed it longtime listener: Andreessen Horowitz. Known as a16z. 

I pick that example, not only because it is my life’s work to bring them the fuck down in a wide-ranging RICO suit. That is, admittedly, a primary reason. HOWEVER they are particularly instructive here because they are one of those big, momentous VC firms, and more importantly, they have managed to secure the most leverage over the direction of the industry, and that is the widely and objectively held viewpoint in the industry: that they are the King of VCs, king of the Valley. 

When I talk about setting the direction of the industry, I’m talking about some EXTREMELY important and big companies and massive returns out of a16z since they were founded in 2009. They have backed huge number of house-hold name companies that created and defined entire market categories, gave birth to entire constellations of startups themselves: Facebook, AirBnB, Coinbase, Lyft, Oculus, Skype, Instagram, Github, and Digital Ocean among them. They really cut their teeth building up huge giants of the “app age” / cloud computing bubble; and in the background they began aggressively executing on artificial intelligence and crypto companies. A lot of what you see happening around you *right now*, in tech, the tech that you use and the “game-changing platforms”, is because a16z invested in it at some point in the last 10 years, opened a market category, and released a monster into it. As an intellectual force, a technical force, a leadership force, a talent discovery force, and yes, an economic force, they stand out at the very center of the financial crimes and conspiracies in tech. 

So let’s get into them. 

For context, A16z has 54.6 billion in “assets under management” or “AUM”. According to Crunchbase data, a16z moved 197 rounds of funding to startups last year, and the total amount of funding directed to those startups in result, was about $21 billion dollars. Again, total VC spend on startups last year was $238 billion. Which means a16z was driving almost 9% of the money total spend on startups in 2022. A few of those percentage points come from a16z going in on the purchase of Twitter, a really significant moment in their firm not only because of the size of the deal involved, but what it means: mainline access into the main platform for social progressive movements in the world. Even if you wanted to call the Twitter deal an outlier and adjust down accordingly (which I would argue is idiosyncratic and inappropriate), you are still looking at around 6% of the industry spend — for the ENTIRE tech industry…  

being driven by one firm… 

that has only 90 investors. (Update: Marc Andreessen has specified since the publication of this article that they only have 25 actual investors. Calculations below are updated)

To show you how far away this is from anything anywhere near democratic, even within the industry: a conservative estimate is that there are 8.9 million US tech workers in the industry. So in the case of a16z, you have .000280898% of the workforce deciding on 6-9% of the entire future of technology, year after year.

.000280898%.

And none of those are elected officials? None of them have participated in any kind of community process for selection? None of them have been vetted by anyone except some extremely rich borderline unknown purse strings, that likely includes some of the biggest financial and war criminals of our day (LPs)? They just… FUCKING PICK WHAT WE DO WITH THE ENTIRE GODDAMN TECHNOLOGY FIELD?!?! 

If that isn’t extreme enough, I would happily argue that at a16z, the only person who really, truly matters is Marc Andreessen, and it doesn’t make any sense for us to look at the firm as anything else but an extension of his will. Marc is like the official word on fucking everything in the Valley and is king and boss and emperor and so on. He makes no bones that he runs his firm in an authoritarian manner as well as all of the startups that he invests in. 

He had a partner in the firm who has unfortunately since died, so Marc is kindof the only important person there, to be honest, the rest is just a rotating cast of psychopaths he fashions to carry out his personal visions, such as his recent hire of one Katherine Boyle, General Partner at a16z, and one of the most bloodthirsty bitches you’ve ever seen; she’s out here preaching about God and burning your birth control and drone bombing kids, a real Hillary Clinton ass killer. (As a side note, the one thing that Marc seems to have picked up in the last bubble about diversity and inclusion is that given the opportunity, white women will go to war for the men who hate them and ruin fucking lives to be seen as important in their eyes. TOP pick-me behavior, TOP war-hawking, see you in a war crimes tribunal Katy, hope the deep-throating gets you a chance to personally kill someone too!! Palmer just got HIS first kills, why not you? Women CAN have it all). 

When you have this much concentrated sway, we end up in situations like: If you want money, you better be catering to what a16z says they want. If you want more funding when your first funding round runs out, you’re praying that a16z is going to give you the money otherwise you’re shit out of luck. If you piss a16z off? Boy, I’d be surprised if they don’t fucking kill you, drag you out in the back of the woods by one of their thugs like Jason Calicanis, the 5 foot 2 killer. (A16z surrounds itself with just outright psychopathic thugs, their landing page is a good look but when you start to look at who is actually around them, you land yourself in an absolute thicket of the lowest of the low, base ass criminals). 

While it may seem improbable that this is how decision making is done for THIS MUCH of a financial and social power, people simply do NOT understand how deeply authoritarian/totalitarian/dictatorial the industry really is; the VCs themselves talk about this as being a core part of the startup model, where you have the VCs, then the founders, and then the C-suite, etc., all very hierarchal and concentrated. And this is all happening very neatly and very uniformly across the portfolio. A recent a16z book talking about the concept of the “One Leader” as a primary and foundational part of the startup structure; the Founder is revered above all and treated essentially like the emperor of his own fiefdom, and encouraged to maintain a tight hold on the power and control in the company, including by hoarding stock from employees. This is not some fringe analysis of how startups are run, it is simply a description of how things are run in the industry: top top top to down down down. 

When we look at the overall spend on startups in a given year, you are talking about creating the foundation of the technological future of the entire world. The money we spend on startups is the money they we are allocating to the future; we are DECIDING on that future. It is everything. It matters the most. 

Across every single major VC firm, we see an insane amount of pull by a tiny, tiny, fractional, fractional part of even the US technology workforce itself, to say nothing of the input that is entitled to the rest of the country and the world. When you look at those firms all together, the impact compared to the footprint is just really, really fucking incredible where you are seeing this across the entire ecosystem and there are no other options and no other way out: just a small handful of players that are the chokepoint and the check point for the whole system.  

The level of singular and disproportionate control VCs have to literally dictate the direction of the technology industry over years and years and years, is incredibly frightening, it is incredibly disturbing, it is incredibly urgent. Every single year these same firms are making these type of insanely big moves that boil down to just a small handful of people. (And yes, they are almost all White and Asian men, but that isn’t the whole picture; they all have lots of things in common such as being psychopaths who enjoy fine dining, human hunting and colonization). 

That said, 

While the specific numbers of how much a16z and the other large venture capitalists are moving in the market in a given year is really compelling, it is only one piece of the economic picture of the impact VCs have and how they wield it. I would encourage you to think of financial numbers as a PLATFORM for pull in the industry; it is the money that is the tablestakes, must-be-this-tall-to-enter, the admission to the possibility of fixing markets. But that’s just where it begins.

5. 

It’s not enough to know simply that VCs control and strategically engineer what startups they start/develop, you also have to know the role that VCs play in those startups and how that unfolds. The degree to which VCs are or are not involved in their startups on an ongoing basis or at key junctures with big impacts on the market, gives us a sense of how their power is actually functioning, and how much of the behavior of startups is simply an extension of the venture capital agenda.  

The extremely key role that these big-name VCs play in funding rounds is as the lead investor, which is a really important and a very specific financial role in this process. It  cements the VC’s role in the startup as the primary exterior and also, interior driver. Just during the early funding round the VC is deciding on the valuations, the other investors who fill out the round, the terms of the agreement, the board, the contracts, the product strategy, the timeline and the roadmap, and everything like that. They not only give the company money but they tell it very dictatorially what they will do with that money, are deeply hands on in the strategy, on the executive team and early hires, and so on.  

Lead investors give smaller venture capital firms and investors access to larger rounds that they can’t carry on their own; in this way the larger fund also has a ton of control over the other venture capitalists and there is somewhat of trickle down economy that functions here in which, if you are a small firm, you better kiss some ass if you want to stay in the game, and you’re there just on the graces of the court. Everybody has to serve somebody, right? Big firms like a16z hold a ton of sway *other smaller venture capitalists* and the direction of THEIR portfolios and THEIR assets. The smaller firms don’t diversify a funding round so much as they are carrying out their role: subordinate to the big players and forced to follow their lead or risk because cut out of everything except really small deals with less desirable startups. Top VCs actually spread out their odious influence over a larger financial pool in this way. 

A great example of this occurs when we talk about venture capital category creation; when a large VC firm literally makes up, according to its own benefit, an entire category of investments, thus literally creating the markets, and dozens of small, no-name small fry VC firms eat it up and therefore create the illusion that any of this is real or organic, that this is an actual economic trend with any objective reason to pursue it, when all they are doing it following orders. We’ll circle back to that in a bit. 

6. 

The influence and control over startups far extends past just the deal table. Many of these startups will go on to employ hundreds, thousands and more in the years ahead and as they grow over years, some of them IPOing and selling, some of them turning into super-giants and even spawning their own “next generation” startups with the executives and top engineers of origin. This is how we got the PayPal Mafia out of PayPal.  

And the VCs are involved, deeply, hands-on, for fucking all of it. They are the most important defining factor in what the startup MEANS, what it DOES, how it GROWS, how it MOVES, what it BUILDs, who it HIRES, how it FUNCTIONS, how it GOES TO MARKET.  One idea that people have about venture capitalists is they are investing blindly in an organic ecosystem, and that they are essentially just making bets on what will and won’t work out based on “experience” and “intuition” and “foresight”, and they basically give the startups a check and some general cheering words and sage advice, and are out until it’s time to raise another round or to close out. 

Very much not the case. 

Startups are deeply fused into the venture capitalist’s firm, and they function like just another part of its already-moving machine, being oiled and screwed into it. Startups have very little determination of their own futures, and the idea that even the founder is the main one driving the direction, simply does not bear out. A16z, with 1300 rounds, probably has about 1,000 startups in their portfolio; they are in all cases going to be more experienced and authoritative in how the startup is run and already have an entire system for making the portfolio work, often in unison, to achieve portfolio goals. You are not actually getting “new ideas” coming in from the founders, as is popularly thought; founders actually exist as managers for the company reporting in to a much larger structure. 

 The venture capitalists CONTROL the startups. They are never just passive observers, they are always deeply hands-on in driving direction, in driving strategy. The firms offer a total white-glove process for getting the startup from inception to hopefully a really big ass return, a glamour event like an IPO or an acquisition. They put a lot of money into this bitch and they will MAKE it fucking work… something they can absolutely accomplish in, again, a fixed market where they have, for years and years, been utterly dictating the landscape. 

So we need to be looking at venture capitalists just as much as what startups they pick and how they fund them, but how they grow and groom those startups over time; how those startups go on to continue delivering on venture capital aims and goals, how those founders remain in a16z’s pockets for the rest of their careers, how when you look at how these things are materially run, you will come to see VCs far less as investors and much more as empire builders; startups are just their building blocks. 

Y Combinator really perfected this model of essentially building a machine around founders for success, where things are very regimented, the structures of the startups are set up nearly identically, where the venture capital investment provides a “value add” to the startup: a promise to ram it through the market into success. 

Larger firms now apply these same techniques in their larger practices, funding at multiple stages in the startup lifecycle. This is the systems-wide function of a16z and venture capital more broadly, which is not to fund things in some market free-for-all, but drive singular agendas via startups across huge industries, using financial choke points, monopolies, uniformity, conspiracy and dominance. 

You’ll note earlier I mentioned that a16z has about 500 employees, but only 25 are in the investment practice. What are all those other people DOING there, and why do you even need 500 people if you just have 5 or 6 people deciding where the money goes? Well, you need those people to make sure the startups succeed at all cost. So inside every a16z startup… is a16z DNA. 

Marc Andreessen himself is a renowned startup manager. He is known for his gentle, yet firm, almost fatherly role in the building of the startup, and his temperament has mellowed over the years with success and age; he takes a personal interest in all of them and opens his arms, his counsel, probably not his home, but he has been known to show up to theirs. At 3 am. Imagine how scary that would be, to have Marc Andreessen show up your door at 3 am. After all, the VCs are the ones who sit on the board with the power to fire the CEO (a power that is very deeply felt). He is more likely to come to escort me to my mind prison than for a chat, but if you ever do want to swing by, I have games and chianti, whoever wins gets the bottle. 

Marc likes to talk about personally “scrubbing in” to “his” startups to help them when things are either going to shit or when shit starts really ramping up; and that’s probably some pretty impressive surgery because at this point he personally has experience with thousands and thousands of startups, and the man invested the web browser for fucks sake. Kids today don’t even know what that is. 

The VCs who really run the game, know literally every part of the business, all the startups, who they could sell to, what is happening, eyes in every part of the global and the financial ecosystem, they have extremely deep relationships in all of these places, they have eyes and ears everywhere. And they extend a wealth of resources to the startups besides just money. 

At a16z you have the “Go to Market” team, helping their portfolio companies go through the process of successfully launching their company, their products, taking them through various stages on the way to I.e. Becoming a publicly traded company or a hyper growth trajectory. They have an “executive talent network” practice, and this has everything to do with *a16z* finding, grooming, selecting and moving around, high-level, top management throughout its portfolio companies; this is important because in many cases it is actually the VENTURE CAPITAL FIRM that is fleshing out what the leadership team of the startup is as well as what the talent profile is; and of course they’re bringing in people that they have worked with before, the same old same Old Boys Club. Then they have a SEPERATE technical talent network, this is a team that’s making sure that the startups have good engineers, have alignment with a16z and its portfolio on a technical basis, etc.

So at this point, you have the VC literally just building most of the stack. 

Then they have this big ass team of people called its “People Practices.” An a16z job ad notes that “People Practices” has to do with implementing management and HR. Disturbing that a16z is basically establishing HR departments when its founder has a nasty tendency of “saving” executives with sexual misconduct problems and publicly shitting on victims.

Oh and they have a whole marketing practice too. Lots going on. Lots going on. In fact, looked at this way, just calling these folks “investors” seems like a massive misdirection and even an outright lie. 

The level of engagement venture capitalists have with startups isn’t discussed nearly enough, because it very much turns the idea on its head that STARTUPS are the ones leading the direction of the industry, supported by venture capitalists, when it is actually VENTURE CAPITALISTS leading, working through an entire set of startups that they personally set up, fund, “mentor”, install management, lead/control, determine GTM, decide on everything from talent to tooling, etc. Of course, this is financially ingenious even if it should be outright illegal: it allows a16z to run its startups a bit like a factory line, by implementing uniformity, sharing practices, coordinating on messaging and product direction, sharing talent and teams, and so on.

7. 

I find it incredibly fruitful to view venture capitalist firms as really big ecosystems that you need to zoom way out from any individual startup to see. A16z’s ecosystem consists of the over 1300 investments it has made: a vibrant, dynamic world of startups, consisting of the executives and top engineers at every company it funds, all of their employees, all of the R&D and M&A between them, all of the tech and products, and so on and so forth. 

And to the point of cronyism, people are constantly moving around inside of that configuration; executives are turned into bees going from flower to flower and sharing knowledge and picking up best practices and transplanting them and so on. Which would be fine if they were not carrying the pollen from fascism to the thousand flowers that bloom entirely under the sun of a singular VC firm owned by an outright fascist. 

Just one small window into how serious this can be in practice: Take the CTO position at Coinbase, which has been a key role where we see this insularity and cronyism playing out. We’ve seen an a16z partner start and sell a company to a16z company Coinbase, then serve as its CTO, before getting spun out into an a16z propaganda role creating books like “The Network State” to promote VC sovereignty. The guy who took that guy’s spot at a16z has since popped up at Twitter HQ, on day one of the Elon transition, to “help out”. Oh!!! 

None of this would be inherently bad necessarily, hey, we can all use a hand once in awhile, right? Unfortunately,  these are all a bunch of fucking fascists building fascist companies with other fascists in a highly insular, highly concentrated, productionized monopoly for the concentration of wealth and power and world takeover.  

In that case, its really bad.

8.

And they aren’t doing it alone either!!! 

There are conspiracies between VC, tech elite and other key individuals, overriding any specific firm, that we can observe across time collaborating on “projects” (conspiracies) together over time. You have a great example of course, in the PayPal Mafia, which has spawned dozens of companies (probably more once you flesh out the whole chart) and multiple VC firms. Yet they are always driving a consistent theme forward: controlling the evolution of financial technology for personal gain.

One of the most important conflagrations of seemingly separate entities is that between Marc Andreessen (a16z) and Peter Thiel (Founder’s Fund). You’ll find throughout my blog evidence that Peter Thiel of Founder’s Fund and Marc Andreessen of a16z, are involved in a financial conspiracy that encompasses cryptocurrency and the build-out of a Silicon Valley-grade military. Marc and Thiel are extremely close and have been very close for a long time; they were both early investors in Facebook and were on its board together for years, which means they were helming arguably the biggest venture capital success story of all time — Thiel was its first outside investor. So, definitely invite you to check some of my other posts, such as: How Many People Have A16Z and Founder’s Fund Killed? 

When you start to talk about different VC heavyweights working together on specific agendas and teaming up to raise huge sums of money to fund flagship/category defining startups, you start to get a real sense of how VCs are able to sway the market by sheer force of corruption. 

Thiel’s firm, Founder’s Fund, participated in 79 funding rounds last year, coming to ~ $6.6 billion total swing, including another major co-investment with a16z in Anduril (weapons company). Anduril is exactly one of those category-defining startups: a highly funded, cash-flush, heavily backed company stacked with trusted a16z + Founder’s Fund talent (including its CEO, Palmer Luckey), deployed for the very specific reason of ice-breaking and dominating a new market, creating it. You could think of these as “platform startups”, as VCs are describing them lately, or as bedrock/cornerstone firms, depending on your leaning. And in the case of Anduril, it is the cornerstone of the autonomous warfare market that Founder’s Fund and a16z are aggressively executing on. 

Anduril builds a number of products that are designed to kill, off the shelf, and has just massive interface with the decision makers in intelligence and military, as well as contracting directly to active war zones; something that another Founder’s Fund company, Palantir, is doing as well. You’ll find a16z and Founder’s Fund in it together on a number of key deals. They are both investors in OpenAI, they are both investors in  Oculus, AirBnB, Stripe, SpaceX, police tech company Flock Safety, and others — each of these are definitive first entries and platforms into VC-envisioned markets. 

This a16z x Founder’s Fund collaboration on warfare is a pretty serious and obvious anomaly because, while the industry has long been backing the surveillance machine and certainly had major relationships w/ the CIA, NSA, etc., it was never a war hawk industry and there has actually been some substantial anti-war pushback in the past 10 years; not enough, but Project Maven, industry support for Chelsea Manning, and the No Tech for ICE motions, were enough to make tech elite perfectly aware that much of the rank and file programming workforce, does not want to be war criminals or to murder people. This is very nakedly an effort to force compliance with a new hawkish agenda and actually to change the culture of the industry itself, which we’ll go through in more detail later.  

This new drive, this new animating force and propulsion around weapons buildout, is being clearly led by a16z and Founder’s Fund as they collaborate on the new industry tag-line, “American Dynamism”, a shiny wrapper on the new combat direction. The implications of their conspiracy to turn the tech industry into a killing machine, are all over the industry already; you can feel the weight of the pull as tepid, timid TechCrunch articles yet remark that there’s somehow, magically “more interest” in the “defense industry” in tech, and less resistance from the technical workforce to such work than we’ve seen in prior years. The “more interest” isn’t coming because the rank and file has had a magical change of heart; it is because startups are vying for cash for a new war category that these VCs are building out as we speak. 

 One of the reasons we can see the alignment between Thiel and a16z so clearly is because their agendas are playing out in extremely controversial areas, like whether or not tech should be involved in *checks note* building a new autonomous military and becoming architects of war through AI-piloted drones and complex “battlefield OS”es that make choices about “kill chains”, as well as various ICE-age, superpowered war-grade surveillance and data analytics, like what we see in Palantir. 

 These agendas DO NOT match the agendas of the rest of the venture industry, much less the workforce itself. While the industry has long had a significant relationships with especially intelligence agencies, it is ALSO important that we recognize when these relationships have escalated or changed form, which is exactly what is happening here.  

9.

To add in to this mix, it would impossible to talk about the a16z + Founder’s Fund conspiracy without talking about another firm that has been linked extremely closely to BOTH of these firms: In-Q-Tel, 

and yes, that would be the CIA’s investing arm. 

A16z, Founder’s Fund, In-Q-Tel: I propose that this is one of the most important configurations that exists in the tech world. The Dark Triad.  

Both Founder’s Fund and a16z are very close with In-Q-Tel; in fact, Marc Andreessen was outted in 2020 for serving on a secret advisory board for the director of the CIA himself, Mike Pompeo. InqTel was one of the first to fund Peter Thiel’s Palantir. These folks are in on all kinds of deals together in various configurations and we see them at the very heart of the weapons agenda in tech. (and Elon Musk shows up a whole bunch too). SpaceX is funded by In-Q-Tel and a16z and Founder’s Fund. In-Q-Tel, a16z and Founder’s Fund are *all* in on Anduril. Together, these firms cover huge surfaces of the new hawk agenda. Palantir was a clear turning point to the dark side; SpaceX is of course deeply connected to military operators as space efforts always have been, and Anduril is already a giant force in the startup ecosystem and scaling very rapidly; this puts the same conspirators at the core of the some the worst, most heavily funded and most corrupting tech companies, who are operating in surveillance, killing and war craft, pushing that agenda and trying to drag the rest of the industry behind them, again and again and again. 

Founder’s Fund and a16z have also been at the very forefront of the fight for AI dominance; both backed OpenAI alongside fellow PayPal Mafia collaborator Elon Musk — In-Q-Tel itself has funded a whopping 120 AI startups. In-Q-Tel supposedly went in on $688 million of cash on startups last year… the only problem of course is that it’s the fucking CIA, they often don’t disclose their rounds, or their startups, or how much they actually shelled out and went in on, so there’s literally 0 reason to believe that number is accurate. 

I’ll go further into this firm in a future article, but we’ll round off this little group with Lux Capital, a pretty small firm but nonetheless one that is showing up alongside of these characters, on category-defining, firm-defining, market-defining anchor companies, again and again. As well as being right there in the marketing mix everytime, helping to make sure that this looks like more than just the CIA, Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, but rather actual market and an actual economic direction that exists for anything other than greed and bloodlust. Lux doesn’t necessarily bring an outsized proportion of the money, but they are clearly putting in a lot of work on the marketing, ideology and appearance of a fake market. And I imagine they will be handsomely rewarded.

These are CONDITIONS for market fixing: a practice of firms entering conspiracies together that link them closely in trajectory and through the major investments they are making, compound their influence and power in the situation, bringing the total deal participation way up, being able to spread out across a larger surface area, and having the combined impact on industry culture to achieve shared goals: such as dominating the AI infrastructure space or “pivoting” the field directly into arms dealing.  

When you add up all of these contributions of these firms working in lockstep on a shared agenda in 2022, you’re looking at around 350 combined deals, and you’re looking at about 12% of the TOTAL spend on startups last year. The CIA, Peter Thiel, a16z and some fuckboy little shit firm, Lux, all in bed together driving at least 12% of the industry spend directly towards some of our darkest futures. 

9.

These conditions make way for one of the main tactics venture capitalists use to influence the market: category creation. We talked about this a bit earlier but we’ll look at some concrete examples I’ve been tracking. 

Category creation is basically when VCs make some shit up and tell everyone from the press to the guy in the garage next door that this is the future of the industry, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, it’s just “the market” and “the trends we’re seeing” and “the economy” and “what we’re seeing” and “the direction the market is going in”. Very simply, venture capitalists are constantly coming up with new “categories” to drive momentum around; they debut and push these, essentially marketing packages, out into the market and thereby compel the entire ecosystem to move in that direction if they hope to get funding. These funding categories are presented as some kind of capture of organic technological development, but they are simply strategic deployments by VC which are totally wrapped up in their blood lust, ambition and greed. 

We have had an amazing court-side seat to artificial category creation in recent years as a16z has led the category creation of two major invented verticals: American Dynamism and Web 3.0. 

I’ll use American Dynamism as our example, which seems to have originated at Founder’s Fund and carried into a16z by Katharine Boyle with a pit-stop at a second-tier firm in between, a great example of the affinities between a16z and Founder’s Fund showing up here again. With spread from Founder’s Fund, a16z’s significant marketing machine, In-Q-Tel and Lux Capital, this idea as spilled into the mainstream press, into the financial think tanks, into the various talent feeder programs, and is now totally contaminating the startup ecosystem. 

It has been pretty surreal to watch as they transparently developed and deployed this idea and now it is raging all over the industry. American Dynamism, at its core, is about tech becoming a war engine and turning itself into a weapons industry; but it parades as some sort of psuedo-populist, pseudo Republican, pseudo New Deal movement about “maintaining American global competitiveness” and returning to a time when we “built things”, and “fighting Russia and China” and “patriotism” and “overcoming the loss of American values and momentum” and blah blah blah blah. Getting away from “unserious” issues like social progressive movements and into “serious” issues (like killing women and children in conflict zones with drone swarms.) 

Underneath all the fluff is nothing but VC positioning itself to LEAD, as strategists and architects, the vision of the new warfare, and building out a new war portfolio featuring combat-grade drones, AI pilots, and battlefield-level surveillance. Plus guns and submarines and a bunch of other insane bullshit.  

When we talk about venture capital trajectories and how those happen across different portfolio companies they have, we see a great example here where you have Palantir and Clearview and Anduril and Flock and ShieldAI and the host of weapons companies across these portfolios, unfolding on the command of the same people and towards the same ends… in formation. And that is how startups are in fact wielded in the market and it makes literally zero sense, ever, to talk about a specific startup without contextualizing it in what you will always find present: a formation of startups that is working together on shared venture capital aspirations, typically under an invented category that is presented as an economic truth. 

American Dynamism is obviously a pretty scary vision, especially since the people who are proposing it are literally fascists.  I’ve documented here how the idea of American Dynamism spilled out from a few a16z VCs talking about it, to all of its portfolio companies suddenly talking about it (weird!!!) creating the illusion that this is coming out of a bunch of different companies and people and interests and that there is original thinking being contributed to this. Then it was picked up by a number of smaller VC firms — kissing ass to secure placement in elite rounds. (Lux of course was the very first). Then it started suddenly appearing in all these financial notes and advisories and thinktanks, and then some scattered mentions in the press, and then a few mentions by REPUBLICAN POLITIANS, most recently invoked by the Chief of Staff to the (R) Governor of Mississipi on Twitter. Fast forward and there’s a conference, meetups around the country, a blog, a podcast. Now all kinds of other VCs are looking to fund American Dynamism; now all kinds of founders and startups are using its branding and messaging and positioning to get cash.

It’s really incredible, actually. Within weeks of the official rollout of American Dynamism last year, there was even coordinating imagery and symbols rolling out on the front pages of VC sites (lots of combat images and drone footage) and even on Twitter background photos (American flags, tanks and the Statue of Liberty), which was all very funny Americana because, as I’ve gone into detail elsewhere, it is just being used to make this thing look like it is coming from some known, Republican element as opposed to an unknown, fascist one. Hell, they even came up with an emoji combo — the American flag and the rocket ship — to designate it. Startups both within and outside of the portfolios were “rebranding” as American Dynamism companies as potential founders flocked to the new meetups. This was a really polished and effective roll-out and it has been met with very, very little push-back. 

After all, who would push back on it?  

The sudden appearance and dominance of American Dynamism of course echoes what we saw with the roll-out of the “Web 3.0” category — remember how all the fuck of a sudden out of nowhere the word “Web 3.0” was obnoxiously literally everywhere? As I wrote in an earlier piece: 

“While a16z has always been King, in *this* bubble we really start to see the skills and strategies they honed in the last bubble. Their ability to lead all of their portfolio companies as a unified team — to get all of them jumping “how high” onto web3 messaging at warp speed —  is *this* particular competitive advantage that puts them far and away above the other firms as far as directing the industry. 

As soon as they gave the marching orders on web3, within a month or so the entire industry had flipped to the exact same messaging. You’re seeing the same messages about web3 coming out of every single startup, tech elite, a large swath of programmers, and all of the VC firms. The coding schools now have web3 and crypto as part of their curriculum, to kids as young as middle schoolers, and all of the major computer science schools, MIT, CMU, are on board as well. A16z’s complete control of the ecosystem, in basically forcing an entire field into homogenous focus, is terrifying to watch but it also reveals very clearly the degree to which venture capitalists control the market.”

If nothing else, this indicates that startups are building to VC specs; not pursuing their own agendas or any kind of organic “trends” in the market. 

When we see portfolio coordination happening in this way, you get a great look at how VCs are able to orchestrate a number of startups together to push agendas. That’s that 12% control of the funding in the tech ecosystem that a16z, InQTel, Founder’s Fund and Lux, have, working together with massive resources behind them, to basically force adoption of venture capital priorities on everyone else.  

The VC’s ability to issue orders to the ecosystem, by holding all of the funding clout within it and not being afraid to swing it around, is an important component of what enables market fixing. Ideas proliferate across the tech industry and while supposedly the direction has ANY kind of democratic process, ANY input from users whatsoever, ANY transparency into where any of this is coming from, ANY influence from some nebulous startup economy —it just doesn’t.

Venture capitalists decide on the core trajectories of the industry in near total isolation and we can see this play out in the market again and again. A16z in particularly has been incredibly adept at this because they have pushed the most spend and the most sophisticated tactics to position themselves as the industry leader and as the thought leaders of the industry; Marc Andreessen of a16z is by far the most famous venture capitalist, an extremely shrewd marketer who has honed his talent through investments in a large number of social media platforms including Buzzfeed, whose specific goal was to crack the code of what makes things go viral. This is the firm that launched Clubhouse, that has the most popular podcasts and blogs in the industry, that has the most respected portfolio and conferences. The idea of “thought leadership” is tame until you question whose fucking leadership and for what reason. 

And the market-fixing efforts have a quick turnaround; as that TechCrunch article (HOW are they still around?!?!) notes: “Five years ago, Google backed away from a Pentagon government contract because thousands of employees protested that its tech might be used for lethal drone targeting. Today, however, Silicon Valley has far fewer qualms about developing tech for the U.S. Department of Defense.” 

The article was covering a panel with Founder’s Fund and In-Q-Tel and Lux Capital. 

10. 

One obvious question to have at this juncture is, where the fuck are like, the computer programmers and shit, the people who make the code? Aren’t they like, saying something, standing up, fighting the man, …. ???? Anything ?????? What are they … doing?!?!?! Aren’t they fighting for a …. Voice? Don’t they want to be part of what is driving these choices? Don’t they have some moral concerns here? Aren’t they … doing anything about this? 

LOLOLOLOL 

Tech programmers are a bunch of bootlicking fucking spineless worms with zero sense of moral obligation the second a brand-name startup looks their way, and the environment is designed to nurture this cowardice and expand it to its logical conclusion: outright collaboration.

One of the CONDITIONS that makes it possible to fix the tech market is that you’re talking about a really severe instance of a heavily policed monoculture that is spread across the entire industry and that starts even before people start working in the industry. The fact that the industry is composed of basically 80% white and Asian men gives us a really solid basis for a monoculture and one of the reasons that messages transmit so quickly across the industry. In fact, it’s my belief that this is one of the main reasons WHY tech retains such a homogenous workforce despite there being basically every force in the world pushing them in the direction of diversity. Venture capitalists are at the heart of this as they set the model for all startups, install the executive teams, are responsible for building the hiring mechanisms, and so forth. They themselves ensure this pattern continues by maintaining overwhelming white and Asian investment teams. Additionally, they make sure all the startups are themselves run by white and Asian men, as they only fund those groups. Last year less than 2% of VC funding went to women and less than than 1% to Black people, by demographic. This is the true origin of the financial inequality in the industry: venture capitalists only give money to startups with white or Asian male leaders, the executive hires are also white and Asian, then the early engineering team, and so on down the line.   

Monocultures, particularly in an authoritarian structure, means that changes in priorities, in messaging, new trends, financial status real or otherwise, can move extremely quickly and without dissent.

I watched a record of Marc Andreessen talking at his American Dynamism conference. (Oh yes, they rolled out an entire conference AND a made-up award to push this). Marc was talking about the innovation of the tech campus, describing how

“over the last 20-25 years it became common to have this idea of the corporate campus, Google crystalized that in the culture... the company's facility was going to be a continuation of the college campus experience..... the theory was if we could get people especially these young people, like inculcate them, keep them in this college campus environment then basically they'll work more... because they'll be there more often. As a consequence you had this thing where young adults stayed in this corporate campus environment and then as a consequence they had this incredible community, incredible environment where they have all their friends, coworkers, colleagues, team mates... and then by the way it also turns out its the dating pool, it's just like the college campus, it's the dating pool, and so you know basically if you work for the Google campus or Facebook campus, where you're going to date probably somebody who also is there because you're there all the time together."

One of a16z’s other prize startups, Github, which now forms the basis of its Co-pilot code automation software, was also massively pioneering this concept of “you are your job”, insular, all-inclusive, hive-mind producing bubble; they were the ones who first turned employees into marketing engines for the company in every aspect of their lives, turning them into actual walking billboards. The cult-like, frat-house environment is how Github managed to convince a bunch of supposedly open source software developers to sell out the entire field, stealing all of the code on the site to make way for the coding AI, CoPilot; this technology is already being cited as the cause of layoffs, including those at Meta (also funded by Marc Andreessen).

Oh the tangled webs we weave.  

11.

Let’s talk more about the VC portfolio and how to think about it, specifically the idea that VCs use their PORTFOLIOS in a concerted, organized and strategic way, conducting them together to execute on broader portfolio goals. 

The VC’s portfolio is every startup that it has ever invested in. Over time, that adds up to a lot of companies, especially as the level of wealth concentration within VC itself has consistently escalated since the beginning. Since a16z founded their firm in 2009, they have made over 1300 investments. See, you need to not only understand how what amount of money is being shelled out by the top venture capitalists, you also need to understand what that money can buy them. 

Companies. Lots and lots of tech companies. Currently, a16z lists over 110 exits — that would be companies who IPOed or sold, often today’s mature companies with an outsized ongoing impact on the market — and over 360 active startups. Remember to take a longitudinal perspective again to see the cumulative impact over time — even the startups that do fail or dissolve and thus aren’t counted here, could have had a notable impact in the technology landscape, the cultural landscape, talent landscape, and so on. That the VC is continuously able to control a large number of startups and have this kind of activity and control over years and years and years is important to reckon with - in a16z’s case, they have already been active for 14 years.

With the mix of exited companies and new companies, you see the dynamism of the portfolio over time where you get maturation down the line, but that core a16z DNA is still part of everything that is done and the mature startups are still used to drive the rest of the portfolio and even become a new platform for it, itself spawning new startups, executives, acquisitions, and so on. There’s a lot of interactions between larger tech companies and small startups, actually, but that’s for another time.

So imagine having almost 400 fucking startups and 100 major tech companies literally in your pocket RIGHT NOW, the absolutely cream of the crop startups, and imagine having, let’s say near to 1,000 startups in your pocket at various points throughout the lifetime of the portfolio — a16z started in 2009. (Hilariously, its not actually easy to find how MANY total startups, as opposed to “investment rounds”, VCs have… a lot of the very basic financial dimensions of this industry are somehow absent even from major industry databases.). Imagine being the beating heart of 300 or 1000 fucking startups — and that number is accelerating constantly as VC wealth concentrates and the industry expands — and being able to outright order them around: about the markets to go after, the sales to make, the customer base to focus on, how the funding is deployed, what R&D looks like, what acquisitions are made and what IPOs debut, and when, what the marketing messages and go-to-market strategies are, who gets hired and fired, what the business model is, what the products are and their features and policies, what the technology tooling and engineering team look like. How employees are treated.

The VCs are the ones who are are in a tiny central tower of a small number of people, and they are conducting what amounts to an orchestra of companies towards larger, category-based goals. 

What you get is an army of startups that as far as the eye can see have a authoritarian, top to bottom structure, a workaholic or cult-like monoculture, are structured to a16z specifications, featuring a16z appointed executives and board members, being outright owned in the early years before dilution, often in majority by the firm. With a16z driving the product and sales and marketing strategy and making all of that as clean and efficient as possible, you’re looking at just a colossal market force which comes from not only the investment but the CONCENTRATION of power and the SPREAD and LEVERAGE of that power across the industry. 

We think of a tech founder as being impressive and powerful because he is leading one company; now zoom out from that and look at one VC firm of just 25 investors, managing a portfolio that, over the course of multiple bubbles, runs 1000 other companies.

 The general attitude of most of Silicon Valley to the venture capitalists is awe and fear; there is definitely the acknowledgement that success and continued employment can go down to the VC, and that the VC is an all-powerful force. They are kindof like rockstars x mob bosses. And the sway they have over startups just on a culture level and at the level of thought leadership is enormous. They are the most listened to, they are the most platformed at conferences, their blogs are read by everyone, their podcasts attract entire fanbases, and it just goes on and on. Adored, respected, feared, worshipped, and of course they all eat it up because they are all narcissistic sociopaths. 

The idea of looking at the portfolio itself as an active, dynamic, changing and complex, singular financial instrument that is itself shaping the market, is incredibly important to understanding the venture capital platform. This isn’t betting on startups: this is creating markets, creating entire categories, and then populating them with deep benches of startups all focused on capturing that market and driving together towards a success. This is where we get those formations or cohorts of startups where there is movement towards VC goals, where success is in alignment rather than in competition — another place where the myth of competition in the ecosystem shows up. Like with the CIA funding 160 artificial intelligence startups, and those are combining systematically to literally create a market and create an ecosystem out of what the CIA wants. Great!!! 

I think this goes a long way towards explaining why changes in the industry — such as the category creation of something like “Web 3.0”, and the layoffs that went seemingly viral around the industry, even though they are not economically necessary whatsoever — why these themes, messages and changes in focus, marketing and execution, spread so quickly across the sector. Twitter and Facebook, both a16z companies, were the first to begin the fake layoffs, Coinbase was soon after, that has spread throughout the entire industry and resulted in more than 100,000 lay-offs. When the venture capitalists want something to go viral… it does. 

12. 

We’re going to switch gears for a second to talk about… the housing market!!! Of course we had to get to the motherland of market fixing… the housing market. 

Its important to note that tech’s cloud computing bubble really started rising in the crash of the housing market and the banks in 2008.

We’ve discussed throughout other entries in this blog, the role of land and real estate and cities in general, in the venture capital plot. You all know the story so we’ll go through it in just a few sentences. Tech grew in the Bay Area and as early fortunes are made that brings more and more young white people looking to strike gold. They need housing, restaurants, transportation — more more more, and it must be “better” than what already exists. The agonizing process of gentrification and displacement begins. In the first bubble its the Peninsula, and in the second bubble, the last one, it really got San Francisco and Oakland, where residents were pushed out of the area, wages were depressed by tech giants, low-income workers crowded many families into single-family housing, local businesses were shuttered and switched with developer projects, police presence and violence increased… and on and on. Very sad and it is a very serious crime, what tech has done to the people of these areas and did, systematically, for years on end. The whole time getting richer and richer and richer, and a huge contributor to that WAS the treatment of people, the treatment of workers, real estate speculation, and so on. 

Now, venture capital is moving aggressively into Miami, Atlanta and Austin, domestically, and abroad Dublin and London and Nairobi. They are using the same model and all my money’s on the exact same patterns repeating; tech will be more effective and more ruthless in using geography to obtain cheap labor, housing, land and revenue than ever before. 

There is a direct connection between VC and tech wealth and its impact on lands and cities. As Marc Andreessen of a16z himself said in a fireside chat at the end of last year, “geography is so central to economic opportunities”, and “cities are the foundation of modern economic growth.” He would know: he and his family are the largest landowners in San Francisco, and he himself is now among the richest and most powerful people in the world in the wake of the Bay’s destruction. Like Marc, huge number of techies have gotten rich through real estate speculation, through gentrifying and then flipping housing; land developers have made fortunes, and huge amounts of land have been occupied, stolen from local residents, to make way for corporate campuses and new developments. 

This isn’t just happening in one or two areas where tech is building physical presence; no, it is exporting city-destroying mechanisms through real estate platforms. WeWork, AirBnB, and now Flow, Adam Neumann’s new company, funded by… you guessed it, a16z, are just the better known of a portfolio of real estate startups and resident-focused technology ranging from neighborhood surveillance apps to companies like Flock, which a16z also funded last year: a management company that takes over for landlords, or specifically “takes them over and manages” their properties. Their pitch is … wealth creation for landlords; this of course is part of ongoing efforts by a16z specifically to create a new landlord class and further destabilizing people from owning their own properties, instead relying on tech companies to dole out housing at their will. Destabilizing markets is right at the top of their priority lists, as the venture capital strength is making money off destabilization of land, residents, workers, students and so on. 

A16z is going hard for the real estate market. Flow, which will become the major category anchor for VC real estate the way Anduril is for “American Dynamism”, has already PURCHASED over 4,000 apartments in a number of cities. There’s been a ton of studies and papers on the negative effects of such companies; the AirBnB case study is especially important with regards to concentration of wealth and assets and the consistent creation of gentrification via this model. I am particularly concerned because there’s a lot of thought that the housing market is going to tank this year, while a16z is posed with fuck tons of cash to aggressively expand its geographical footprint. 

So, when we talk about fixing markets, we are also talking about literally fixing the housing market. The VC model is intertwined with how much money it is able to extract from a city and its residents, and how effectively it is able to turn the city itself into a source of revenue, a source of cheap and precarious labor, an incubator for its companies, a contained and isolated bubble for its workers, and so forth. So that is something that is working here as well. 

13. 

It’s hard to talk housing without talking… politics!! 

I really don’t want to dwell here because tech’s involvement in politics is quite extensively documented, but I do want you to consider the command that tech has. Most emblematic of their success in manipulating politics is their success in taking over cities without having to benefit residents or do anything for the city; and their skill thus far in evading regulations, any type of regulation whatsoever. While they have often simply benefitted off of the lack of precedent as well as the declining American infrastructure, it is certainly demonstrated that tech has been effective in keeping the government off its back. 

The Bay Area is of course the case study on how fixing of politics have played out. 

One of the most important things I want to impart to you is that tech’s traditional way of manipulating politics, has often had less to do with outright donations, but rather presenting politicians with something even more tantalizing: “development” of the city. For example, Twitter, Medium and other tech companies who were trying to move into the Tenderloin, early in the last bubble, famously received the Mid-Market Tax Breaks, when they all got significantly off the hook tax-wise —  big tech moving into any part of this city should have resulted in a wealth for existing residents and the city, but it won’t surprise you to learn that wasn’t the outcome at all. 

The Mid-Market Tax Breaks were justified by the promise that the expansion of tech into this poor neighborhood would bring an economic revitalization and more money for the city. And it worked for all the fat cats — when tech comes in, the politicians get their money, the landowners and landlords and real estate speculators get money from sky-rocketing cost of living, and an extremely monied base of workers replaces what are often incredibly precarious people, such as the low-income families, sex workers, addicts and others that were much of the Tenderloin. 

Destruction. Needless, callous, inhumane destruction. 

But for cities and politicians, tech offers an entire economy, more revenue, more monied residents and importantly — a “solution” to the problem of poor communities, mostly communities of color such as those displaced in the Bay Area.  

You’ve seen the effectiveness of this approach to political manipulation as cities have, throughout the years, competed with each other to win a new Amazon or Google office or a Tesla factory. 

Most recently, a16z top brass has been seen in Miami snuggled up to the Mayor about the tech transformation coming into the city. Ditto in Austin, which tech has been targeting ever since its crown consumer conference, SXSW, became a techie destination and totally transformed the city. In perhaps the most concerning developments, El Salvador’s announcement of the first “Bitcoin City” led quickly to increased tourism, more example of this VC “package” playing out there. The problem of course is that tech is on a major escalation path as far as the exploitation of the global south. That’s something we particularly need to pay attention to in light of revelations from OpenAI regarding their use of contracted workers in Kenya making as low as $2/hour. Overall, we’re seeing increased activity by VC in Nigeria, where Peter Thiel recently funded a banking startup, and outsourcing of software work — almost all to poorer countries — is expected to climb by a whopping 60% this year. 

This all is putting politicians and political systems into the pockets of tech without there having to be even a formal donation or any covert behavior; anyone who can get on the same page of wringing out the cash from a city can sign up and join the winning team. We got a strong demonstration of tech’s negotiating power, and how far they are willingly to go to maintain it, when Tesla got up and moved out of California in response to regulatory and taxation issues. Though they’ve walked this back somewhat more recently, this nonetheless sent a powerful message to cities that they need to follow what the tech bosses say, otherwise they’ll just pull out all the revenue that is coming with them and leave the communities way worse off then they started — and no more excuses for why they allowed it to happen. Keeping regulations, oversight, resident-protective measures and taxation away is a primary goal. 

BECAUSE this “biz dev” model is the more standard way that tech works with local and state government, you see donations on all kinds of aisles; tech can work with any and all sides of the aisle and will work with whatever set of politics is present in the area or seems most advantageous. Tech can offer benefits to every single part of the government if it chooses to. It can bring a shit ton of rich voters that will do whatever their bosses say to help sway elections. It can give a massive boost to police funding as it enters war with local Black communities and demands police presence be built out to “protect” their employees. It creates new government jobs. It makes housing prices skyrocket. Developers flock in. New offices and campuses are built. Tech’s ability to offer the GOVERNMENT of cities great deals, of course, come at the expense of the city’s residents, who are totally overtaken as we see in many parts of the Bay. 

14. 

Another thing VCs, in collaboration with the tech giants, are extremely good at is manipulating the salary of its workforces and actually using those salaries to attain certain aims: such as paying programmers enough money that they could afford to take-over low-income areas in places like San Francisco and Oakland (just to reiterate that point.) But programmer salaries, too, must be kept in check: Steve Jobs was caught colluding with a few other Bay Area giants (Intel, Adobe) years ago in a series of back-room deals, to make sure that computer programmer salaries didn’t get TOO competitive. They ripped a lot of workers off of a whole bunch of money. Now, AI and a massive increase in outsourcing in the design of the startup, demonstrate yet another way that venture capitalists have come up with to keep salaries for technical workers under their control, as well as to keep stock concentrated — tech has been engaging in massive buy-backs and openly stating their desire to decrease stock compensation. 

The flip side of fixing the FT programmer salaries, is the giant, low-paid, contracting workforce,  paid absolutely bare minimum pay — the amount of effort it took to get fucking META to pay $15/hour, showed the moral depravity of Meta’s management, which was re-affirmed in Meta’s ongoing absolutely paltry payment of contractors in the global south, paid pennies to shift through vast quantities of horrifying content like child sexual abuse images and video, leading to serious workplace injuries like… PTSD. 

Removing economic power from all of its workers, even those at the “top”, gives the VCs a significant command of the ecosystem. You can raise salaries across your portfolio companies and suddenly they have the cash to wreck havoc on poor people in the cities. You can depress the salaries and have a good pretense for taking a bunch of stock back, which consolidates the wealth and ownership of the company even further. (It won’t surprise you to find out that during this current moment where Meta is supposedly needing to lay off huge amounts of talent, it is also in the middle of a huge stock buy-back program.) You can pay some programming jobs more than others; the way that AI engineers will be able to retain job security while other engineers will be making less and forced into contract roles— specifically to move the field in that direction, a direction that, again, is being decided by, a very small group of people and the CIA. You can decide to use a bunch of contracting out of the global south, so that you aren’t actually contributing to the economic stability or growth of the people, whether here or there or anywhere at all. 

The ability to set and manipulate comp in all parts of the tech workforce, is absolutely foundational to how they are fixing and manipulating this market. 

15. 

So naturally union suppression is another thing here that contributes to the framework for market fixing; this is because it is suppressing power and a voice from the workers, and smashing any dissent that may arise in any area — whether that be the treatment, the wages, the terms of the relationship… much less influence over product, much less influence over the direction of the company. It’s not just that VCs have power… it’s that workers have absolutely none, even the ones who are brainwashed into thinking having a meditation room at the office means they have any input to this system. 

The lack of unions is just one of the ways we know that there is serious suppression of not only worker’s right but just dissent overall, and any kind of dialog between the power structure and the rank and file. 

 There is no “voice on the job”, even for the highly paid computer programmers. While highly paid, it’s pretty clear at this point that the VCs regard even their 10x engineers as just another part of the assembly line; new layoffs, salary and stock comp depressions demonstrate that they aren’t special and somehow exempted for this behavior. The idyllic office environments full time software engineering hires at tech companies enjoy, were developed not as tokens of appreciation from grateful bosses but rather as cages for worker experiments, figuring out the best way to get the most out of them. Every worker that tech touches is under compensated, even computer programmers, who often generate a million bucks a year for their companies while being paid just a fragment of that, and are STILL laid off from their jobs. 

Unions, or any form of worker organization whatsoever, has been brutally put down by tech at every single level and in every single part of industry. Whether that has been WeWork firing all the cleaning and maintenance crews when they tried to organize in New York, or contracting firm Bauer Transportation getting sued for illegal union-busting tactics, or Tesla locking workers in factories and forcing them to work in pandemic conditions; or whether that’s been women trying to speak out about gender and sexual harassment and assault in the tech workplace and being mass attacked by anonymous “trolls” in the industry until forced to very literally go into hiding.

 It’s been consistent, it is part of the industry’s DNA, these industry-wide norms have been reiterated over and over again and in tens of thousands of startups all led by a small group of venture capitalists and their cronies in FAANG companies.

This is the profoundly undemocratic nature of the industry; any efforts on the part of workers to negotiate with management or change conditions or to gain more influence, are not only dismissed but actively punished. In this environment you are the furthest away from having a critically thinking, empowered, franchised, involved, worker base, a base that is contributing to the direction of the industry in a meaningful way, a base that can negotiate with the industry for better work conditions AND for changes in the overall industry direction, down to product building; for example, women in tech have consistently tried to speak out about the negative impacts of many social media and other tech companies on women, whether that has to do with the collection of reproductive information, or the state of online harassment, or the way that technology is used by domestic abusers and pedophiles to target women and teen girls. 

The women in tech movement in particular has been shit-canned by venture capital, almost in totality. Any scrap that remains is some type of Lean In bullshit, these scenarios when you see bitches making six figures at Meta — a company that roundly results in bad mental health and predation of teen girls — complaining that are being treated badly by their male colleagues. In the fuck did you expect? That entire company is built on girls and women and has never done a good thing for them once. Which is fine with alllll of these girls until that same energy is reflecting back towards them. 

Ahem. There was another vision for what “women in tech” could ACTUALLY represent, but the brass crushed it. We’ve seen a similar thing happen to organization by Black workers overall in the wake of Ferguson,  where Black workers were working towards changing the DIRECTION of the industry.  In fact, a lot of the biggest worker upheavals in the industry have been SPECIFICALLY about what tech builds — whether this has been demands to stop selling surveillance to police and ICE, to stopping data integrations with the NSA and other bodies, to refusing illustrious contracts with the Pentagon, and on and on. In these movements, it was the specific intention of these movements to affect the industry direction; the issue of diversity was deeply tied to how the industry could be changed, how it could result in better outcomes for users, communities, workers, the world.  

And venture capitalists have been RUTHLESS in refusing to change on any of these issues. There is less representation for women, for Black people demographically than there was before. Less funding. Less job stability. Less stock. The VCs, asked to dis-arm the police of tech-powered weapons, are more involved in supplying police tech than ever. American Dynamism represents the full-scale build out of a fucking military, putting an end to any question of an anti-war influence. From a worker’s organization perspective and an activist perspective, we are in worse shape than ever. 

The market is nothing but empty, uncontested space, manufactured and maintained by a brutal and total suppression of worker power. 

16.

VC is also connected to the school system and to the general educational pipeline that goes into the industry. I won’t spend too much time on this but simply consider the reality that CS programs, hacker schools, accelerators, incubators, and so on, all of the feeders into the tech industry itself, are pretty much tailored to whatever the demands of the VCs are for their portfolio trajectories and categories and their various fund categories and industry-wide objectives. 

They can actually, via these programs, reach into youth populations and from a very young age — some as young as middle school, some even before — be shaping how they think about the industry, the tools and skills they have, what they expect out of their work, even what their analytical approach to technology is and their level of critical thinking. Because believe me, the Raytheon-sponsored Girls who Code hackathons aren’t teaching these CHILDREN that building technology to kill other little girls in other countries isn’t okay.  Importantly, many of these programs also get children used to the idea of tech companies in general and to simply accept them as a fact of life, rather than to think critically about them or to have the opportunity to envision technology worlds outside of one that is dominated by the CIA and rogue venture capitalists. And I’m so fucking serious. 

Tech is also very wound up in schools later down the road including and especially its most prestigious schools like MIT, CMU and Stanford; they share research projects, a revolving door, funding, and the pipeline from the school into the industry, which is what makes a school “successful” and what it needs to be considered one of the top computer programming schools. A total racket.  

A huge part of this basically boils down to tech, from way before it even employs people, grooming docile, ignorant, self-referential, gullible and generally cowed workers so it can just use them as pawns in its takeover of the galaxy. 

Tech’s never-ending search for the perfect employees has ended in a practice of manufacturing them. 

17. 

VC owns or influences so much of the media and social media that it isn’t even funny. The amount that it owns is truly mind boggling. These are the people who killed news and gave us AI-generated click bite virality engines like Buzzfeed instead. 

The tech blogs, the TechCrunchs, GigaOMs and Ars Technicas, were and are alllll taking money *primarily* from the tech companies and venture capitalists THAT THEY ARE SUPPOSEDLY REPORTING ON. This comes in the form of “sponsorship”, the all corrupting “sponsorship”, all kinds of sponsorship. Ads. Articles. Conference booths and conference talks. Podcasts. Briefings. “Consulting.” The whole pie is up for grabs. And of course this is all venture capital money that is being spent to purchase the coverage. The tech press was, is and has always been exactly what you would expect as a result. Nothing but glowing coverage of startup launches and milestones real and invented, nothing but anointed tech CEOs and golden venture capitalists in the speaking slots at the conferences, zero critical thinking whatsoever.  

Within the industry we have our OWN message board that is primarily for computer programmers, called Hacker News, that has been a source for virulent misogyny, racism, even outright fascism, even since inception. Hacker News is the biggest source of technical news, so every programmer in the industry is going to this one website which is incubating an environment of hate, intolerance, and extremism. Many of the early, raid-style attacks on women in tech were initiated and perpetuated on Hacker News, driving huge amounts of harassment on its targets. Trying to get Hacker News fixed and/or taken down, was a big priority of the progressive movement within tech during web 2.0; no go. Guess who was running that site? Venture capitalists. A firm called YCombinator. And it won’t surprise you to know that the guy who presided over the whole thing is none other than Sam Altman… now of OpenAI. 

VC has obviously taken a huge role in the creation of the social-era media so I won’t dwell on that too much, but take Reddit, which throughout the entire last bubble, was literally incubating hate groups that were wrecking havoc, continuously, on progressive movements, targeting the emerging leaders of movements and in often extremely successful attacks. I wrote more about how technology has evolved in constant conflict with social movements here. Twitter was another venture-backed program where, despite revisionist history that has occurred since Elon and a16z’s purchase of the site, people were attacked for years on end, even FREQUENTLY including, rape and death threats, on their children’s lives, with absolutely no relief. Tech programmers were at the heart of these attack techniques, which they used primarily against women in tech, gaming and even sci-fi/fantasy before spreading to other groups. 

The media corruption is widespread and ensures there are almost no viable media outlets reporting on this issue with any clarity or any honesty whatsoever. Oh, you think the Intercept is a viable news source? Well isn’t it funny that the guy who funded that, Pierre Omidyar, just happens to be a venture capitalist billionaire of the PayPal Mafia, right up there with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel? Especially after Gawker, I’m literally amazed that no one even thought more critically about the PayPal Mafia’s ongoing manipulation of the media using every sick game in the book. Come on people this is textbook. The PayPal Mafia literally owns the Intercept (or did until recently moving its fav operative, Glenn Greenwald, furthers towards destabilizing politics and media in the global south). Omidyar continues to hire up “tech-critical” media, lol, so even the tiny and supposedly “indie” projects around are on the teat. 

The fucking PayPal Mafia literally started a publication to … checks notes … whistleblow on tech and that doesn’t sound like a total op to anyone else? Come ON I NEED us to do better than this. 

And of course over the past 10 years tech interests have picked up huge parts of the traditional media too, buying up Time, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and others. This absolutely helps keep the coverage in line and keeps the coverage narrowly critical if at all. Jeff Bezos owns and literally shows up at, the Washington Post, undoubtable terrifying the staffers… so is the Washington Post going to insist that tech elite get a boot to the face off the face of this corporal plane? Definitely not. At some point people, seemingly backed into a corner by all the media takeover, started actually believing that coverage can be separate from funding source… a massive cope and an obvious untruth. The Intercept? It’s only mentioned the most important venture capitalist in the Valley, Andreessen Horowitz, two times in nine years of history. It has not even said the word “PayPal Mafia” a single time. 

WEIRD!!! 

There is literally no way to *report* accurately or to analyze tech, without mentioning both of these players and OFTEN. In case you wondered what all the money that the PayPal Mafia spent on Intercept was for… it was keeping their names far out of this. It was Peter Thiel’s company Palantir that built PRISM… the very fulcrum from which the Intercept came. 

There is no tech media outside of their grasp; right now there’s only a small handful of anti-tech commentators but, for example, one of those podcasts just took PayPal Mafia money, yet another example of this conspiracy eating up all potentially critical media about them, even small fish. They are thorough if nothing else. 

There are no independent sources, and worse than that, critique is literally bashed to death; I ran an independent tech publication in the last bubble, and I literally had to go into hiding because the abuse and the outpouring of stalking and threats was so severe. My partner at the time had to get armed guards at his offices because they were coming after not only me, but everyone in my life and their workplaces as well. THAT is what happens if you are actually doing the work. Many of my colleagues in web 2.0 experienced a similar level of harassment for speaking out, some even leaving the country to establish security and safety again from the VC sycophant fascist army. 

Anyways, being able to fix the media contributes hugely to the ability to fix a market obviously, because that control that you have over the media apparatus makes it possible to dictate the messaging inside AND outside of the industry, it ensures treating your made-up categories like they are real, it ensures nothing but the narrowest criticism, it ensures that the industry will be described on the terms tech itself describes itself. That the sham economics will be upheld; this obviously allows them to shape the narrative about the market and startups, to suppress critique and news from, in particular, labor activity; it gives them the ability to create and push new trends and investment ideas, to focus attention on some of their startups and not on others, to distribute beliefs about the market that they want out there — perhaps, that we are in a bubble, or that a bubble is bursting, or that a crypto winter is starting or thawing, or that layoffs are starting and connected to any kind of real financial circumstances. 

18. 

Wow, we made it!!! I did not think we would get to the end of this. And like I said in the beginning, this is just an intro piece and we’ll be exploring even more of this in the coming days. It’s very nice to get some of this out because these are ideas that I was working on before I got sick in 2016, so the development of the VCs-as-market-fixers thesis went on the back burner; luckily, 2022 was incredibly useful year and data point to apply all of this to. 

In this article, we established how venture capital is able to fix the technology market through: 

• Maintaining a monopoly on startup funding sources 

• Concentration of funding in a very small number of large VC firms

• Concentration of decision-making power WITHIN those small number of firms 

• Opportunistically holding and releasing “dry powder” to affect market conditions

• Authoritarian management of startups, exercise of VC power over every aspect of the startup and the portfolio 

• Cronyism in portfolio companies and in the firms themselves

• Conspiracies between VC firms to drive specific agendas, such as the Founder’s Fund + InQTel + a16z plot to build out an autonomous military 

• Coinvestment 

• Category creation 

• Installing and maintaining a authoritarian monoculture incapable of critique or dissent across the field

• Use of an entire startup portfolio as an organized economic weapon

• Creating industry-wide fear of venture capitalists 

• Fixing the housing market 

• Corruption of local and state officials 

• Artificial manipulation of compensation and job precarity across the industry 

• Union suppression, suppression of all forms of worker dissent 

• Terrorism of dissenting people, especially women +/ people of color 

• Control over the educational pipeline, from coding schools to major CS universities 

• Ownership and influence of the tech, business and economy media 

I’ll leave you with this: 

If the layoffs, the web 3.0 category, the crypto winter and American Dynamism are all faked and artificial, then what DID happen in technology last year? 

Well, venture capital was able to consolidate their power and funding power even further, seeing “an increasing amount of capital concentrated in larger-sized funds led by experienced managers within the Bay Area and New York VC ecosystems.” They were able to snap up much better deals on start ups because of the supposedly deppressed tech economy, in the resulting “investor friendly” environment. They have been able to do huge amounts of stock buy-back, while being able to lower stock compensation across the board. They were able to drive down the security and pay of its technical workforce and increase their outsourcing to deeply exploited labor in the global south, proposing a new financial model for how the startup will be constructed going forward. They brought major, major financial partners like the major banks and financial institutions, onto crypto and into crypto partnerships, using the low price of crypto as bait and as part of business negotiations. They were able to effortlessly drive their web 3.0 and American Dynamism agenda throughout the international economy. They were able to launch widely available artificial intelligence with extremely minimal pushback. They were able to drive some very serious funding to their cornerstone companies: last year, 10 startups were able to raise rounds of $1,000,000,000 (1 billion dollars), or more, including Epic Games, SpaceX and Anduril.

So what the fuck? 

When a16z and other venture capitalists talk about the “future of technology” or “the market”, please keep in mind that they are not “predicting” it or reading the fucking tea leaves of an unknowable force; they are not sages, rather, they are TELLING you what they have given the money and power and environment to thrive, they are TELLING you that their horse… their horse is going to win the race. And it will. Because a16z fed them cocaine.

(No smiles for a dry powder joke? Too soon?). 

If you are reading this, please know that almost no one knows about the a16z + Founder’s Fund/PayPal Mafia conspiracy, even though a few people are starting to catch on that something’s not right here. This is a huge investigation and if you or someone you know can contribute to the investigation of a16z and its conspiracists from the PayPal Mafia, please consider it. All of the information is public and its just a matter of connecting the dots. For example, coming up with lists of ALL the companies that both Founder’s Fund and a16z have invested in over the years, and looking into some of these extremely sketchy investments a16z has made into weapons startups, would be invaluable and we have an opportunity to put this all together as a community and bring a change to this situation. You are reading this here, but almost no one knows about it. I don’t know what to do anymore to make people see, care, understand. And I don’t want it to be too late by then.