What We Don’t Know About Venture Capital
We tend to assume that we know what venture capital is up to, because we can see some of its products in the world, and many of them we use everyday. And we read about their startups, like OpenAI, as they go on years-long marketing tours of consumer products. Venture capitalists, being malignant narcissists, are often public creatures, so we see them often on infinite road shows, the podcast circuit, conferences, in the media, on social media and in their various blogs. For example, Marc Andreessen’s literally non stop presence in the public eye, the sty in mine.
Despite our seeming knowledge of what is going on, we have massive areas here where we just don’t know what is going on, and people need to realize that there is an overwhelming amount of information on venture capital that we need to have, but don’t. As a body, venture capital is slippery, able to move in and out of thousands of financial vehicles, able to hide and conceal technological development, and able to evade investigative inquiry, while possessing global networks of factories, labs and their famous underground bunkers.
One of the reasons that activism against venture capital has been less successful in moderating them, as opposed to the comparatively better success with moderating tech giants, is because VC is not publicly traded and huge parts of their portfolio, at any given moment, are also not publicly traded. So they are simply not submitted to the same level of regulation and process and public disclosure. In this post I will touch on a few areas that I would VERY MUCH like some insight into, but that we don’t have; my hope is that you will realize that there are HUGE surface areas of the venture capitalist footprint that we just don’t know. And yet, this knowledge is related to THE CHARACTER of venture capital, which we CAN see the outlines of through this lens.
Please consider *FAR FROM* ALL STARTUPS GET THE LIMELIGHT TREATMENT; venture capitalists are exceptional marketers and they have their slew of consumer startups that get all of the lights, while being able to control and suppress information about other parts of their portfolios. A major mechanism of this is the “stealth startup” — startups that are founded and funded in secrecy, and only come out later, if at all. A great recent example of this is Castilion, a startup making long-range hypersonic missiles, that has been in “stealth” since being founded in 2022, and recently came out of a stealth through a small article in industry publication TechCrunch. Castilion of course being out from war criminal firm a16z, behind much of the build-out of lethal weapons startups by Silicon Valley.
There are hundreds of startups working in controversial areas of weapons production, biotech and artificial intelligence that we have absolutely no knowledge of and no way to discover, particularly with the lack of investigative journalism about the tech industry; the ongoing collapse of the liberal media while the right-wing media outlets created by venture capitalists thrive, and they have created a media circuit which they entirely control. The publication that perhaps has the most information about venture capital — because it is their pet publication and the VC and tech class are the subscribers of it and it contains almost exclusively uncritical coverage — costs $400/year and is virtually unknown to anyone outside of the industry.
This capture of the media has been accomplished over decades of squashing the independent press, gaining media monopolies, maintenance of “in-industry” publication and firms, bribery and so on. Most of the tech reporters have always been on venture capital payroll in some way or another, for example, TechCrunch historically has made most of its money from sponsorship from startups, ads and event exhibitions, etc. Their money all comes from venture capital. Same today in The Information. Just massive conflicts of financial interest when it comes to getting any serious journalism done. Even The Intercept was funded by tech billionaire PayPal Mafia money, and you should go check how many times they’ve mentioned Andreessen Horowitz, the world’s biggest and most dangerous venture capital firm, in the entirety of the publication (spoiler alert: it fits on a hand).
While we can get aggregate amounts on how much a startup has raised from venture firms via industry database Crunchbase, we don’t know *how much each firm itself contributed*. In most cases, multiple VC firms “go in a round” for a particular startup — and it can be up to six or more entities. One investor is the “lead”, bringing the largest amount of money and coordinating the rest of the money. Venture capitalists spend a lot of time getting the money together — and their role as orchestrators of capital is often neglected, the other end of the shiny startup that comes out as a result of this process. One MAJOR lack of visibility we have is into In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. They rarely announce the amount of their participation in funding startups. While In-Q-Tel, amazingly, openly and publicly lists the *120 AI startups* it has funded on its website, it is, obviously, the CIA. Traditionally a secretive motherfucker.
The other thing is that, again, they all have fucking underground bunkers, they have all kinds of research labs in the fucking desert and shit, they have massive amounts of land they have acquired in New Zealand, Honduras, Nigeria, California, Hawaii and others. The LAND footprint of the venture capital net is almost entirely ignored, even though property and land holdings are a consistent result of venture capital accumulation.
What the FUCK are you building and doing in your secret labs and your bunkers you sick fucks? We have no inspection body into aanyyyyy of this shit, and their status, wealth and power, means that they can quite literally do anything they want; after all, they are spawning tons of weapons startups and just literally handing startup psychopaths money to build missiles. Peter Thiel conducted unregulated medical experiments for herpes vaccine in St Kitts, and it received a lot of push back for being, of course, unethical as fuck. And these are people who push seriously for massive “deregulation” of medical development, who are actively working to attain zones where they can do “consent-only” medical development.
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We lack a reasonable sense of the full extent of the venture capital financial body. We have some visibility into the major funds, the brand-name funds like Andreessen Horowitz. In addition to these big blue chips, many of the major venture capitalists fund startups through their own investment vehicles, and those are left out of the picture of funding. Sometimes these are full funds — like Sam Altman’s Apollo Projects. Venture capitalists provide funding to OTHER venture funds — for example, Marc Andreessen’s funding of Pronomos Capital, the main firm responsible for the ongoing plot to create sovereign billionaire cities all over the world. They often invest personally in startups, and other than Peter Thiel, because of the limelight on him, this is not tracked, and is then left out of the full picture of the venture firm. As this machine continues to produce more and more rich venture capitalists, they are personally major drivers of venture funding OUTSIDE of their core firms. Marc Andreessen and his cronies, for example, created the “California Forever” company in order to engage in a secretive, aggressive and legally coercive land grab in Solano County, which was able to gain a majority land ownership in the region before anyone knew about it.
Holy shit.
Then add to that their family foundations of various kinds, their trusts, the trusts of their family members, the investments of the family and friends, fuck, I don’t know, non-profits, these people do all kinds of rich criminal bullshit. The financial footprint and investing footprint of the venture capitalists expands a great deal through this lens, beyond the one specific vehicle of the main firm. Their “main” funds, are only one of the financial vehicles they operate out of. But they control many more financial vehicles, invest in funds, create “side funds”, make personal investments, give financial gifts, establish foundations, have their money invested back into tech by financial managers, and it just goes on and on and on, and at any given venture fund of enough size, the partners are ALL engaging in these practices. So the venture firm itself is not only spinning up gigantic quantities of startups but actually spinning up many, many, many other financial vehicles and investment vehicles.
In addition to just highlighting the lack of the full picture here, I want to point out something germane to the CHARACTER of the venture capital, implicated here: the great fluidity of the venture capital organism, that is regularly enacting itself through not just the startups you hear about, but a whole other level of capital development, land purchase, and extensions of capital. I think of the venture capital system as more of a large net/network, that can and does infinitely spin up financial vehicles. In fact, that is a core competency and one of the reasons they are so successful.
The idea of venture capital as being, uniformly, a specific set of venture firms and their investments, cuts out a material reality where these financial trajectories and conspiracies are much more complex, diffuse, flexible, secretive and intertwined than generally believed. Through these, most of the venture capitalists in the Valley are all connected together, but in particular, networks are maintained around core players: I.e., the infinite number of connections between Peter Thiel and his best friend, Marc Andreessen. When you look at the constant, repeated, shared, financial propulsion over time, you see that entities that appear to be separate, that are MADE to look separate, and people that are proposed to have different beliefs and be part of different organizations or trajectories, are NOT.
The venture capital financial ECOSYSTEM is built with the major firms as their groundswells, but this is a constellation of financial instruments that actually adds up to what we think of as venture capital.
This also makes it easy for them to move people around in their financial conspiracies from vehicle to vehicle, particularly in cases where there is some kind of scandal. For example, when the CEO of Github resigned in disgrace after an investigation in 2014, he was quickly moved to another part of the Andreessen Horowitz portfolio: Oculus. Whose founder is now leading Anduril, the biggest a16z weapons company. And so on. The permeability speaks to the presence of the venture capital *network* as the relevant unit of study.
Much as I often say that we must think in terms of venture capital and not in terms of startups, but encompassing them, it is also true that we must understand the character of venture capital as a COLLECTION of financial vehicles, that is grounded in the venture firm itself but extends the power and reach of the firm and its partners, beyond typical understandings. There is a huge need to track and investigate the total capital footprint, land footprint, development footprint. We just honestly don’t have a great sense here of the totality of what is going on and if what we see in the public is just the tip of the iceberg, there’s a lot more iceberg to go.