On venture capital
How venture capital works, whose interests it serves, and what its incentives produce.
About this collection
By Doug Scott with Claude Opus 4.7, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini — all four contributed; Claude Opus 4.7 pulled it together. AI-generated, no human expert review. The frames evaluate the system. The verdicts, where given, are the publication's own. The reader is invited to disagree.
Authorship and review notes
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Featured pieces
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Will Insurance Decide When AI Reshapes Legal Work?
There is a popular and clever theory: that AI adoption in law won’t be gated by whether the technology works…
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Why Lovable Becomes Worthless
There is a specific category of AI startup that looks like a rocket ship right now and is, in fact, a sandcastle at low tide. Lovable is the cleanest example…
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The Race Against Itself — UK fiscal arithmetic, the productivity question, and a small mobile cohort
Cross-category piece. The UK's fiscal arithmetic, on most institutional projections, cannot be closed by tax rises or spending cuts alone. The remaining lever is productivity growth. On current…
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The 33%
Cooper, Woo and Dunkelberg surveyed 2,994 entrepreneurs in 1988. Thirty-three percent rated their probability of success at one hundred percent. They were not failing at probability theory. They were…
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Why Fund Economics Need Overconfident Founders
A typical early-stage venture fund makes about twenty-five investments. Its returns to limited partners depend almost entirely on whether one or two turned out to be extreme outliers. What that math…
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What the Natural Experiment Shows
The US, UK, and EU run variants of the same venture model under different conditions. Comparing the three lets us ask which features of the system are intrinsic to running a venture model at all…
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Both Halves of the Headline Are True
Venture capital is good for society and bad for most founders. Readers who hear that sentence often assume one of the two halves must be wrong. Both are documented in the empirical literature. The…
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Venture Capital Is Good for Society and Bad for Most Founders
Venture capital is good for society and bad for most founders. Both halves are documented in the empirical literature. Most writing about VC handles one half or the other; this piece handles both.
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The Wrong Winners Write the Books
Founder advice is not only survivor-biased. It is filtered toward the survivors most certain that their outcome was repeatable. The classic survivorship filter is well known…
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For Prospective Founders — What the Recruitment Narrative Does Not Say
For a reader weighing whether to enter the venture system as a founder, an early employee, or an investor of personal savings into venture funds. The strongest single argument the publication has on…
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The reality of being a founder — what the data actually says
Most of what is published about being a founder is recruitment material — accurate enough on the survivors…
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The Power Law and What It Forces
Returns to venture investments follow a power-law distribution: a small number of extreme outliers carry the whole. From that single empirical fact, the moral pattern of the venture system…
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VC across the US, UK, and EU — a jurisdictional reference for prospective founders
The operational counterpart to the main analytical piece. Side-by-side comparison of structural features (LP base, founder tax regimes, exit market depth, employee equity treatment…
Deep versions, alternative versions, and engagement-with-critique
The longer-form pieces, the predecessor synthesis, and the publication's engagement with substantive critiques received on this body of work.
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VC: most fail, most suffer, some win lots — does society win or lose?
An open question on venture capital. Seven analytical frames in parallel, evidence labelled by strength, anchored in US/UK/EU as a natural experiment. A short prologue addresses the reader directly…
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From talent to transaction — twenty years inside an accelerator program
The predecessor synthesis on accelerators, useful for readers interested in how accelerators relate to the broader venture-capital ecosystem. Treats acceptance into an accelerator as a structural…
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Common Reactions — VC: substantive critiques and the publication's responses
Six substantive critiques the publication has received on the venture-capital pieces. Where the critique is right, the publication agrees. Where the deep version already treats the point…