Venture Capitalists are Cowards

I was taught that the people who had money to invest must be smarter than me because they had money. So I entered the tech venture capital arena with gusto. Finally I had found my meritocracy. I was promised that rich people would recognize great new ideas and fund them generously. 

I joined Women 2.0, an organization that supported female entrepreneurs getting an equal amount of funding for their companies. Over the decade I was involved with Women 2.0, funding for female founders actually went down from about 6% to 2%. Why was my precious meritocracy giving 98% of their funding to men (and mostly white men at that)?

This was how I learned that venture capital wasn’t given to the best ideas or the most important issues. Venture capital was given to copycat ideas created by teams of men who were already successful financially. Instead of funding new ways to clean plastics out of the ocean or online communities to coordinate care of loved ones–we got dog food after dog food delivery company. While everyone chased ‘facebook: the sequel’ we wasted some of the most incredible technical minds on how to deliver groceries in 15 minutes. 

The Capitalists I met didn’t care about anything that didn’t make them more capital. (The only thing that disqualifies you from being a capitalist is running out of money.) By centering money first and foremost, they have re-ordered our world. Instead of focusing on our relationships, self-actualizing, or quality of life–we are focused on money, money, money. And if you don’t have money, then you don’t matter, so you better get obsessed. 

As soon as you figure out that venture capital isn’t given to the best ideas, you learn it’s all about who knows who. I was told that if you didn’t have family money, then you better make friends with people who did. 

I’m pansexual, meaning that I love people of all gender expressions, not just the ones I can make babies with. I wish the next chapter was about the hot rich lesbians I started hanging out with but that was rare. Since women haven’t legally been able to lead independent financial lives for much longer than I’ve been alive, there are few financially independent women. (Women weren’t allowed to have credit cards without their husband’s signature until the 1970s.)

I thought it was just luck of the draw who got the financial cushion and who had to stress about getting enough to eat. What I didn’t see was that wealth was being diverted from the lower and middle class to the wealthiest 1% intentionally. Capitalists told us that we would all be successful if we weren’t lazy and we believed them. All the time, they’ve been building business models that make them rich at the expense of everyone else. The capitalist were winning while unchecked by the people and politicians.