Maybe Silicon Valley is the worst way to fund inventions except for all the others

See This Column Is Dedicated to Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists by Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times. Excerpts:

"there’s a risk in overvilifying the machinery of Silicon Valley based on its noisiest personages in its most frothy times. And while there are lots of flaws in the V.C. model, I also wonder if it’s a bit like that quip about democracy attributed to Churchill — maybe Silicon Valley is the worst way to fund inventions except for all the others."

"Silicon Valley has for decades been among the country’s most valuable economic assets. Along with research funding and other subsidies by the government, it’s one of the primary reasons the United States maintains global technological supremacy. It has also produced genuine advances that have improved our lives; from Zoom to Slack and even to gig-economy companies like DoorDash, the entire work-at-home apparatus that held up much of the economy through the pandemic was built on the back of venture capital."

"To address some of humanity’s biggest challenges — climate change most pressingly — we will need venture capitalists to fund the best and riskiest ideas. It is V.C. firms that are financing research into next-generation batteries, new forms of energy and other ways to mitigate the worst effects of global warming.

Among Valley investors, Twitter-addled V.C.s like Sacks and the angel investor Jason Calacanis are far from the biggest names in town. Though they have a large presence online, they mostly invest millions or tens of millions of dollars at the earliest stages of companies; they are hardly emblematic of the Valley’s largest venture firms, which have raised and invested tens of billions of dollars over the years."

"inferring the attitudes of the venture capital industry from its presence on Twitter “is like watching ‘The Real Housewives of Orange County’ and deciding that that’s how wives in Orange County act.”"

"One reason Silicon Valley works is that it collects expertise and institutional knowledge, learns from failures, and feeds those insights to succeeding generations of companies. That sort of guidance is exactly why many start-ups are likely to survive their bank’s blowup."