<story><title>Picking Winners: A Framework for Venture Capital Investment</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04229</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chroem-</author><text>I feel like venture capital is a major choke point in our current implementation of capitalism, where &amp;quot;the market will decide&amp;quot; is really a euphemism for &amp;quot;a small handful of extremely wealthy investors will decide.&amp;quot;  We&amp;#x27;re paying a massive opportunity cost on all of those ideas that don&amp;#x27;t ever reach the market because VC&amp;#x27;s don&amp;#x27;t think they&amp;#x27;re easy money.&lt;p&gt;A good way to resolve this would be to reform the accredited investor laws into something more meritocratic.  Instead of needing to own one million dollars in assets, there ought to be some sort of knowledge-based competency exam so that regular people can invest in ideas they think are worthwhile.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tibbetts</author><text>If you want to increase good ideas getting to market, fund basic science, not startups. VCs might not be picking exactly the right companies, but it is hard to argue there isn&amp;#x27;t enough private investment capital for high growth startups. The real missing link is support for new ideas long before they are startups.</text></comment>
<story><title>Picking Winners: A Framework for Venture Capital Investment</title><url>https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04229</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chroem-</author><text>I feel like venture capital is a major choke point in our current implementation of capitalism, where &amp;quot;the market will decide&amp;quot; is really a euphemism for &amp;quot;a small handful of extremely wealthy investors will decide.&amp;quot;  We&amp;#x27;re paying a massive opportunity cost on all of those ideas that don&amp;#x27;t ever reach the market because VC&amp;#x27;s don&amp;#x27;t think they&amp;#x27;re easy money.&lt;p&gt;A good way to resolve this would be to reform the accredited investor laws into something more meritocratic.  Instead of needing to own one million dollars in assets, there ought to be some sort of knowledge-based competency exam so that regular people can invest in ideas they think are worthwhile.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ojbyrne</author><text>Minor point - you can also be an accredited investor if you &amp;quot;have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 combined income if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year.&amp;quot; [1]&lt;p&gt;That feels somewhat more &amp;quot;meritocratic&amp;quot; to me.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Accredited_investor#United_States&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Accredited_investor#United_Sta...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>