<story><title>Entrepreneurs are the New Labor</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepreneurs-are-the-new-labor-part-i/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Investors have won?  What?  Founders have never had more power relative to investors than they do now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinceguidry</author><text>There are three parts to this essay, He doesn&apos;t explain this point adequately until the end of the second. But you still won&apos;t get what he&apos;s saying unless you&apos;re already a follower and have digested the ideas in his blog.&lt;p&gt;Venkat trades in big, hairy concepts. The one he&apos;s using here is &lt;i&gt;legibility&lt;/i&gt;. It&apos;s when information is structured in rigorous ways, defined by those using it as an instrument of power. It is the primary tool governments use against the people. An example is making every person have a current address listed on their driver&apos;s license. Governments stack these legibility requirements up so as to control commerce and extract rents. (taxes)&lt;p&gt;Venkat&apos;s argument is that investors won the game by forcing founders to be legible, reducing the information advantage they enjoyed historically. While it may look like founders have never had more power, in reality they&apos;ve lost a crucial ability, to hoard critical inside information. It&apos;s really the only advantage they have, without it, they&apos;re at the mercy of investors. The ability to dictate terms is really inconsequential, more a function of fashion than actual power. Who cares if you get 2x the money you should have gotten? With information asymmetry, founders could easily wrangle 100x.</text></comment>
<story><title>Entrepreneurs are the New Labor</title><url>http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepreneurs-are-the-new-labor-part-i/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Investors have won?  What?  Founders have never had more power relative to investors than they do now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>7Figures2Commas</author><text>Even if you assume that this is generally true, it doesn&apos;t mean that increased founder &quot;power&quot; has really come at the expense of investors.&lt;p&gt;The coordinated money printing by central banks around the world has injected trillions of dollars into the global economy, and the greatest beneficiaries of that have been  a) firms in the financial sector and b) individuals who have significant exposure to financial markets.&lt;p&gt;This, of course, has a direct and indirect impact on Silicon Valley:&lt;p&gt;1. It&apos;s easier to raise a venture fund when LPs are doing well. Fed action has incentivized investment in riskier asset classes. Appetite for risk is broad-based and not concentrated in venture capital, but venture capital has certainly benefited.
2. Thanks to QE Infinity, the fortunes of many publicly-traded Silicon Valley companies have risen with the stock market and the IPO window is open. A handful of tech companies even sport 1999-like PE ratios. This has created enormous wealth in the Valley, much of it liquid, which has produced an angel (and super angel) boom.&lt;p&gt;Founders, particularly those with a track record and/or traction, may be able to negotiate better terms today than they could have even a few years ago, but that&apos;s largely because the dollars being invested in their companies are so cheap.&lt;p&gt;Who would you rather be: an entrepreneur who thinks he&apos;s getting a good deal because he got a higher valuation and retained more control, or the investor who gets to invest with Monopoly money?</text></comment>