VC is just a lazy boogieman. Facebook IPO'ed 13 years ago. I dont think it would be different if was owned by the other boogie man private equity, owned entirely by Zuckerberg, or publicly traded.
This is a response that lacks imagination and depth of understanding of capital markets.
No, VC money is what enables the entire multi-billion-dollar loss-leading front end effort that creates the network that is sold in an IPO.
No one else will take that level of risk, and the first eight years of its existence wouldn’t occur without VC money.
You’ll also notice how I didn’t say VC money was the problem. That was a long list of very specific qualifiers I wrote that you strawmanned very efficiently.
I just dont think it is accurate to put recent behavior at the feet of VC debt funding. FB would have been slower in growth, but had significant revenue long before IPO. The most objected behaviors of FB occurred post IPO.
Again this response seems to miss the point. Without VC funding, there is no Facebook. The company is a variant of companies that lose money by pretending to not need profit for many years and can only exist because they are/were VC funded.
I think that's just rephrasing the same argument. If social media weren't free, then you would be the customer and those VC-backed corps would be serving you. Social media being free means they're not serving you because you are not the customer. The "free" part and the "VC-backed" part aren't the problem, it's the incentive structure created by combining the two.
VC-backed corporations masquerading as public services to gain user networks they can later monetize is the problem.