Relevant thoughts on venture outcomes moving further and further into the tails:
John Loeber 🎢 (@johnloeber)
I've been thinking and talking about this a lot
Historically when you saw $1B+ liquidity events in Silicon Valley, everyone won -- early investors, employees, etc. You'd have lots of these little events and they'd feed the whole ecosystem.
In the next year, we'll see the biggest liquidity events ever -- OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX (X/xAI) going public for 10X+ of what had ever been imagined as possible before.
But the wealth generation is remarkably concentrated: there's not a single pre-seed or seed fund in any of these companies. A very small number of larger investors will win big.
Even though the ecosystem is going to generate more wealth than ever -- answering all the 2022-era questions of where the returns will come from -- most firms will be without returns.
This windfall will create many new rich individuals; a whole new cohort of angel investors. But as insiders to the big labs, they will be more jaded about software than angels of the past, since ~every startup will effectively be on the roadmap of the big labs as we approach AGI.
=> We'll probably see a thinning of the number of professional venture investors as the power law gets even more aggressively skewed. Only larger funds will be able to capture ever further-out tails. And I'd expect that the new generation of angels will invest much more outside the traditional domain of software. It's going to be a good time to work in the capital-intensive world of atoms.
— https://nitter.net/johnloeber/status/2032704375135805806#m