Bubble Indemnity

When Silicon Valley venture capitalists get themselves into image trouble, it’s usually because they’ve been too candid with their low estimate of other people’s intelligence. For example, after India recently prevented Facebook from offering free Internet service there, Marc Andreessen suggested in a tweet that the subcontinent might be better off had it remained under colonial administration. It’s much less common for V.C.s to soil their own nests in public. So it came as something of a surprise when Chamath Palihapitiya — Sri Lankan war refugee, early Facebook employee, investor in Slack and Box, part owner of the Golden State Warriors — told Vanity Fair in March that if we are in fact in the early stages of a second tech collapse, venture capitalists have only their own mediocre, clubby selves to blame. They should, he said, “focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious. Right now we haven’t done enough of that, and the result is that most of the things we’ve funded are mostly crap and largely worthless.”