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Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Ben Werdmuller posts a follow-up to the Jeffrey Zeldman post (previously) on why the internet is broken. It's deep and thoughtful and gives us a good look inside the VC mindset. There's a logic to the system, but (to my mind) it's a circular, almost maddening logic. VCs need huge profits because 90% of startups fail. This means that startups have to focus on generating traffic and worrying about business models later - they need rapid exponential growth. Worse, "Entire demographics of people have effectively been locked out of venture capital." This in turn makes it hard for startups that focus on sustainability to actually survive, because compared to these wildly growing VC-funded startups, they're slow and expensive. So the only way to succeed is to get VC funding. Are there alternatives that might work? Like lowering costs, focusing on community, that sort of thing?

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Oct 09, 2024 09:40 a.m.

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