Is VC Bashing Passe?
News that Evan William is taking venture money for Twitter got me thinking. Is VC bashing finally passe? — We went through a period in the late 1990s during which people lusted after VCs and stalked them at conferences. It was as if people believed …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece caps a running debate in the corpus about whether venture capital still earns its equity. Mark Evans floated a new VC model back in January 2006, and by March 2007 TechCrunch was asking whether a reckoning was coming for venture capitalists. The day before this post, Evan Williams himself weighed in on why founders take or refuse VC in his own essay on why VC.
What changes with this story is the signal: Williams, one of the most prominent voices of the lean, anti-VC web era after Blogger, is confirmed to be raising venture money for Twitter per a VentureBeat interview cited at the time. Kedrosky reads that reversal as evidence that the post-bubble disdain for VCs — which replaced the late-1990s conference-stalking enthusiasm — is fading.
First-order effects
- Twitter gains institutional backing and the pressure that comes with it, moving from a hobby-funded side project under Williams to a venture-scale bet.
- Kedrosky's argument hands cover to other founders who had publicly distanced themselves from VCs: taking the money is reframed from selling out to growing up.
Second-order effects
- Venture firms competing for scarce breakout consumer-web properties like Twitter face renewed pricing pressure on valuations, echoing the courtship dynamics of the late 1990s described in the piece.
- Rivals and adjacent commentary — including the earlier reckoning debate — are forced to update their framing: the question shifts from whether startups need VC to which model of VC they accept.
Third-order effects
- If founder sentiment swings back toward courtship as it has here, the industry re-enters the familiar boom-phase pattern where capital chases habitually-used services before monetization is proven — the same cycle the late-1990s comparison warns about.
- The durability of the anti-VC ethos was always tied to cheap infrastructure and early revenue; its erosion suggests structural dependence of the web startup ecosystem on venture cycles rather than independence from them.
The trend: Startup attitudes toward venture capital move in sentiment cycles, and the willingness of marquee founders like Evan Williams to take VC again marks the turn from post-bubble skepticism back toward courtship.