Funny what happens when you have stupid amounts of institutional money pour into a sector for 15 years.

I think there was less money in the sector for the first 10 years or so of YC than there was during the dot-com era, so I don't know that it's true that the opening of funding markets to first-time founders is a consequence of too much VC funding.

YC exists because a dude made it big in the initial dot-com bubble. With every subsequent wave of windfalls, you get a larger pool of founders who struck gold and now want to play investor, and over a sustained length of time with no bust, that leads to a pretty founder-friendly ecosystem for funding. But the whole arrangement relies on there being ample institutional money available and no downturns sips from juicebro

I don't disagree with that diagnosis but think that's more a question of how money within the VC sector is allocated, not how much money is being allocated to VC in the first place. Like you, I see a lot of money going to people wearing cargo shorts and brightly colored sneakers and then getting plowed back into the startup casino. I'm just saying, that money used to go to country club investment bankers; it didn't --- at least until recently --- get diverted from the broader economy.