To me, a big part of the problem is that investors are all trying to find the next super unicorn to make their fund numbers work out, so there’s a built-in incentive to bet on big visions even when they’re likely to be bullshit. This gets compounded by the fact that you don’t actually have to build a sustainable company, you just have to pump it long enough to get your investment return courtesy of the public markets and then who cares about the company’s fate? See, for example, Groupon. I distinctly remember doing a startup incubator back when it was about to IPO and everyone was breathlessly encouraging us to be more like Groupon.

The VC model is fundamentally susceptible to this stuff.