Yeah, I don't know how it is for everybody, but I'm reminded of the line, "A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip." When I've been at places that have taken VC money, there's always a deep, pervasive awareness that the deal is "exit or bust", and that every investor call should include good news in up-and-to-the-right form. At least with us, they didn't have to do much explicit yanking of the chain. Probably for the same reason that Fat Tony doesn't often have to remind people that he expects to be paid on time.

the generation of companies that defeat these vc companies will bootstrap, and use things like remote and chatgpt to make it work.

The yanking doesn’t even stop then; it just changes who is pulling. Various institutional investors are all over Google to do better than it is. Google makes billions of dollars a year. More. More. More.

Google has founders shares. Everyone always like to blame Wall Street. Management listens to them not because they have board seats but because they want to keep the equity based comp party going.