I really want a lot of venture capital investors to work on their self-esteem. After a few decades of supporting and mentoring New York City’s tech community, I hope I’m credible when I say I care a lot about how it thrives. So one of the most disappointing—and frankly surprising—things I’ve seen lately is how many investors in the greatest city in the world have been lowering themselves, sucking up for approval from a cohort of Silicon Valley tycoons who hate our city, hate our values, and want us to fail. I’m furious because there are so many good people and good ideas here that deserve to thrive, and aren’t getting the chance. Why would anyone sit by while outsiders put our community down, only to let those same outsiders profit off us when we succeed anyway? In fairness, I’m not talking about all of our city’s investors. Some are content to keep their heads down and hope the worst of the West Coast doesn’t notice them. But imagine if our other civic institutions worked this way: the Knicks timidly stepping onto the court and standing back while opponents charge the rim, or the Liberty letting the other team fire off shots unchallenged. This is not the New York City I know. What real New Yorker, when faced with a taxi cab headed toward them in a crosswalk, would say, “Oh, sorry, I was going to be walking here, but you go right ahead and run me over, good sir!” It’s pathetic, and it’s bad for business. Our city is watching, and our kids are too. HQ Zero I’ve been lucky enough to watch brilliant friends build innovative businesses here, having each other’s backs and catalyzing a community that lifted up the city we all love. And then, over and over, we watched our lawmakers line up to give billions in handouts to West Coast tycoons who’d already won the game. Even when the community stopped those giveaways, the companies still hired just as many people here as they’d promised—because people want to work in New York City. Our tech community's own data shows that, while the Bay Area lost tech jobs over the last 5 years, we've grown by 23%. We never needed to bribe these guys in the first place. (Unsurprisingly, many of the same people who once demanded access to New York taxpayers’ pockets started trashing our city and its most vulnerable residents the moment the freebies dried up.) The lesson is simple, for the public sector and private investors alike: we don’t need to buy the love of people who hate New York, or act as if we’re inferior and desperate to import an economy from elsewhere. We don’t do that shit here. We don’t need to be thirsty. We can invest in the people who already love this city enough to build the future here. We are, you may learn, second to none. Fortunately, we’ve replaced the timid, backwards-looking leadership of the past with people who believe in our ability to lead, build, and invent a better future. It’s no surprise that New Yorkers are more optimistic than they’ve been in decades, or that we have the lowest crime in recorded history—nor that the people who hate our city are lying about all of it. The very same tycoons who felt entitled to taxpayer handouts now feel entitled to treat our investors as feeder funds for their own goals. There is no future in funneling deals to firms trying to undermine our entire civic ecosystem. Building value, having values I’m still committed to the radical social ethos that you should be able to build tech companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that founders and employees can get fabulously wealthy while workers are paid fairly, that investors earn a solid return, and that everybody pays an appropriate tax rate to the city that made it all possible. I don’t care if it makes me a radical to think those opportunities shouldn’t be hoarded by the same three or four predatory jerks who can’t stop trashing New York. It’s no secret that the rise of authoritarianism and bald-faced bigotry among Silicon Valley investors has led them to demonize our city. What’s almost too much to bear is watching people I’ve respected in New York look the other way while those leaders embrace rank misogyny, blatant antisemitism, unapologetic Islamophobia, and profound racism—so virulent that the most powerful venture capital firm in the world hired a partner on the basis that he strangled an unarmed Black man to death. I’m grateful that many of you tell me privately that you object and still hold onto your moral compass, which makes it all the more heartbreaking to watch so many go silent publicly. Where is your self-respect? Because I’ll be honest: they are laughing at you for debasing yourselves in front of them, and they enjoy shitting on the city you call home. You should do work you’re proud of, that you feel good telling your family about, and that you’re excited to share with your community. You should also do the math. A tiny handful of firms control the vast majority of late-stage funds, and you are not going to differentiate yourself by being a mindless feeder fund for the same 10 cancer capital firms as everyone else. If your only edge is competing on who can kiss Andreessen’s ass the most, you’re already fucked, kids. Look at how they already have to tap-dance—calling things “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence” just to prove their fealty. How long until you’re asked to publicly rename your work, or tell a big lie about your city, just to stay in the room? I’ve heard too many people in this town claim they don’t have any power, that their only job is returning capital to LPs. All you have to do is the simplest thing in the world: refuse to play along. By contrast, if you bet on this wonderful community, connect to the next generation of innovators, and fight for the future instead of against it, there is limitless opportunity here. If you have to put it in a way your LPs can understand, explain that there is huge alpha in going the way that a16z is not. Call it “Anti-authoritarian Dynamism”. Explain that you’re going to strangle their deal flow, since founders of color and next-gen innovators don’t want to talk to the firms who hate New York City and hire killers. Tell them you’re choking off the supply chain of capital to the office where Daniel Penny works. Side with the founders, not the funders Just in case you don’t already know: Zohran Mamdani is your best friend. He wants the city to win, and our businesses to thrive. And those West Coast VCs who act deranged when you mention his name? They want your city destroyed, and when it's not, they lie and say that it already has been destroyed. Pick the side of your neighbors and your community, and speak up for the founders and entrepreneurs building the opportunities you want to be part of. Just as importantly, speak up for yourself. It’s not viable in the long term for every outcome—and the small number of possible exits for your portfolio—to be controlled by the same handful of gatekeepers. I used to love helping friends turn cool new products into companies that provided good jobs; now that’s virtually impossible because the scale has gotten so absurd, and so few players decide who gets to participate. When I talk to people who are still early in their tech careers, the only names they know in the investor world are the usual suspects — not yours. They’ve never heard of your firms, of many of New York's most thoughtful and interesting and supportive investors, and they’re downright skeptical when I tell them to work with NYC-based investors instead of making a trip to Sand Hill Road. That all changes the moment New York’s tech leaders put their power behind an alternative narrative. Simply saying “we are here, we exist, and we are not a satellite of the same tired agenda you’ve been hearing from Silicon Valley for years” would be hugely valuable for the entire New York City tech ecosystem. It's going to be especially resonant after the entire country just picked a political path that looks a lot like New York City's values — and is based on rejecting Big Tech's values. It would also, I expect, do wonders for your soul after years of enduring the quiet indignities of watching some horrid people chip away at your self-esteem. Now, I know most of you aren’t inclined to go to war. That’s fine — you can still be nice. Jalen Brunson is really nice! Karl-Anthony Towns is really nice! Sabrina Ionescu is nice! But they really like to win, and they don’t take shit from anyone. You have to decide if you want to win, or if you want to get bullied on the playground by the people who actually have their heads in the game. As a repeat founder who spends my time with makers — both the next generation of creators, and the people who’ve built great companies before them — I know where my loyalty lies. Those of us who build things know who we are. Those of us who love New York City are having one of the great moments of the modern era. Do you know who you are? Are you going to join us?

I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture. This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words. This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide. And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape” or even using the 🍇 emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said. To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA” for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics. But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm. The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop. You Were Not Born With These Constraints One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that. The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google. Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity” to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants. Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.) Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they? Fuck the Algorithm Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born. The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!” Okay, what if they do? What if they do. Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates. (And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.) If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.) If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds. It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive”. The response is simple: For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean. Don’t work backwards from what the algorithm wants or what a platform permits. Build a presence on every platform you can, even the ones where you have fewer followers or where you’re harder to find. Tell your audience that your speech being free matters more than corporate convenience. Keep saying it, and keep it positive: independence gets them better art, better information, and more connected communities. Build alliances with other artists, activists and people who share your values, and let them know you’re going to start sharing your work uncensored. Start releasing your work uncensored and see where the platforms push back. (You may be surprised: sometimes you were censoring yourself in anticipation of limits that weren’t even there.) If a platform does try to limit your reach or expression, make a LOT OF NOISE about it. Tell the press, rally your alliance, and spread the word on your other platforms, using the moment to build audience and raise support there. Get others to amplify the parts of your work that don’t violate platform policy, so the controversy drives people to the rest. Find the others pushing back on algorithmic control of expression, and raise and praise their work when they do the same. If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways. I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive” to die.

We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore. There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one. I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation. Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it. How Venture Capital became Cancer Capital I’ll be breaking these points down in further detail, but just to begin framing the concept, I’ll lay out the core idea here in some bullet points (so that you’re not tempted to run this whole thing through an LLM): Venture capital was only supposed to be a tiny segment of the overall capital market, but it has expanded to become the primary form of funding that new companies consider — it was never the only way, and it didn’t used to be the default one VC was meant to be a small percentage of overall investment because it represents the high-risk, high-reward part of a portfolio; to be healthy, most of a portfolio — or most of an economy — needs to focus on assets that are more stable and predictable. But a cancer grows from a cell that a body needs in small, healthy amounts, and that turns deadly when it grows without limit until it harms, or even kills, its host. As regulations have gotten looser in recent years, a handful of venture capital firms have become “do everything” funds that combine private equity with their existing VC businesses, and expand to manage massive stockpiles of tens of billions of dollars The 1% of VC firms that get this big stop being exposed to the risk in their own investments at all — when you collect 2% a year to manage $50 billion, that’s a billion dollars landing in your pocket annually whether any company you funded lives or dies. Those firms also stop legally even being venture capital firms, making them unaccountable to markets, founders, or the law — and that’s how they become “Cancer Capital” Meanwhile, the 99% of “normal” VCs don’t have the power or funding of the Cancer Capital firms, but are forced to play on the field that those firms define, even if they don’t like the way they do business Since the Cancer Capital firms have become so powerful, the overall balance of power between founders and VCs has flipped; instead of founders having a company that VCs would try to fund, now VCs publish extremist political manifestos, and “founders” are just the people who are selected to carry out parts of those plans The rest of the world doesn’t know: New founders and workers entering the tech industry are unaware that Cancer Capital has taken over, so many are still trying to play by the old rules, and can’t figure out why their ideas are being pushed into serving the goals of the Cancer Capital firms Politicians and media still look at VC as if it works like it did 10 or 20 years ago, and cheer them on like they’re funding job creation or enabling new companies to grow, when their primary goal is concentrating power and wealth into the hands of the Cancer Capital tycoons. They keep getting fooled by this, over and over. These days, venture firms are increasingly getting their funds from pension funds and retail retirement accounts, meaning the public (you!) are increasingly holding the bag for the parts of their portfolios that actually have some risk, even if you never intentionally made that choice The shift away from IPOs in the tech industry has also encouraged these Cancer Capital firms to find ways to cash out long before companies ever go public, meaning they can make a massive return off of companies that never make a penny of profit, even if regular investors get screwed by the stock of a company once it actually gets listed on the public stock market. Part of why this has gotten so corrupt is the way the Cancer Capital firms have transformed themselves into their post-VC forms. Because they’re not legally VC firms anymore, they’re free to buy shares directly from founders, or hold unlimited amounts of publicly-traded stock — exactly what they couldn’t do as regular VCs. They can even sell their investment in a company as an asset to another one of their own funds, and then book the increase in value as a profit, all without the company ever having made a penny. Another racket: a company that’s raised a bunch of cash in a funding round can buy out its early investors if they’re one of these post-VCs, so they can get paid off even if their portfolio company has never made a penny in profits or revenues. All of this self-dealing, and the way that they’re isolated from any accountability, has made these firms become more and more shameless in their behavior. Former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O’Farrell publicly called out the firm (a rarity — the company is notoriously vindictive towards those who it decides are disloyal) for what he called its “political infiltration” of AI policy. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and their firm have put $115.3 million into this midterm cycle — nearly double their $63 million in 2024, and more than any other billionaire donor in the country, even including Elon Musk. Molly White, whose Tech Influence Watch tracks this money against FEC filings, shows that a16z alone accounts for more than 20% of all political contributions from the entire cohort of crypto and AI companies it follows. And they’re funneling these funds to candidates in both parties. This is a huge escalation from the tentative baby steps that folks like Zuckerberg were making in the Obama era, working on benign issues like trying to help immigrants. And of course, it gets a lot worse than just their lobbying. As I have frequently noted, Andreessen Horowitz hired a man as a partner at their firm despite his having no background or qualifications in tech, finance, or startups whatsoever. His only discernible qualification was that he had choked my unarmed neighbor Jordan Neely to death on a subway car. This is how brazen, how toxic and destructive, we’ve allowed the industry formerly known as venture capital to become. We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society. And it’s time to act accordingly. Up next: we’ll dive into the specifics of many of the points laid out above, to understand more about how we got here.

The vast majority of the documents people use to do business are really quite poor. Presentations that make your eyes glaze over, memos that are inscrutable or unclear, and all kinds of artifacts that say more about how they were created than whatever message they were ostensibly trying to communicate. It's been one of my great frustrations for years, and a big part of why I wrote Make Better Documents a while ago. That post captured a list of the suggestions I've been giving people for years on how to make better, more effective documents that can actually do work for you, instead of fighting at cross purposes to your larger goals. To my great surprise, that list of suggestions on how to make better documents got a pretty huge response, and a lot of people told me they found it really helpful. So now, I've created a Better Documents skills.md file for people who use LLM tools like Claude to help assist them in creating business documents, to prompt their AI tools to make better documents by default. If you're not familiar, agent skills are simple text files that describe new capabilities or processes that LLMs can take advantage of when carrying out tasks. (They're Markdown files — more proof of how Markdown is taking over the world!) The way this skill works is that it's distilled the broad principles I outlined in that post into a series of 5 tests, covering areas like whether you've properly considered your target audience, whether the overall structure is correct, if you've overdone things with your formatting, and if things are named clearly, and then either generates a new file that follows those rules, or reviews an existing document to make sure it is obeying best practices. It's nothing too fancy, but I've been using it for a while, and shared it with a few friends, and people have told me they found it handy and it's improved some of their routine documents. I'm especially glad that people have found it useful even if they're the kind of folks who would never let an LLM generate a document on their behalf, but do think software tools are useful for things like spell check or grammar check. I see this as being a tool in that kind of category. If you're familiar with skills, the install process is really simple and works just like any other skill. This skill is totally free and open source (if you have improvements, send along a pull request on GitHub, or if you're not a coder type, just email me or hit me up on social media and let me know what fixes/suggestions you've got), so there are no encumbrances or restrictions on its use. I am curious if it's useful to people, especially if you find it handy to use more broadly at a company, so don't be shy to get in touch if you find it valuable. Here's to us all enduring fewer terrible presentations!