Further I don't think that making it easier to get involved is helping. The ideas of incubators and demo days and all that kind of stuff means really well. But it's along a faulty line of thinking IMO. It goes like this: making it easier to start a company will get more people involved and increase dealflow and that'll increase successful outcomes.
The problem is that as many people have said, tenacity or stubbornness or gumption are highly valued for founding a company. There's the assumption that bringing more people into the startup ecosystem won't substantially change the demographics and thus the statistically likely outcomes. Making it easier doesn't cause everyone to have less gumption but it does lower the bar which allows people with less in and that lowers it on average.
Changing the demographics like that seems to be somewhat self-defeating in a way. It just increases the pool of candidates from which the VC has to successfully winnow down to the ones he/she thinks have the best odds of going ballistic. The game is harder, not easier.
I think a large part of the problem is that the country/world as a whole doesn't change fast enough. In order for a VC to bag a 1000x return it's got to be a national or global scale company. For that to happen the whole world or a substantial fraction thereof must learn about the company and want to avail themselves of the products or services. That's a few billion people you've got to convince; these companies are largely consumer-oriented as of late. But human beings only spend so much leisure time learning about new things to do or buy or what-have-you. It's very, very difficult to convince the whole friggin world to change within the roughly 10 year timeframe of a particular VC fund.
Investing in companies which need more money to have a reasonable chance at success sounds really dumb until you analyze the situation a bit. In those cases, money might well be the real limitation rather than the entire world. As such a VC might have a little more control over the outcome and that's an edge.
The problem is that as many people have said, tenacity or stubbornness or gumption are highly valued for founding a company. There's the assumption that bringing more people into the startup ecosystem won't substantially change the demographics and thus the statistically likely outcomes. Making it easier doesn't cause everyone to have less gumption but it does lower the bar which allows people with less in and that lowers it on average.
Changing the demographics like that seems to be somewhat self-defeating in a way. It just increases the pool of candidates from which the VC has to successfully winnow down to the ones he/she thinks have the best odds of going ballistic. The game is harder, not easier.
I think a large part of the problem is that the country/world as a whole doesn't change fast enough. In order for a VC to bag a 1000x return it's got to be a national or global scale company. For that to happen the whole world or a substantial fraction thereof must learn about the company and want to avail themselves of the products or services. That's a few billion people you've got to convince; these companies are largely consumer-oriented as of late. But human beings only spend so much leisure time learning about new things to do or buy or what-have-you. It's very, very difficult to convince the whole friggin world to change within the roughly 10 year timeframe of a particular VC fund.
Investing in companies which need more money to have a reasonable chance at success sounds really dumb until you analyze the situation a bit. In those cases, money might well be the real limitation rather than the entire world. As such a VC might have a little more control over the outcome and that's an edge.