World Eaters : How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy

An urgent and illuminating perspective that offers a window into how the most pernicious aspects of the venture capital ethos is reaching all areas of our lives, into everything from healthcare to food to entertainment to the labor market and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

The venture capital playbook is causing unique harms to society. And in World Eaters, Catherine Bracy offers a window into the pernicious aspects of VC and shows us how its bad practices are bleeding into all industries, undermining the labor and housing markets and posing unique dangers to the economy at large. VC’s creates a wide, powerful wake that impacts the average consumer just as much as it does investors and entrepreneurs.

In researching this book, Bracy has interviewed founders, fund managers, contract and temp workers in the gig economy, and Limited Partners across the landscape. She learned that the current VC model is not a good fit for the majority of start-ups, and yet, there are too few options for early stage funding outside of VC dollars. And while there are some alternative paths for sustainable, responsible growth, without the help of regulators, there is not much motivation to drive investors from the roulette table that is venture capital.

World Eaters is an eye-opening account of the ways that the values of contemporary venture capital hurt founders, consumers, and the market. Bracy’s clear-eyed debut is a must-read for fans of Winners Take All, Super Pumped, and Brotopia, an appealing “insider / outsider” perspective on Silicon Valley, and those who are fascinated to look under the hood and learn why the modern economy is not working for most of us.

The venture capital playbook, which has become dogma not just in tech but increasingly across the entire economy, causes unique harms to society, the economy, democracy, and in the lives of everyday people. Like late-stage capitalism on steroids, it calls for companies to seek total domination and to do it as fast as possible. What follows is a cascade of negative outcomes for society as a whole and the economy at large. Uber and Lyft steamrolling regulators. Facebook and YouTube relying on a revenue model that optimises for misinformation and radicalisation. The intractable diversity problem in the tech industry. Worker exploitation. These threats on their own are bad enough. But the practices of the venture capital world have begun to bleed into the rest of the economy creating staggering inequality, vanishing competition, and a redefinition of American entrepreneurship that shoehorns many founders with good ideas into an ill-fitting VC model, which can push their startups to failure before they even get off the ground. Luckily, it isn t all doom and gloom. There are investors and founders, like Indie.vc and the companies aligned with the Zebra Movement, who have proven that another path is possible. But how do we create the conditions so that their version of capitalism - one that fosters competition, innovation, sustainability, and inclusive growth - can thrive? What regulatory guardrails do we need to implement to prevent not just the worst behaviours of Facebook and Amazon but the rise of the rest? Readers will come away with deeper insights into the urgent decisions we must make about how to regulate tech. There is a future where a growing tech sector is welcomed as a boon for everyone rather than a threat to our economy, our public health and democracy as a whole. But to get there, we need to reckon with venture capital and the corrupted system it has created.