How venture capital became the system's answer to an uncomfortable question: what happens when creators don't need permission anymore?
This is not an anti-VC article. I've spent enough time in this industry to know that venture capital is a useful tool — in some cases. This is an observation. A sociological one. About how a financial instrument became an identity, a rite of passage, and — if you look closely enough — a mechanism of control.
I'll start with what I see. Then I'll explain what I think is happening underneath.
The tool became the goal
A hammer is a tool. You use it when you need to drive a nail. You don't celebrate the hammer. You don't announce on LinkedIn that you just acquired a hammer. You don't get invited to conferences because you own one.
Fundraising was supposed to work the same way. You raise money when you need capital to do something you can't do with revenue alone. When the growth opportunity is so large and so time-sensitive that external capital is the rational choice.
But that's not what happened.
Open any tech publication. Count the articles. The majority are about fundraising rounds. Not about products. Not about users. Not about ideas. About money raised. Maddyness, TechCrunch, Sifted — the editorial line is the same everywhere: the fundraise is the news.
Go to any startup event. Who's on stage? The founders who raised. Not the founders who built something that works. Not the ones with 6 million users and no outside capital. The ones with a Series A and a deck.
Look at LinkedIn. A fundraising announcement gets 500 likes. A product insight gets 30. The incentive structure is visible to everyone and questioned by no one.
The fundraise stopped being a tool. It became the product.
Ivan Illich, the Austrian social philosopher, described this exact phenomenon in 1973. In Tools for Conviviality, he argues that institutions — originally designed to serve human needs — eventually cross a threshold where they become self-perpetuating. They create the dependency they claim to resolve. Schools create the need for schools. Hospitals create the need for hospitals. The institution becomes indispensable not because it works, but because it has eliminated the alternatives.
Illich calls this radical monopoly — when a tool becomes so dominant that it erases the possibility of doing without it.
Here's a question I've never heard answered: what is the rationale for raising venture capital when you're a services company? There is none. The economics don't support it. But I know services founders who feel the pressure to raise — because without a round, they feel invisible.
That's not a financial problem. That's an institutional one.
The system recaptures control
Something happened in the last twenty years that terrified the existing order. The cost of creation collapsed.
A kid in a bedroom in Lagos with a $50 keyboard and a cracked copy of FL Studio can make a song, post it on TikTok, and reach 200 million people. No label. No producer. No distributor. No permission.
A teenager in Marseille with a phone and an idea can become a globally recognized creator. No agency. No network. No media training. No one's approval.
A developer in Tunis with a laptop and Claude Code can build a product, ship it, and reach a million users. No VC. No board. No pitch deck. No one between them and the market.
This is genuinely new. For most of human history, creation required permission. You needed a publisher, a label, a patron, a banker, a backer. The internet removed the middleman. AI is removing the last ones.
This should be celebrated. And in many ways, it is. But watch what happens next.
The musician gets big. Within months: a manager appears, then an agency, then a lawyer, then a production company. Each one necessary in some cases. Each one a layer of mediation that the technology had made optional.
The creator goes viral. Within weeks: a talent agency, a brand partnership team, a content strategist, an accountant. The creator who needed no one now has a team of twelve.
The entrepreneur builds something that works. And the first question from every person in the ecosystem is: when are you raising?
I am not saying these services are useless. I am observing a pattern. Every time technology gives individuals the ability to create and distribute value autonomously, a system of intermediation reconstitutes itself around them. The names change. The mechanism doesn't.
Pierre Bourdieu would recognize this immediately. In his work on social and cultural reproduction, Bourdieu showed that power structures don't disappear — they convert. Economic capital converts into social capital, which converts into cultural capital, which converts into symbolic capital. The forms change. The hierarchy remains.
The archetype
The VCs will tell you themselves: they bet on people, not projects.
This sounds meritocratic. It isn't.
Because "people" doesn't mean everyone. It means a very specific archetype. And the data makes this painfully clear.
| Metric | Data point | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Female founders' share of VC funding | 2.3% | Unchanged in 30 years |
| Preference for male narrator (identical pitch) | 70% | Harvard study |
| Funding gap: promotion vs. prevention framing | 2x more funding | Dana Kanze, HBR |
| Black VC-backed founders | < 1% | Industry data |
| VCs from Harvard or Stanford | 40% | Industry data |
Female founders receive 2.3% of all venture capital funding. This number has not meaningfully changed in thirty years. A study conducted at Harvard showed that when investors were presented with identical pitches — same slides, same script — 70% preferred the version narrated by a male voice. The content was the same. The voice was not.
Dana Kanze's research, published in Harvard Business Review, found something even more specific. VCs ask men questions oriented toward promotion — potential gains, growth, vision. They ask women questions oriented toward prevention — potential losses, risks, what could go wrong. The framing of the conversation itself is biased. And it directly affects funding: entrepreneurs asked promotion questions received twice as much funding.
Less than 1% of VC-backed founders are Black. 40% of active venture capitalists graduated from Harvard or Stanford. The homophily is structural: investors fund people who look like them, think like them, and went to the same schools.
This is not conspiracy. It's sociology. It's what Bourdieu described fifty years ago in La Noblesse d'État: the system of elite institutions tends to reproduce the dominant class in its own structure. The grandes écoles produce people who run the system that values the grandes écoles. The VCs fund people who look like VCs. The cycle is self-reinforcing.
I can name — without naming — three or four people in my own network who have the perfect archetype. The right school, the right accent, the right vocabulary, the right posture in a meeting. They raise every three or four years. The money flows. The products sometimes work. Sometimes they don't. It doesn't matter. They match the pattern.
I can name others. Brilliant people. People who understand their market better than anyone in the room. Who won't raise a cent. Because they don't have the codes. They don't know how to pitch. They don't wear the right things. They don't reference the right frameworks. They don't signal belonging to the right tribe.
The poison
Here's where it gets personal.
The young entrepreneur — 24 years old, full of talent, full of ideas — absorbs a message from every direction. The message is: you need to raise. It comes from the press, which only covers raises. From the events, which only invite founders who raised. From LinkedIn, where raises are celebrated like weddings. From the entire infrastructure of the ecosystem, which is organized around one single act.
The fundraise is no longer a financial decision. It's an identity marker. You raise to exist. To prove to yourself and others that your project is real. To silence the uncle at the family dinner who knows everything. To impress the classmates who went to consulting. To feel, finally, that you've made it.
Bourdieu would call this symbolic capital — the prestige, the recognition, the social status that comes not from what you've built but from the signals you can display. The fundraise announcement on LinkedIn is the purest form of symbolic capital in the tech ecosystem. It doesn't say "we built something people use." It says "someone important believed in us." And in a world where the system defines importance, that validation becomes more valuable than the product itself.
I grew up in the banlieues north of Paris. No books at home. No computer. No one in my environment who had ever started a company. I built dating products for fourteen years. One of them reached six million users. I sold my shares and walked away. Then I went back to university at thirty and became a sociologist.
I have never raised venture capital. And I have spent a significant portion of my career feeling like I don't exist in the ecosystem that I helped build.
That feeling is not accidental. It's produced. By a system that needs you to believe you can't do it alone.
What the system could become
I am not arguing against venture capital. I am arguing against its monopoly on legitimacy.
The fundraise is useful when you have product-market fit and the growth opportunity requires capital you can't generate from revenue. That's a specific situation. It's not every situation. It's not most situations.
And for those who do need capital, the system as it currently operates fails them in a specific way. It doesn't just exclude people who don't match the archetype. It leaves them completely unsupported.
Here is the nuance that changes everything: many of the people excluded from the system are not ready. They don't know how to pitch. They don't know how to manage. They don't know how to structure a board meeting or negotiate a term sheet. They haven't been exposed to the codes. This is not a failure of intelligence or talent. It's a failure of access.
The system currently says: match the archetype, or get nothing.
What it should say is: show us a brilliant project and a team that can learn, and we will bring you inside.
Not just money. Coaching. On how to express yourself. On how to manage. On how to think about operations at scale. On how to raise your ambition to the level of your ability. A complete accompaniment — not just a wire transfer.
The difference is subtle but it changes everything. Stop funding people who fit the mold. Start funding projects that deserve to exist, and help the people behind them acquire the codes they were never given.
Ivan Illich proposed the concept of convivial tools — technologies and systems that enhance personal autonomy rather than creating dependence on institutions. The venture capital system, as it stands, is the opposite of convivial. It creates dependence. It defines the rules, controls the gate, and decides who gets to play.
A convivial alternative would look different. It would fund projects, not patterns. It would measure products, not pitches. It would recognize that talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not — and it would act on that recognition.
A final observation
I run a consumer product studio. Sixteen people. Four live products. The biggest one has six million users and has facilitated over four hundred thousand marriages. We've never raised venture capital. We are profitable. We exist.
But if you only read the press, attended the events, and scrolled LinkedIn — you wouldn't know.
That's not a complaint. It's a data point.
The question is not whether venture capital is good or bad. The question is: who decided it was the only way to exist? And what happens to all the builders who never asked for permission?