Not everyone is a fan of venture capitalists (vcs). One academic famously questioned whether they were “soulless agents of Satan, or just clumsy rapists?” Paul Graham, the co-founder of the Y Combinator startup incubator, published a “unified theory of vc suckage”, in which he likened the industry’s investment process to a body-cavity search by someone with a faulty knowledge of anatomy. Venture capitalists, he concluded, resembled classic villains: “alternately cowardly, greedy, sneaky and overbearing”.
