Michaelo Church or Michael O. Church, I don't know who you are, but this is a great comment on the article. Thank you for this perspective. As someone once in VC, I laughed when you said what is true: most VCs are not actually putting their own money behind the investments. Indeed, it's only the 9-figure celebrity ones.
My only quibble was your line about not making money. Your first year associates/analysts are pulling in 6 figures which I think is pretty decent dough, even though it may feel like a middle class wage in the "star cities" you rightly mentioned.
Your first year associates/analysts are pulling in 6 figures which I think is pretty decent dough, even though it may feel like a middle class wage in the "star cities" you rightly mentioned.
Rent burns it all, and VC-istan and Wall Street both have ageism problems.
It's the same thing as for athletes. A typical major-league professional athlete (which means we're already in the top <0.1 percent) making $600,000 per year isn't really that overpaid when one considers that he has a career that lasts about 6 years, and that his job has extreme physical demands. (Most people pay attention to the celebrity assholes, but the average professional athlete has to be a disciplined in-bed-at-9 type of guy to maintain peak performance.)
When you consider how tight our window of employability is (as soon as we're not "shiny" anymore, we're thrown back into the regular economy, and the locals out there have good reasons not to like us) and how much nonsense we have to put up with, we're not that privileged. Most of the VC-istan hotshots making $175,000 per year will see a 30-50% salary drop (in addition to a -100% ROI on their startup equity) when the bubble goes out.
In addition to rent, there are high taxes on income (making $150 for 10 years means you pay higher taxes than if you made $75k for 20 years, particularly if your $150k is earned in California vs. $75k in Texas), and other high cost of living issues.
My only quibble was your line about not making money. Your first year associates/analysts are pulling in 6 figures which I think is pretty decent dough, even though it may feel like a middle class wage in the "star cities" you rightly mentioned.