Larrydapunk

The chief of @sequoia is quitting b/c venture is toast and the math doesn’t work anymore. Everyone keeps asking why so many top operators are stepping down from big jobs, leaving prestigious firms, or skipping the “career ladder” entirely to start their own companies. People want some conspiracy theory answer. But there’s a simpler explanation: The most important thing you need to build a generational company is an exceptional team. And it has never been harder to assemble one. Not because talent disappeared. But because all the exceptional people left to build their own companies. Twenty years ago, if you were a cracked engineer, you’d go join Google or Amazon, get a ridiculous comp package, stack your RSUs, and coast. That was the playbook. The smartest people went to the biggest companies because that’s where the upside lived. Today? - You can raise a pre-seed from your kitchen table. - You can ship a product in a weekend. - You can find customers on X, LinkedIn, Reddit, hell even TikTok The distribution is global from day one. Starting a company has never been easier. But because of that, keeping exceptional people has never been harder. It’s not ego, or pride, or impatience. It’s access. The people who would’ve spent 5–10 years “earning their stripes” at a big company don’t need to anymore. They were always going to build companies. Now they can just do it way quicker. I left @meow after basically a year to build my own company. Other early staff left and did the same. We found problems in a market we were passionate about and were raising capital in no time. This is happening everywhere. There’s so much more capital and opportunity in the ecosystem that the best people no longer feel the need to “wait their turn.” They don’t need the credibility badge. They don’t need the résumé. They don’t need permission. Which sounds great for innovation… but there’s a consequence no one is talking about: Talent is now fragmented across thousands of small companies instead of concentrated inside a few great ones. This means that we'll see way more companies succeed…but far fewer companies scale to generational size. Not because the ideas are bad. Not because the markets are small. But because the talent density isn’t there. The best founders in the world still need other exceptional people around them. You can’t brute force a generational company alone. And if all the best people are building their own thing, the firms (VC or otherwise) that rely on assembling an A+ team inside a single institution are screwed (kind of). They won’t get the returns they’re used to. Their bets won’t compound the way they did in the past. Because when access increases, concentration decreases. And when concentration decreases, generational outcomes become rarer. Everyone celebrates how easy it is to start something today. Nobody talks about how hard it is to build something great in a world where your best possible cofounder, early engineer, or right-hand operator is already off running their own startup. It’s not good or bad. It’s just the new reality. If you want to build something with longevity today, you need two things: 1. A mission that exceptional people are willing to pause their own ambitions for. 2. A culture so high-standard and so aligned that talent density becomes your moat. Everything else is noise.