This essay looks at how the rise of mega-funds changed the venture ecosystem. Instead of a model centered on discovering underpriced startups early and helping them grow, the system increasingly became dominated by huge pools of capital, aggressive follow-on dynamics, and winner-amplification behavior.

1. Venture Became More Like Asset Management

As funds became larger, their behavior changed. They needed larger outcomes, more deployable capital, and more certainty. That pushed venture toward later-stage, scale-driven patterns and away from its original craft-like character.

2. Incentives Shifted Across the Ecosystem

The essay suggests that mega-funds distorted prices, changed founder expectations, and made the market more about signaling, momentum, and capital intensity. That can weaken true discovery and make the ecosystem feel less like venture and more like a capital escalation contest.

Conclusion

The argument is not simply that large funds are bad, but that they changed the nature of the game. Once venture scaled too far, it stopped behaving like the old venture model people romanticize. Understanding that shift helps explain why startup funding often looks very different today than it did in earlier eras.