Tim O’Reilly and Parker Thompson on Company Building, Venture Capital, and Inequality

Erik is joined on this episode by Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly), Valley legend and founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, and returning fan favorite Parker Thompson (@pt), partner at AngelList. They start out talking about Tim’s piece in Quartz about the hazards of the view that scaling one’s company as fast as possible should be one's top priority above all else. He says that this approach is not for every entrepreneur and that it’s an artifact of the amount of money floating around today chasing returns. He has a biting critique of the companies that are going public without having ever been profitable or cash flow positive — but more importantly, without having a plan for getting to that point. Parker and Tim discuss the misalignment of incentives that can happen in venture capital, and some of the alternative models that are sprouting up to solve that problem. He gives his advice for what entrepreneurs should do when getting started and how they should approach raising money. They also discuss policy changes that could lead to longer-term thinking by investors, whether Tim foresees a “Silicon Valley meltdown,” as well as why inequality is such a pressing issue and how to solve it. We want to apologize for the audio quality of the second half of this episode. We ran into technical difficulties again during recording but are working on getting them sorted out for you. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal. Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global and is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg.