A wave of performative, over-leveraged start-ups is degrading the shared trust that underpins venture capital. By making absurd nine-figure asks on the back of debt and bravado, showboating founders extract attention while imposing costs on everyone else. The result is harsher funding conditions, deeper scepticism, and the steady erosion of the start-up ecosystem as a commons.
Contents
1. Introduction: Just a Piss Take
Once upon a time, taking capital seriously was a prerequisite for asking for it. Today, apparently, you can fly to the US millions in debt, wave your arms theatrically, bang on about AI, and demand one hundred million dollars with the confidence of a man ordering drinks on someone else’s tab.
This is not theoretical. Anyone who has sat through US pitch meetings in the last year has watched founders with unresolved liabilities, seven-figure monthly burn, and no credible path to breakeven calmly demand nine-figure cheques because “that’s the round”.
This isn’t ambition. It’s piss-taking.
A ridiculous start-up recently demonstrated the worst excesses of modern founder culture: staggering liabilities, negligible fundamentals, and a request so grotesquely outsized it felt less like a funding round and more like performance art. The sort of thing you do not because it makes sense, but because it signals something, confidence, bravado, inevitability. A Barnum act in a Patagonia gilet, where narrative substitutes for numbers and confidence is expected to outrun scrutiny.
And here’s the real damage: this behaviour doesn’t just embarrass the people doing it. It poisons the pond for everyone else.
2. From Commons to Circus
Venture capital, for all its flaws, once functioned as a shared commons. Risk capital existed to fund hard things: infrastructure, research, unglamorous systems work, patient innovation. You brought evidence, a coherent plan, and a sense of proportion. In return, you got trust.
That commons is dying.
It’s being strip-mined by founders who treat capital not as a scarce resource but as a stage prop. The ask no longer maps to reality, only to vibes. Debt is hand-waved away as “momentum”. Failure is reframed as “iteration”. Responsibility dissolves into narrative.
The result is predictable: investors harden, diligence becomes punitive, and everyone who isn’t an arsehole pays the price.
This is not an argument against ambition. It is an argument against ambition unmoored from evidence, responsibility, or proportion.
3. The Show Boaters’ Externality
Every absurd $100m ask backed by nothing but slideware creates an externality. It raises the bar for credible founders. It lengthens funding cycles. It forces real teams, building real things, with real constraints, to spend more time proving they are not clowns.
This is the tragedy of the commons in start-up form: individuals extract private attention and upside while degrading the shared environment. The show boater gets their fifteen minutes. The ecosystem gets stricter term sheets, lower trust, and a deeper suspicion of anyone who doesn’t already look like a Silicon Valley archetype.
And somehow this is sold as “vision”.
Trust is a finite resource. Every time it is abused for attention or leverage, the replacement cost is paid by someone else.
Of course, the system doesn’t immediately run out of money. Like The Wolf of Wall Street, there is always another wave of newcomers, less experienced, more credulous, more impressed by volume than substance, ready to hand over capital. The problem is not that funding disappears, but that good capital is crowded out by dumb money.
Builders don’t need wide-eyed tourists writing cheques for the story; they need investors who understand the work, challenge the assumptions, and stay when things get difficult. An ecosystem dominated by marks instead of partners doesn’t die quickly: it rots.
4. Debt as a Costume
Let’s be clear: going millions into debt and then demanding nine figures is not boldness. It’s abdication of responsibility dressed up as courage. It’s cosplay entrepreneurship, wearing the language of scale without the substance to support it.
Debt should constrain behaviour; instead, it has become a prop used to justify ever larger acts of irresponsibility.
These founders don’t fail quietly, learn, and rebuild. They fail loudly, blame the market, and rebrand. The wreckage is left behind for employees, creditors, and the next generation of founders who now inherit a more hostile landscape.
5. Who Pays?
Not the arseholes. They’ll land somewhere. They always do.
The cost is borne by:
- founders who don’t exaggerate
- teams who budget carefully
- technologies that need patient capital
- ecosystems outside the US already fighting for credibility
When investors say “we’re seeing too much nonsense,” this is what they mean.
6. Conclusion: Reclaiming the Commons
If the startup world wants to survive as anything other than a travelling circus, it needs to relearn an unfashionable idea: proportion.
Capital should be earned, not manifested.
Ambition should scale with evidence.
Debt should induce humility, not delusion.
And founders who treat shared trust as a disposable resource should be called what they are: not visionaries, not rebels, but self-interested piss-takers accelerating the death of the commons.
Because the next time someone serious asks for funding, they’ll be standing ankle-deep in the mess these people left behind.
An ecosystem that indulges this behaviour doesn’t get more innovation. It gets better con artists, and a steadily shrinking pool of people willing to fund anything real.
Some readers will inevitably go looking for an Aunt Sally: Dr Evil lookalikes to pin all of this on, a single founder or company they can point at and say there. That instinct misses the point. The real damage isn’t done by one pantomime villain, but by an ecosystem that keeps rewarding the performance long after it knows better.
Anyone who really wants a Dr Evil can find one easily enough. They usually look the part. The harder task is admitting that the audience, the marks, and the cheerleaders matter more than the man on the stage.