Originally posted as a comment by brooksjordan on the post Why would the venture industry be any different? using Disqus:

‘Why would we expect the venture industry to be any different than other industries, any more forward-thinking, any less susceptible to imitators, any more driven by incentives and the systems they create?”

It’s a great question. Should we expect it? I think there are two ways to think about it.

The first is that, obviously, like any human or community, VCs are limited by what they know. So, they get a pass (like the rest of us) in that very general sense.

But, the second is that VCs, absolutely, should be expected to have an extra or enhanced window built into their worldview. Their job is to see what’s coming – and more importantly, what’s needed – and invest in it to make it happen.

Clearly, there are VCs who have done that since day one and a new breed who are now innovating at the edges.

As a group, though, I’d have to agree: lame. These are the people that, as a special type of business athlete, were supposed to be leading us into the future, and, if they’ve been trading that responsibility in, and enormous opportunity, for short-term profits, and to avoid innovating in a webby world, then no wonder they killed their golden goose.

Sadly, it was the world’s golden goose, too.

The upside is that it’s a big wake-up call for past, present, and future VCs, and a signal to all that, huh, maybe “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

How can we create systems that incent us to invest in global optimization rather than local optimization? How can we create incentive structures that pay us to invest in what the “world” needs rather than just what we need?

Neglecting the short- and long-term incentives of investors and entrepreneurs would neglect thousands of years of evidence of how people make decisions.

Instead of focusing on X industry’s problems and how it needs to change, perhaps the forward-looking opportunity is to figure out how we can all create the new reality without or without X industry’s participation.

How can we all “work on stuff that matters”?

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