Afternoon Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: This Disruptive Think Piece Will Change the World

Matthew Yglesias: This disruptive think piece will change the world: “If your company (like Vox Media!) is funded by venture capital…

…two things are going on: 1. You’re not profitable enough to finance investment out of retained earnings, and. 2. You’re not creditworthy enough to get a loan from a bank. Disaster! Why would anyone ever give a company like that money? Well… if you get a small ownership stake in the next Google or Facebook you’re going to strike it rich. So how do you think you’re going to convince someone to make a long-shot, high-reward investment in your unprofitable, non-creditworthy company? Well, it’s hard. And you’re definitely not going to do it by being humble and well-mannered. You need to sell the sizzle…. Not only are you asking people to take a reckless gamble… you’re asking people who are already rich and don’t even really need the money that will come from your company’s success. So you need to appeal to their vanity and egomania…. And yet the alternative to the buzz economy is even worse. It is definitely A Good Thing that we have Google and its excellent search engine rather than the bad old indexes we used to put up with…