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An Excerpt from World Eaters: How Venture Capital Is Cannibalizing the Economy

by Catherine Bracy

An excerpt from World Eaters by Catherine Bracy, published by Dutton and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Current Events & Public Affairs category.

The venture capital playbook, which has become dogma not just in tech but increasingly across the entire economy, causes unique harms to society, the economy, democracy, and in the lives of everyday people. Like late-stage capitalism on steroids, it calls for companies to seek total domination and to do it as fast as possible. What follows is a cascade of negative outcomes for society as a whole and the economy at large. Uber and Lyft steamrolling regulators. Facebook and YouTube relying on a revenue model that optimizes for misinformation and radicalization. The intractable diversity problem in the tech industry. Worker exploitation.

These threats on their own are bad enough. But the practices of the venture capital world have begun to bleed into the rest of the economy creating staggering inequality, vanishing competition, and a redefinition of American entrepreneurship that shoehorns many founders with good ideas into an ill-fitting VC model, which can push their startups to failure before they even get off the ground.

Luckily, it isn’t all doom and gloom. There are investors and founders, like Indie.vc and the companies aligned with the Zebra Movement, who have proven that another path is possible. But how do we create the conditions so that their version of capitalism—one that fosters competition, innovation, sustainability, and inclusive growth—can thrive? What regulatory guardrails do we need to implement to prevent not just the worst behaviors of Facebook and Amazon but the rise of the rest? Readers will come away with deeper insights into the urgent decisions we must make about how to regulate tech.

There is a future where a growing tech sector is welcomed as a boon for everyone rather than a threat to our economy, our public health and democracy as a whole. But to get there, we need to reckon with venture capital and the corrupted system it has created.

World Eaters has been longlisted in the Current Events & Public Affairs category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below comes from the book's Introduction.

◊◊◊◊◊

Over the past ten years, a genre of books and other media has emerged to expose egregious and often salacious harms, abuses, and excesses that are too common in the tech industry. I don’t mean for this book to be one of them. In fact, the more time I spent researching this book, the more I came to believe in venture capital’s proper role in the economy. There is no doubt that VC has created huge benefits for society. Leaving aside the economic gains that venture capital has created, many venture- ­backed companies—companies that may not have been able to find financial support anywhere else—have unquestionably improved the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Genentech, one of the biggest venture capital successes of all time, is responsible for the mass-market production of human insulin. Google made the vast array of knowledge on the internet available for free to anyone who could get online. Moderna developed a Covid vaccine with breathtaking speed, paving the way for the world to emerge from the pandemic and likely saving millions of lives in the process. All these breakthrough technologies were funded by venture capital. 

But the story also has a dark side. At the same time venture-backed companies were improving quality of life, they were also undermining it. Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter provided the tools that allowed people to take down dictators—and then put those same tools into the hands of authoritarians who used them to spread disinformation and savagely oppress their people. Lyft and Uber created a critical extension of transportation infrastructure—but they also ­increased traffic, undercut public transit, and eroded worker protections for millions of people. Juul purported to be creating a safe alternative to cigarettes—only to get another generation hooked on nicotine. 

I don’t think it has to be this way. In the following pages, I hope to show that what is broken about the tech industry isn’t primarily a function of the technology itself, or even the companies that build and sell it. The brokenness goes much deeper than that, into the economic system that made those companies and tools possible in the first place: venture capital. 

Venture capital creates this brokenness in two ways. First, the venture capital industry has become unwaveringly committed to an investing approach that demands venture- ­backed startups pursue hyper maximalist growth at breakneck pace. This methodology—embodied by the creed made famous by Facebook: “Move fast and break things”—forces companies to make thoughtless and often irresponsible decisions that result in negative social and economic outcomes, for which the rest of us bear the cost. 

Second, and arguably more crucially, the venture capital approach to investing has crowded out other forms of capital that could support sustainable startup development. What results is an unhealthy monoculture where only one kind of company can be successful. Entrepreneurs with great ideas that don’t fit the mold of venture-scale growth, or who aren’t willing to compromise their values at the altar of investor returns, are often either left to die or forced to morph to fit the accepted paradigm. In this way, venture capital has deeply distorted the innovation ecosystem and has, I argue, killed more value than it has created. This is especially true in areas of the economy where the venture approach is ill suited for the market. What works to spur innovation for software and high-technology companies can be a disaster when applied to infrastructure-heavy sectors like housing and clean energy. 

[…] 

This book is meant to be about the failure of systems, not people. But systems don’t fix themselves; they change only when people do. I hope this book is a call to action for those who have a role to play in creating an innovation ecosystem that produces not just financial gain for a few but broad-based economic growth that benefits everyone. Along the way, we might just have a better chance of solving our most intractable challenges to boot. 

What is it exactly that these stakeholders can do? 

  • Founders must come to understand that raising venture capital isn’t the mark of a successful entrepreneur, and that the most critical part of getting their business off the ground is finding investors whose incentive structures align with their goals for the company. 
  • Regulators should include venture capital in their analysis as they seek to create more accountability for the tech sector, and look at how they might institute policy to ensure both that venture capital is playing the correct role in the financial system and that all types of innovative companies have access to the capital they need to succeed sustainably. 
  • Venture capitalists should challenge Silicon Valley’s orthodoxies and pursue other approaches to creating investment returns than the single one to which they have almost all been committed for the last several decades. I know most of them believe it can’t be done, but isn’t the mark of a good venture capitalist that they believe in doing things that other people think are impossible? 
  • Most important, limited partners—the wealthy individuals and institutions who provide the capital that venture investors distribute—should start using their influence to shape the venture capital industry. Many of the institutions whose money is flowing into venture capital claim to care about world-positive outcomes. But they take a passive approach to overseeing their portfolios, delegating responsibility to fund managers whose compensation packages incentivize them to seek the highest possible returns at all costs. If just some of these limited partners decided to support a different approach to startup investing, it could create a wave that shifts the economy. 

For the rest of us—parents concerned about how tech is influencing our children, advocates who fight for a fairer economy, and citizens who care about the health of our democracy—I hope this book provides a clearer picture of how the tech sector works so we can lobby our representatives for changes that will actually fix the problems we are trying to solve. 

Above all, this book is an invitation to a conversation about how we build a future where venture capital is a force for good, enabling human flourishing rather than eroding our wellbeing. 

 

Adapted from World Eaters by Catherine Bracy, published on March 4, 2025 by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Catherine Bracy.

 

About the Author 

Catherine Bracy is a civic technologist and community organizer whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and political and economic inequality. She is the Founder and CEO of TechEquity Collaborative, was previously Code for America’s Senior Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem, and founded Code for All. During the 2012 election cycle she was Director of Obama for America’s Technology Field Office in San Francisco, the first of its kind in American political history. She is a prolific public speaker for places like Axios and the Personal Democracy Forum. Her TED Talk “Why Good Hackers Make Good Citizens” has almost one million views. Her work has been highlighted in the LA Times, NYT and NPR.

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