I've been feeling this for years. From my perspective, the purpose of VCs was to:

- Waste my time filling out forms to participate in incubators they would always reject me for.

- Fund my competitors so much as to drive up CPC for any given keyword as to make make ROI on ads impossible.

- Monopolize all tech markets through a variety of ways including contributing to the culture of making it taboo for companies to purchase solutions from small vendors who aren't funded by them. My friend who did get into the club described the ecosystem as 'incestuous'. The circular deals we saw going on with AI companies and hardware companies recently are not new; just the same thing they always did, on a bigger scale.

I entered the industry in 2012 so for me it has always been like this.

That said, it's really a deeper system issue which allows this.