World Eaters
How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Award for Current Events & Public Affairs
Longlisted for the Non-Obvious Book Award 2025
A Next Big Idea Book Club March 2025 Must-Read
An urgent and illuminating perspective that offers a window into how the most pernicious aspects of the venture capital ethos is reaching all areas of our lives, into everything from healthcare to food to entertainment to the labor market and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
The venture capital playbook is causing unique harms to society. And in World Eaters, Catherine Bracy offers a window into the pernicious aspects of VC and shows us how its bad practices are bleeding into all industries, undermining the labor and housing markets and posing unique dangers to the economy at large. VC’s creates a wide, powerful wake that impacts the average consumer just as much as it does investors and entrepreneurs.
In researching this book, Bracy has interviewed founders, fund managers, contract and temp workers in the gig economy, and Limited Partners across the landscape. She learned that the current VC model is not a good fit for the majority of start-ups, and yet, there are too few options for early stage funding outside of VC dollars. And while there are some alternative paths for sustainable, responsible growth, without the help of regulators, there is not much motivation to drive investors from the roulette table that is venture capital.
World Eaters is an eye-opening account of the ways that the values of contemporary venture capital hurt founders, consumers, and the market. Bracy’s clear-eyed debut is a must-read for fans of Winners Take All, Super Pumped, and Brotopia, an appealing “insider / outsider” perspective on Silicon Valley, and those who are fascinated to look under the hood and learn why the modern economy is not working for most of us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Community organizer Bracy debuts with a bracing takedown of the venture capital financing model. The pressure VC places on startups to scale "at breakneck pace" drives businesses to make reckless decisions, she contends, describing how investors tanked the once profitable LocalData, which created software to help municipal governments streamline property tax information, by pushing it to expand into offerings for the real estate sector that never caught on. Exploring how other businesses bend the law in pursuit of growth, Bracy details how Shef, which delivers food prepared by amateur cooks to customers' homes, tests the boundaries of regulations requiring salable food be cooked in commercial-grade kitchens. Elsewhere, Bracy excoriates such VC-backed companies as Uber for ushering in a gig economy that classifies would-be employees as contractors to lower costs. Bracy's evenhanded analysis makes clear that for all VC's failings, it has sometimes provided needed funds for such valuable companies as the insulin manufacturer Genentech, and she provides pragmatic suggestions for remedying VC's worst excesses. For instance, she recommends requiring investors to hold their stakes in companies for longer than the standard 10 years, incentivizing them to focus on a business's long-term viability over unsustainable short-term gains. It's a convincing call for change.
