acne.vc

The business of venture capital is ripe for disruption!

Early-stage VC is particularly broken.

As VC firms garner a reputation and track record of moderate success, their subsequent VC fund sizes become huge. Perversely, this means that they have no choice but to be less bold and move down the risk scale, having to invest larger cheques to move the needle, thus limiting themselves to investing in later stage rounds.
To get to a first alpha-version product, startup founders need to focus full time and have some cash. This favours the well-to-do who already have healthy savings, to be able to afford to be unemployed and still be able to pay rent/food/bills. The advantage is doubled because those founders are more likely to have low-degree seapration to potential angel investors. What happens when a "friends & family" round is not possible because you're not from that milieu?

SAFE agreements, the standard for pre-seed investment deals, were a great advance in 2013, but are showing their age. It's nice to be able to avoid valuation debates upfront, when data is still very sparse, but as crypto markets have shown us, price discovery is possible even for the most esoteric projects.
Investors shouldn't need to wait for a company acquisition or IPO to be able to get some partial liquidity earlier.

Accredited investor rules arbitrarily limit who gets to invest in startups and in VC funds. Even when a jurisdiction is more flexible, funds typically don't want to deal with the overhead of taking in a large number of smaller investment cheques.
Few VC fund managers have the time to actively engage the braintrust of all their LPs, resorting to periodic one-to-many email updates. Many LPs are keen to be supportive to the VC funds they invest in, to their portfolio ventures. Some LPs also like to leverage and showcase their participation in a VC fund, as they're almost like very exclusive private members clubs, more exclusive than even the most popular NFT projects.