Member-only story
Is THIS the Future of Venture Capital?
Web3, Venture DAOs, and the new youth revolt.
In the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg turned up to a meeting with the prestigious venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital…in his pajama pants. He was armed with a deck titled The Top Ten Reasons You Should Not Invest.
Number 2 on the list was “Because Sean Parker is involved.”
Parker, best known for founding Napster and being played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, was Facebook’s president at the time, but he had previously been ousted as founder of Plaxo by none other than Michael Moritz, general partner at Sequoia Capital.
“There was no way we were ever going to take money from Sequoia, given what they’d done to me,” said Parker later.
You can read the whole story here but Facebook’s pajama prank was more than just retaliation — it was a watershed moment that signaled changing tides in entrepreneur-investor relations.
The balance of power was shifting toward founders. Author Sebastian Mallaby calls this moment ‘the youth revolt’.
