One key point about entrepreneurship (which I covered in my lengthy piece yesterday) is worth amplifying because society is often being lied to about what actually constitutes building a business.

Put simply: a person who moves money around is not the same as someone who actually makes something. It is not impossible that a money-mover is adding value — I have seen it happen! — but rearranging capital is not, in and of itself, the same thing as actually inventing, or being innovative, or building something from scratch.

I point this out because I’ve spent my career enabling creative people. Whether it’s artists and writers, or coders and makers, my heart is with the people who make things with a soul. Sometimes they make stuff just because that’s what makes their heart stir. Sometimes it’s so they can sell enough of their work to be able to pay the bills. And yep, sometimes it’s so they can start a big business! All of those things seem like valid reasons for creative people to exercise that urge to build something new, and to profit from their effort in doing so.

Frankly, I don’t give a shit what happens to the guys who move the money around to enable the makers. Get the dollars into the accounts and then get the hell out of the way. Try not to crash the economy while you do it.

But what makes me absolutely furious is that the greediest, most do-nothing cohort of the money-movers have spent decades creating the myth that now they are the builders. They think they are the creative ones, the inventors, the ones who see the future. They’ve taken to writing grand pronouncements about how society ought to run, and how they can see the future — based solely on what they might write checks for.

How the VCs boiled the frog

Over the last two decades, the loudest and most prominent venture capital investors have gone from saying they simply provide resources to founders who come up with great ideas, to major VC firms now having extremist political manifestos on their websites, which they promote through coordinated media operations. These campaigns are designed to recruit compliant subordinates as “founders” in order to out the agenda of the money-movers. This is nothing like the prior ideal of enabling creative people who just have a genius idea that they want to get out into the world.

Part of this effort has also been building the distortion that the only way a new business happens is through venture capital funding. Venture funding is, compared to other sources, an extreme form of betting on new businesses that was only ever supposed to be one narrow kind of high-risk, high-reward funding, complemented by many, many other sources. And any of these other much more reasonable options might be more likely ways of building a sustainable business. But the tycoons who made their money in VC have warped the public dialogue so much that the idea of getting something like a bank loan to start a company sounds as anachronistic as a horse and buggy. New companies and even the word “startup” itself have become virtually synonymous with venture capital and the extremist agenda of the most vocal cohort of that community.

Worse, this reframing of capital-as-creativity has captured politicians and regulators at every level. Why does Jeff Bezos need three billion dollars in handouts to build a headquarters in NYC, based on a fake promise to hire Amazon workers that he was always going to hire in the city anyway? Because compliant chumps like then-governor Andrew Cuomo mistakenly think moving money around to billionaires is what constitutes building a business. Do you know how many mom-and-pop small businesses in NYC you could have saved if you put three billion dollars in subsidies into helping those who are squeezed out of their spaces by greedy landlords, instead of the HQ2 boondoggle?

What is really a business, then?

So: beware of people conflating pushing pennies around with actually doing the hard work of building a business. Beware of those who pretend that venture capital and the VCs who run that industry are the voices of entrepreneurship — or that they’re even on the side of entrepreneurs.

And beware of anyone who thinks innovation is about one lone genius or big piles of money. It’s about communities, creativity, and the joyful optimism of coming together to do hard work.