Enron screwed a lot of "normal" people. A lot of employees bought their stock. Uber will just lose the VCs money.

The VCs are not losing their own money. They lose the money of your pension funds and your city's investments. The VCs will be fine.

I don't know how it works in America, but there are strict rules in the UK about where money like that gets invested. It ain't with VCs. Think gilts and blue chip.

I'd be surprised if even America was mad enough to let pension funds go for VC.

I know for sure that cities invest in private capital and VC. Otherwise they could never reach their income projections and would have to raise funding. That would mean either higher taxes or lower pensions which both are a no-go so let's just take higher risk.

That's crazy. Politics can really break incentives.

VCs have LPs and LPs are typically "normal" people's wealth pooled and invested, teachers pension funds, universities etc.

Startups indeed do not typically require employees to shell out hard cash for their equity, but one could argue that they're just extracting payment in employee time instead.

At almost every start-up that I've been involved with, the approach has been to grant employees ISOs which have a strike price (albeit very low) that the employee must pay if they want to exercise the options. They then have to run the AMT gauntlet and take on the potential tax risk. So while employees don't have to pay for the option itself, I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to say that employees don't have to shell out hard cash for the actual equity.

But usually a lower salary than otherwise.

Sure, but what about companies that have gone under as a result of artificially subsidized transportation for a number of years? These companies and those jobs will not necessarily be easy to rebuild.

They can get some of that venture goodness. Agreed that enron was far more pervasive.

And employees with stock options/RSUs/paper dollars.