alt Hacker NewsThe reason hockey stick growth is required is because the “leeches” are putting up the capital to build the profitable company and if the profits dont significantly outpace the risk free rate it’s a very bad investment.
The founders and employees and even the customers are accruing all the benefits of that capital so of course they are happy.
How else do you propose funding the quite expensive and risky enterprises that venture backs? Taxes? Paying employees less before profitability? Charging early customers a lot more? Clearly you can see the downsides of those approaches.
Growth != Profits
I would propose not funding them at all, because so much of the system has turned into outright grift, with wildly implausible "companies" receiving brain-melting sums so investors can pay themselves huge fees.
The companies all do things like "Pitch decks as a service" or "Coworker cafes in space" or "Fusion permanently two years from now, until we spend the money on drugs then pivot to military contracting" or "AI-powered gig economy pet sitters for the Bay Area".
There's a lot of happiness around, but there are also more useful things everyone could be doing.