A History of Venture Capital: From Whaling Ships to Unicorns

In the 1800s, nearly three out of four whaling ships in the world were American, not because of better sailors but because of better financing. That model is basically a modern VC fund.In this special AI-voiced episode, we turn one of the most-read pieces on the GoingVC blog into a conversation and trace 200 years of venture capital: whaling voyages and the power law, J.P. Morgan backing Edison, ARDC's $70,000 bet on Digital Equipment that returned roughly 500x, Arthur Rock and the Fairchild family tree behind Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, the dot-com crash, the rise of accelerators, micro VCs, and the unicorn era.Note: the two voices in this episode are AI-generated. The content comes from GoingVC's research.