venture capital is a strange ecosystem of very smart boys with too much money looking for very smart ideas to turn that money into huge piles of money. so everyone involved has an incentive to sell themselves as the smartest of the very smart boys with the smartest of the very smart ideas such as "selling toilet paper with a subscription", and to remind their audience that only the extra special smart boys can recognize the extra special smart ideas and get in big on the ground floor. so it's a giant fart-huffing apparatus, a hall of mirrors that entices people with constant validation of their intelligence if they're willing to drop large amounts of cash on the promise of extravagant returns.

this is the most efficient way of distributing capital for increasing production.

I know only one person who engaged in startups. Two of them failed and one still exists though I am sure it is not profitable. He has a bachelors in business and has marinated himself thoroughly in liberal capitalist kool aid so he probably thought he knew how money is made. He wanted to make products rather than invest because he wanted to be like one of those local iNnOvAtIVe CEOs that are often published about in the newspaper. Some ppl just wanna be the glorious risk takers I suppose.

Everyone thinks they know better and investor money has to go somewhere for taxation purposes.

As an aside, S&P500 index is the only investment worth making for USAmericans who aren’t in congress.

The point of business is the process of putting others people money into your pocket, ideally you provide an use-value, but nowadays most startups end game is to "dump" their "idea" to a dumbass investor.

The point of doing business is to stop doing CMC and start doing MCM'. Anything else is just window dressing.

Gotta find a new source of profit. They’re pretty scarce so you gotta buy a little snake oil at time; Hope they get lucky.

What's the point of doing business?

Ideally, (your) business provides something for your community that they otherwise would not get or not get enough of. You should use your own strengths and interests, because otherwise whatever you do will be mediocre and you'd quickly hate the work. If everything goes well, you get to hire people from your community; so you're not only providing them with your product/service, but also with income. Good business is geared toward long term operation, and works even despite competition.

Starting a business does not make it a startup. The only purpose of a startup is to grow as fast as possible, with as much outside capital as needed, at whatever cost. Usually it follows the process of enshitification: First be good to customers, then be good to sellers, and once you captured the majority of the market it's time to fuck everyone over. That's venture capital for you, in a nutshell.

Regarding investing: Feel free to park some of your money in an ETF if you must. Searching for "the next great thing" is likely a waste of time.

I can just invest in shares&crypto and make my usual 5% per year

Can you really? Is it really a safe investment?