People in the traditional finance (TradFi) industry often have no real professional skills. I know this well because I found in my work in investment banking that the skills required for this job are actually very limited. Many people choose to enter TradFi because it offers a generous salary without having to master too much substantive knowledge. As long as a young person has basic high school algebra knowledge and a good work attitude, I can train them to be competent for any front-office financial services job. But professions such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers require time and technical accumulation, even though the average income of these professions is much lower than that of practitioners in the financial industry. The high salary attraction of TradFi makes the threshold for entry into this industry more dependent on social background than personal ability. For example, your family background, the reputation of your university or boarding school are often more important than your intelligence level. Such a system makes the TradFi industry a closed elite club, further consolidating existing social class and racial biases. Let's apply this framework to analyze how VCs raise funds and allocate resources. In order to find winners like Facebook, Google, Tencent, or ByteDance, top venture capital (VC) firms need to raise huge funds. These funds mainly come from endowments, pensions, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds and family offices, and these pools of funds are usually managed by traditional finance (TradFi) people. As fund managers, they must fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities to their clients and can only invest in venture capital funds that are considered "appropriate". This "appropriate" standard usually means that these funds need to be managed by "qualified" and "experienced" professionals. And these definitions of "qualified" are often closely related to the educational background and career experience of managers: they usually graduate from a few top universities in the world (such as Harvard, Oxford, Peking University, etc.), and have entered large investment banks (such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs), asset management companies (such as BlackRock, Fidelity) or technology giants (such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Tencent, etc.) in the early stages of their careers. Without such a background, the professional threshold guards of TradFi will think that you lack the ability to manage other people's funds.

People in the traditional finance (TradFi) industry often have no real professional skills. I know this well because I found in my work in investment banking that the skills required for this job are actually very limited. Many people choose to enter TradFi because it offers a generous salary without having to master too much substantive knowledge. As long as a young person has basic high school algebra knowledge and a good work attitude, I can train them to be competent for any front-office financial services job. But professions such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers require time and technical accumulation, even though the average income of these professions is much lower than that of practitioners in the financial industry. The high salary attraction of TradFi makes the threshold for entry into this industry more dependent on social background than personal ability. For example, your family background, the reputation of your university or boarding school are often more important than your intelligence level. Such a system makes the TradFi industry a closed elite club, further consolidating existing social class and racial biases. Let's apply this framework to analyze how VCs raise funds and allocate resources. In order to find winners like Facebook, Google, Tencent, or ByteDance, top venture capital (VC) firms need to raise huge funds. These funds mainly come from endowments, pensions, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds and family offices, and these pools of funds are usually managed by traditional finance (TradFi) people. As fund managers, they must fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities to their clients and can only invest in venture capital funds that are considered "appropriate". This "appropriate" standard usually means that these funds need to be managed by "qualified" and "experienced" professionals. And these definitions of "qualified" are often closely related to the educational background and career experience of managers: they usually graduate from a few top universities in the world (such as Harvard, Oxford, Peking University, etc.), and have entered large investment banks (such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs), asset management companies (such as BlackRock, Fidelity) or technology giants (such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Tencent, etc.) in the early stages of their careers. Without such a background, the professional threshold guards of TradFi will think that you lack the ability to manage other people's funds.