The Athletic keeps growing .......

Not angels. Venture capital firms. There are a a dozen and a half venture capital funds that have forked over money to the Athletic.

Most of those firms aren't looking for one return on investment out of 10. Ideally, they are trying to get a ROI on everything they seed. It's like everything else. They only attract money if they are successful.

The reality is that traditionally, VC has been a crummy business. Over the last several decades, Venture Capital Funds have barely broken even in the aggregate. Equity obtained via broad stock market investing has way outperformed that style of investing, for example.

The last half dozen years or so have kind of skewed how people look at these things. We are in an everything bubble due to yields having been suppressed globally for the last decade (so that real rates are negative globally -- robbing savers to fund more and more debt). That has made people chase riskier and riskier things, which has created a self fulfilling prophecy. The bubbles feed themselves for as long as they can blow (and they have blown to levels we have never seen now).

On the Venture Capital seeding front of that, there has been money chasing everything (at ridiculous valuations) from Uber on down. To the extent that some of those private companies have been able to go public after attracting venture capital, some venture capital investors have cashed out the past few years with nice profits on various things, despite the vast majority of those companies themselves not really generating significant profits (which is what would be determining the value of a company in a normal rate environment).

Ultimately, if the past is prelude to the future and I am right about the dynamic of misallocation of capital due to what the rate suppression / monetary inflation has done. ... there is going to be a lot of money lost by venture capital firms that are left holding the bag. That is not a prediction about the Athletic itself, because I have no idea if its business model makes any sense. But even if the company / idea survives, if it is like situations I know more about, there is still a very good chance that there is going to be some losses incurred by VC firms, because the valuations they are investing at are way out of whack -- there is no honest price discovery in a world of manipulated interest rates and they cause bubbles with crazy valuations. Someone is always left holding the bag.