The Royal Treatment: How Kingmaking Works (Or Doesn't)

Picture this: a 25-year-old Stanford dropout walks into a Sand Hill Road office with a PowerPoint presentation containing exactly three slides. Slide one: "AI." Slide two: "For [insert industry here]." Slide three: "We need $100 million." In the old days, security would have been called. Today, that's a Series A pitch deck.

The kingmaking strategy operates on a beautifully simple premise: if you throw enough money at something, it becomes important. It's the Silicon Valley equivalent of buying your way onto the high school prom court. VCs identify a nascent AI category - say, "AI for optimizing pet food delivery logistics" - find the most charismatic founder who can pronounce "transformer architecture," and then proceed to dump enough cash into their bank account to make a small nation jealous.

The Coronation Checklist

To qualify for kingmaking, your startup needs exactly three things:

• A buzzword-compliant name: Something like "SynthMind" or "CogniFlow" that sounds expensive but means nothing
• A founder who looks good in a Patagonia vest: Bonus points if they've "previously founded a company" that quietly failed
• The ability to say "paradigm shift" with a straight face: This is non-negotiable

Why This Is All So Deeply Absurd

Let's examine the sheer comedy of this situation. VCs, who are supposed to be masters of risk assessment, are now essentially placing billion-dollar bets on companies whose entire technological foundation might be obsolete in 18 months. It's like investing in horse-drawn carriage companies right after the Model T was announced, but with more blockchain references.

The real kicker? This strategy actually works - for the VCs, at least. By declaring a startup the "category king" before any meaningful competition emerges, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Other investors pile in (FOMO is a powerful drug), talent flocks to the "winner," and customers assume that the company with the biggest funding round must have the best product. It's market manipulation disguised as market making.

The Emperor's New Algorithms

What's particularly hilarious about this trend is watching these newly crowned AI kings try to justify their valuations. I recently sat through a demo for a "kingmade" AI startup that had raised $75 million to "revolutionize corporate email." Their revolutionary technology? It could suggest three different ways to say "per my last email." Groundbreaking.

Another favorite: the AI scheduling assistant that raised $120 million and still can't handle time zones correctly. But hey, they've got the funding, so they must be the market leader, right? This is how we end up with entire industries built on vaporware that's been anointed by venture capital rather than validated by actual users.

The Domino Effect of Artificial Royalty

When VCs play kingmaker, the ripple effects are both predictable and ridiculous. First comes the talent wars, where newly funded startups offer senior engineers $500,000 salaries plus equity to work on problems that haven't been fully defined yet. Then comes the marketing blitz, where these companies spend more on Super Bowl ads than on actual R&D. Finally comes the inevitable pivot, when everyone realizes the "category" they're dominating doesn't actually exist.

Remember when every startup was "Uber for X"? Now every startup is "AI for X," and VCs are racing to crown kings in categories that range from genuinely useful to "why would anyone need this?" My personal favorite recent example: an AI company that raised $40 million to help other AI companies manage their AI infrastructure. It's AI inception, and we're all trapped in the dream.

The People's Republic of Reality

Here's what actually happens in the real world while VCs are busy playing chess with other people's money: genuine innovation gets crowded out. Smaller teams building actually useful AI tools can't compete with the marketing budgets of the kingmade companies. Customers get confused by the noise. And when the inevitable consolidation happens, we're left with a handful of overfunded, underperforming "winners" who achieved victory through financial artillery rather than technological superiority.

The irony is that AI, more than any previous tech wave, actually requires real innovation. You can't just throw money at a transformer model and expect it to solve novel problems. Yet that's exactly what the kingmaking strategy assumes: that capital can substitute for creativity, that funding can replace fundamental research.