Venture capital has traditionally been the business of seeding creative destruction — innovation that washes out the old order and overturns incumbents.

Consider examples like Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb or Stripe. These companies either reshaped an existing market or created an entirely new category.

As venture capital has scaled, it has grown alongside a generation of Big Tech incumbents who are increasingly the customers, investors and acquirers of startups.

This shift spawned a generation of companies that are more rapidly scalable, with a clearer market opportunity and less technical risk. But they are also less disruptive — iterative advances that pay a tax to incumbents

It's an arrangement that is comfortable for both sides.

Big Tech companies benefit from reduced competitive pressure, and Big VC firms benefit from opportunities that can reliably consume capital and print growth.

Long term, this looks increasingly like a service industry.

This is not the only parallel between scaled venture capital and the big consultancies: Both have preserved fees at scale by using that scale to sell confidence.