I keep running into the same problem. The four categories I mapped out, create, relate, steward, rest, are where value is migrating. Every one of them has real demand. And almost none of them look like a venture deal.
This is not a knock on VCs. Venture capital is a brilliant machine for a specific shape of business: high-growth, near-zero marginal cost, winner-take-most. The metrics work. The model works. It just was not built for what is coming next.
A gathering platform for local dinner hosts does not have viral loops. A care-worker tool has 70% first-100-day turnover in its labor pool. A retreat booking system serves fifty thousand operators who each run ten events a year. High retention. Irreducible acquisition cost. Geographically fragmented. Emotionally load-bearing. These businesses compound over years, not months. They are not venture-shaped. They are the next economy.
The mismatch matters now
This gap has existed for decades. What changed is that the categories being left unfunded are no longer niche. As The Shrinking Layer argued, the categories where human presence is the product are becoming the entire economy above a certain line of necessity. Half of American adults experience loneliness. 800,000 seniors are on care waitlists. The demand is not speculative.
Five models worth knowing
Revenue-based financing. Take capital, repay as a percentage of revenue. No dilution, no board seats. A dispatch platform like Reeve with steady monthly contracts is a natural fit. Lighter Capital, Clearco, and Pipe have proven this works for businesses growing at 30-50% annually.
SBA loans. The most underrated signal in startup finance. If a bank will lend against your business with a government guarantee, the unit economics are real. $27 billion guaranteed in fiscal 2025. A retreat booking platform or a chapter-based community tool is exactly what SBA lending was designed for.
Cooperatives. REI is a $4 billion cooperative. Mondragon employs 80,000 people. The model works at scale. A chapter-based platform where each local group buys in and governs collectively is not radical. It has just not been applied to the post-agent infrastructure problem yet.
Patient capital. Omidyar Network, the Heron Foundation, RSF Social Finance, and dozens of family offices operate with fifteen to twenty-five year horizons. The four-verb categories are a natural fit. These are not charity cases. They are businesses with real margins that compound slowly and serve a mission patient capital finds attractive.
VC for the infrastructure layer. Here is where venture does fit. The evaluation function tooling, the orchestration layer, the compliance surface, activation-limited proxies like Till. These are horizontal products with classic venture characteristics. The end applications may not be venture-scale individually. The shared infrastructure they need is.
Fund the picks and shovels, and the four-verb economy will build itself.
The kind of money you take determines the kind of company you build
Take venture capital for a care-worker platform and you will be pressured to scale faster than trust allows. Take revenue-based financing and you will grow at the pace your customers can absorb. The constraint is the discipline.
The default assumption that every ambitious company should raise a Series A does not hold for the categories where human presence is the product. The capital stack needs to match the product.
The measurement systems that capital allocation depends on were not built to see these categories. They were built to see software margins and user growth curves. The four-verb economy looks invisible through that lens. It is not invisible. The lens is wrong.The founders who build here will need to bring their own capital structures. That is harder than raising a seed round on a pitch deck. It is also more durable.