I asked ChatGPT:“What are some things VCs should never invest in—even if adoption is incredible, burn is low, and the economics look beautiful?”
Here was its answer:
1. Businesses that require addiction or loss of control to make money.
If users becoming healthier or more in control would destroy the business, the harm isn’t a side effect. It’s the business model.
2. Non-consensual mass surveillance.
Businesses whose success requires stripping people of privacy, anonymity, or biometric autonomy without meaningful consent.
3. AI built to deceive or manipulate.
Products whose core advantage comes from impersonation, deception, or exploiting personalized knowledge to manipulate people’s decisions.
4. Businesses that monetize human vulnerability.
Targeting people because they are desperate, lonely, cognitively impaired, or financially distressed—and because that vulnerability improves conversion.
5. Businesses that privatize profit while forcing severe externalities onto everyone else.
If the company gets the upside while uninvolved people absorb serious environmental, biological, or societal risks without consent, great economics don’t make it a great investment.
6. Technologies that require coercion or serious bodily exploitation.
If the supply chain fundamentally depends on harming, coercing, or exploiting human bodies, no TAM is large enough.
Siqi, Etc. 