You missed the other part of the equation. No one said that all VC money was dumb. The conversation is about billions of funding going down the drain like in the case of Uber compared to the paltry sum inflation adjusted raised by the tech behemoths before they went public and became profitable.

Beats by Dre raised less than $1 billion in funding.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/beats-by-dr-dre

WhatsApp raised less than $70 million.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp#section-ove...

From looking at Crunchbase, Instagram didn’t raise any outside funding.

None of the companies you listed raised anywhere near what Uber, Lyft and AirBnb raised.

That might be because none of these companies are operating in the real world while Uber, Lyft and AirBnB do.