The venture capital industry closed out 2021 with numbers that will be studied for a decade. Global funding reached roughly $643 billion across the year, a 92% jump over 2020 and by a wide margin the largest annual total ever recorded.

The mania was manufactured by cheap money. Near-zero interest rates, a pandemic-era surge in digital adoption, and a wave of crossover investors — hedge funds, mutual funds, and sovereign vehicles that had rarely touched Series A — collapsed the discipline that normally governs early-stage pricing. Rounds were marked up in weeks, not quarters.

The scoreboard reflected it. Some 586 companies achieved unicorn status during the year, pushing the aggregate value of the private unicorn board to roughly $3.8 trillion. Public markets echoed the exuberance, with 238 venture-backed companies completing IPOs at valuations above $1 billion.

The prevailing operating doctrine was scale over unit economics: grow at any cost, raise the next round, and let the multiple take care of the rest. That doctrine assumed capital would stay free. Within months, the Federal Reserve would begin to prove otherwise — and the class of 2021 would spend the next two years being repriced.

For now, though, the ecosystem was at its zenith, and few founders raising at 100x forward revenue were inclined to ask what happened when the music stopped.