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Show HN: Parrot.vc – I forced a bot to read 65,000 VC tweets and it became a VC

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Re: Show HN: Parrot.vc – I forced a bot to read 65,000 VC tweets and it became a VC

#111

Post by smt88 »

todd3834 wrote: post #102
yjhoney wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Most VCs are just that, useless sacks of breathing meat. For that reason, I've avoided them. Even during parties, I (unfairly) dismiss someone the moment I find out they are a VC and just invested in ...(insert famous tech here)... Based on personal experience, VCs are statistically more likely having a conversation with you thinking they are better than you the whole time (and therefore knows better). Not al…

> thinking they are better than you the whole time Do people really think like that? This sounds like possibly a personal insecurity. I don’t know too many grown adults who think things like “I am better than you”. Better at what? making money? Smarter? Getting dates? I don’t know... maybe I’m just too optimistic but all of the VCs I’ve met have been super nice.

> Do people really think like that?

Yes. If you're pitching to a VC, they have power over you. It leads them to believe they deserve that power and that they understand your business (and all business) better than you.

That doesn't mean they're not nice. Feeling superior and behaving pleasantly are not mutually exclusive.

Re: Show HN: Parrot.vc – I forced a bot to read 65,000 VC tweets and it became a VC

#113

Post by andrewflnr »

Ed: rm useless "bug" report.

oh lord.

> I believe that being more at peace in the present would have given me greater patience and ability to be more wordy in order to seem genuine?

A bot talking about how to seem more genuine. By being wordy, in an awkwardly long sentence. The irony burns. https://www.parrot.vc/-Lv4C1NRdxJrut8qiuK_

Re: Show HN: Parrot.vc – I forced a bot to read 65,000 VC tweets and it became a VC

#114

Post by smt88 »

georgewsinger wrote: post #56

VC twitter is excruciatingly cringe. I cannot imagine giving equity to these virtue signaling parrots.* The worst offenders are the people who - have never personally taken a company from zero to one (even worse: when they have internally taken a company from 1 to N, and think that qualifies them). - have a huge portfolio full of incremental companies - constantly talk about trends on Twitter - constantly talk about…

> have never personally taken a company from zero to one

I've met quite a few angels and VCs who have exactly one successful exit on their resume. Without more exits, the overwhelming likelihood is that the exit was luck.

Like most humans, they fail to see the luck in their success and believe they know something about business that other people don't. They rely heavily on their experience and push their portfolio companies to make the same decisions they made.

It's possible there's no formula for a great VC, and incentive structures make it unlikely that talented, visionary, humble people are in that role. If you know how to build things, why be a VC instead of building things?

Re: Show HN: Parrot.vc – I forced a bot to read 65,000 VC tweets and it became a VC

#115

Post by smt88 »

StuffedParrot wrote: post #85
yjhoney wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Most VCs are just that, useless sacks of breathing meat. For that reason, I've avoided them. Even during parties, I (unfairly) dismiss someone the moment I find out they are a VC and just invested in ...(insert famous tech here)... Based on personal experience, VCs are statistically more likely having a conversation with you thinking they are better than you the whole time (and therefore knows better). Not al…

I often wonder what the positive VC experience is like.

A friend of mine has a board that makes connections to clients, supports long-term decision-making, and otherwise gets completely out of the way. That seems as good as it can get.

I know people who receive and value advice from VCs, but my observation has been that it's better to trust your boots on the ground rather than a very-part-time observer who's never talked to one of your clients.

Re: Show HN: Parrot.vc – I forced a bot to read 65,000 VC tweets and it became a VC

#117

Post by tomhoward »

paulgrahamisvc wrote: post #108

So lots of people in this thread that realize vcs are supercilious talking heads. Why does Paul graham, the blogger who claimed Microsoft is dead and that lisp , which btw is untyped and slower than maybe even Go, is a competitive badvantage get admiration? Is it just by the wannabes?

Lisp was a competitive advantage for the company that made him rich in the mid-90s. He wouldn't claim it is for a new company starting out now. He later wrote that Python and Ruby were a competitive advantage. They wouldn't be now. But other languages/platforms are. His claim wasn't that Lisp is and will always be a competitive advantage, but that at any time, there is a powerful platform available that few developers/companies have embraced yet, but that could be a competitive advantage to a company that does.

As for Microsoft, it still is dead in the sense that he articulated in that essay; it doesn't offer any novel/powerful/ubiquitous platforms that new companies could or should build new products/companies on. It barely exists as a mobile platform, nobody has built significant new companies out of Windows desktop software in years, and its cloud platform is just one of several, and far from the biggest/best. He never said it would go out of business, just that it would become a generic BigCo, which is exactly what it is.

He also built a new type of investment company that invested in Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Stripe and many other new startups, before any other VC would look at them, and at a tiny fraction of the valuation that other VCs would invest at. That investment model he pioneered has since been imitated countless times around the world - unsuccessfully, in most cases, because he did such a good job that others couldn't seriously compete.

With all that said, I think there's plenty he's been wrong about, but he's been right about the most important stuff, and deserves admiration for that.

Re: Show HN: Parrot.vc – I forced a bot to read 65,000 VC tweets and it became a VC

#120

Post by raverbashing »

nloui wrote: post #48
dozzman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got the same one... Are they pre-generated maybe? Edit: Link: https://www.parrot.vc/-LvAxcZD23ySp2dL0sZw

They generate on a cron job every 15 minutes and I also pass the site through a Cloudflare cache because I'm cheap and the actual code runs on a $5 DigitalOcean box :-)

So, it's webscale already. VCs will love this! /s
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