Who Are My Investors?

Why is it assumed that this morally undesirable money would take the form of an LP directly signed on with one's VC? Can't this money instead invest itself with an existing LP that's seemingly on the up and up?

For example, say Goldman is an LP on one of your VC's funds from which your company receives money from. Setting aside how morally dubious they are on the face of it, they're otherwise a reputable and respected American company.[0]

However, where's their money coming from? On a larger scale Goldman absolutely does business with the Saudis and has forever. On a smaller scale, I'm sure there's any number of vehicles or ways to otherwise structure the money going into a particular investment such that it'd be difficult for the eventual recipient (i.e. the startup) to know exactly where it's coming from, let alone the VC.

[0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/goldman-quietly... /s

So people can't correct their views at any important news? They should have known better before and can't no longer correct their views, its that what you are saying?

> Pretty much every single comment so far is cynical. "No one really wants to know how the sausage is made", lots of money is tainted anyway, it's just PR fluff, etc etc.

It seems like a deeper problem than that, which is that money is fungible. It's the same thing as saying we shouldn't buy Saudi oil. If the only result is that you buy some other oil and the people who would have bought that oil buy the Saudi oil, nothing meaningful has changed.

To get a meaningful result you need one of two things. One is solidarity (i.e. market power), but you never have that in a diffuse competitive market. The other is to do something that isn't fungible. For example, if you actually use less oil (buy an electric car and solar panels, or support nuclear etc.), it makes a proportional difference even at the individual level, because then it isn't a matter of everyone having to act together to accomplish anything, it's a matter of each person doing their share adding up. Then the cost to them is in proportion to how many people act rather than the cost being effectively zero unless you reach a critical mass you can't achieve.

But there isn't any obvious equivalent to that for venture capital. For oil, basically all of the foreign exporters are antagonistic, and burning oil itself is harmful regardless of the source, so everything lines up for that working as a mechanism of retaliation. But if solar/wind/hydro/nuclear/etc. are the alternatives to oil, what is the alternative to money supposed to be?

To get anywhere on that front you need market power, which essentially means something like government sanctions. But we don't do that because we still need their oil. So it seems like we're right back to stop burning oil.

I really like this. If we all started factoring moral issues into our decisions, the world would start becoming a better place.

Unfortunately, people love to justify doing nothing. Approaches like whataboutism, relativism, and convincing yourself that your decision doesn't matter because X/Y/Z are rampant — as witnessed by comments under this post.

What would be the time frame you care about I would not be so sure that even most western governments did not cross a similar line in one form or the other. It certainly the case that US have being propping up or even installing regimes that were involved in mass atrocities. So as much as we like to feel like we are above this type of thing the reality is that we are directly or indirectly responsible for much worst atrocities. We have being propping up Saudi Royal family for how many decades now?