china owns 5.6% of US national debt.
does this make US debt toxic?
Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
81–90 of 311 posts
Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
That includes Hacker News, by the way. Now that "YCombinator China" is a thing, sooner or later YC is going to start getting gentle insinuations that they really ought to tone down the criticism of China on that forum site they run, if they want to keep doing business there. Then the insinuations will get not-so-gentle, and at that point either YC China or Hacker News will get the bullet.
Meh...PG writing a blog post entitled "Why YC Is Quitting China" would cause plenty of tsoris in Beijing, and the Chinese certainly know this. I'd bet that PG/sama have thought about this set of issues, and they probably have their redlines drawn, but are probably also not advertising them, as is strategically prudent.
> PG writing a blog post entitled "Why YC Is Quitting China" would cause plenty of tsoris in Beijing, and the Chinese certainly know this.
Absolutely nobody but a very select few people would care. YC is not even on the radar of lots of tech start-ups or their founders, the world is a lot larger than what you might think from hanging out here. And that's with full knowledge of the sea change that YC has brought for founders and the absolutely incredible number of companies it has generated, there are still many more people - and founders - in the world that have never heard of YC compared to those that have.
Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their personalities and expectations were toxic. They didn't understand what they invested in and were pissed when we couldn't grow a high-touch business like a pure software business. No pleasant or helpful interactions, just rage.
To be fair, toxic business relationships are far from exclusive to China.
Absolutely. They could have been US investors and had the same issues.
Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
#84I'm all for openness and transparency, but wouldn't an increase in US refusal to play with China just lead to more censorship and oppression by the communist Chinese government? Consider the following: 1. The Chinese communist government derives its legitimacy to rule almost exclusively from its massive economic growth (i.e. Chinese citizens and corporations are effectively saying to themselves "I'm ok to trade some…
I would like to remind that the Soviet regime was defeated by economic issues. I think the only reason the CPC regime might change is due to economic problems. The more abrupt they would be, the better: people need to remember better times and demand change to get back there — including people at higher positions in CPC itself. Remember how the "cultural revolution" fiasco led to serious liberalization and eventually…
Chinese growth was slowing anyway. Now they have a convenient scapegoat for that, big bad America. The long-term consequences of deep hostility against America in the general Chinese population are hard to predict, but they are not going to be favorable to us.
Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not GP, but I've pitched to a crossover fund from China and they were super seedy. On top of having a questionable website and other investments, one of the red flags was they wanted their engineers to review our source code before/without signing any NDAs or commitments.
We also had Chinese VCs ask to review our code (their value proposition was access to Chinese hospital data). Also "system design interviews" asking to essentially how everything works in technical detail, and would work for future expansion plans.
We do tech DD, and also occasionally review code so that's pretty normal. We do take great care to ensure that no secret sauce ever makes it into our reporting, and if the situation requires it do a second round of reviewing before sending out the report to the party that commissioned it. I'm not saying we will never ever leaks bits but if you take your reputation serious in this field then you will do what is possible to ensure that the proprietary stuff stays just that in case there is no deal.
Any VC that asks non-independent third parties to review your code should be shunned.
Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
For WSJ submissions you can append ?mod=rsswn to the url and read the article that way. https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-cash-is-suddenly-toxic-...
Any chance WSJ or NYT devs read HN/Reddit and work on closing these loops? They only seem to last for so long. Thanks for this one.
Equally likely they notice the thundering herd of non-subscribers accessing a select few articles through a particular hole in their subscription wall. Surely can't be that hard for them to track.
Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just a tu quoque fallacy, as venture capital being indifferent to making the world a better place does not mean it is ethical to do business with China.
“does not mean it is ethical to do business with China.” what kind of business?
If it's up to me, doing any business that aids the Chinese government is unethical.
Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no legal basis. It's just Xenophobia.
It could be xenophobia. It could be money laundering regs. It could be "national security concerns" which may be xenophobia or may be legitimate.
Too bad none of us can actually read minds, so we'll never know. If there's a charitable assumption about the state of someone's mind that the facts don't contradict, then it should be taken.
It's funny how many people are emotionally attached to the delusion that they are psychic. I honestly wonder where they got that idea.
Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh...PG writing a blog post entitled "Why YC Is Quitting China" would cause plenty of tsoris in Beijing, and the Chinese certainly know this. I'd bet that PG/sama have thought about this set of issues, and they probably have their redlines drawn, but are probably also not advertising them, as is strategically prudent.
> PG writing a blog post entitled "Why YC Is Quitting China" would cause plenty of tsoris in Beijing, and the Chinese certainly know this. Absolutely nobody but a very select few people would care. YC is not even on the radar of lots of tech start-ups or their founders, the world is a lot larger than what you might think from hanging out here. And that's with full knowledge of the sea change that YC has brought for f…
> Absolutely nobody but a very select few people would care.
Are you kidding me, it would be on the front page of the Journal. People would care after that.
Re: Chinese Cash Is Suddenly Toxic in Silicon Valley, Following U.S. Pressure
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a horrible example. Of course that's not going to wash. Of course an investor would not be willing to sell back their stake before seeing the return they were looking for. If they wanted to sell AI software to the US GOVERNMENT, they should have found US investors. If they couldn't, then investors from US allied nations. They should have seen this coming a mile away, no?
Our relationship with China looked a lot different in July, 2016 when they took that investment.
CFIUS was established in 1975, got extensive powers to block deals in 1988, and even in 2013-2015 20% of their cases involved China.