Oh my! Collecting that 2/20 while I sleep is sooooo exhausting! /s
VCs Are Just Tired
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: VCs Are Just Tired
#32"Lack of bandwidth, hyper-velocity, a pittance of sleep" If we are just going to put together words to describe concepts that make no sense then you are probably meeting people that have never made a dollar on their investment. Some of the best VCs are original thinkers and will take their time making investments. The thing about them is that they will be the first to making an investment in a company even before it…
Venture capitalist success is indistinguishable from randomness. It's pure, unadulterated luck. "The best VCs are thinkers and visionaries" is post-hoc bullshit justifications to make their wealth seem the result of wits and hard work, and not just the product of luck + the pre-existing capital to invest.
Ron Conway alone disproves your thesis. Some people are just very good. Some prescriptions are also very good, like Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins. And the success of the good is not purely Matthew Effect, rich gets richer stuff, as Andreesen Horowitz shows. If you’re good enough you can go from not a VC firm to top 5 VC firm in under five years.
Re: VCs Are Just Tired
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to what? Just because you're not in survival mode in the truest form of the word doesn't mean you aren't trying to maintain whatever you have. Expectations can still be set, email doesn't turn off, and personal relationships (kids, family, friends) continue on, along with personal goals, health, increased cost of living, etc. Just because it's 'voluntary' doesn't mean it's not work or it's not stress or it…
my point is there’s a lot of people who complain about work that could in theory never work another day in their life again but do for non-financial reasons anyway
Sounds edge case-y (and only decreasing as wealth inequality increase)... but as you said, there are other reasons that keep them going. It’s not about “survival” in the most basic sense. That doesn’t make it any less real to those people.
Re: VCs Are Just Tired
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to Hacker News—not even about VCs. We're looking for curious conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Assume for a moment the guy is right by whatever circumstances. There are three supporting pieces of evidence and perhaps the last sentence is "charged" but I don't see how it is offensive even if wholly incorrect. How would he present the very ideas as "curious conversation"?
“Curious conversation” means working towards understanding, as distinct from heaping blame.
In all the examples cited, there are many actors and circumstances that have brought these things about; investors, sure, but also customer demand and behavior, technological evolution, social and economic factors at micro and macro scales, and countless millennia of evolution.
Angry scapegoating might be briefly cathartic but doesn’t effect actual change.
A healthy, curious conversation explores all factors and yields ideas for new solutions to present day problems.
Re: VCs Are Just Tired
#35those poor VCs, how can they live on 52M
Re: VCs Are Just Tired
#36Everyone is tired because they are overworked: engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, police, cooks, janitors. Long shifts, split shifts, long commutes, homework, constant interruptions, questionable management practices, weak labor laws, weak enforcement thereof, asymmetric legal costs, self-training on your own time, expectations of faster and faster turnaround times, less and less support staff...
Who's investigating the reasons behind all the burnout and erosion everywhere ?
Re: VCs Are Just Tired
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Venture capitalist success is indistinguishable from randomness. It's pure, unadulterated luck. "The best VCs are thinkers and visionaries" is post-hoc bullshit justifications to make their wealth seem the result of wits and hard work, and not just the product of luck + the pre-existing capital to invest.
Ron Conway alone disproves your thesis. Some people are just very good. Some prescriptions are also very good, like Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins. And the success of the good is not purely Matthew Effect, rich gets richer stuff, as Andreesen Horowitz shows. If you’re good enough you can go from not a VC firm to top 5 VC firm in under five years.
In no way do these people disprove the argument or other EMH-like arguments (efficient market hypothesis).
In many random distributions, if you sample enough you're going to get outcomes at the tails.
Re: VCs Are Just Tired
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't the obvious capitalism solution to that be - loans become very cheap because people dont know what else to do with their money. Lots of people now have access to (other people's) capital. Wealth is no longer as concentrated, wisdom of crowds prevail?
Or you could pay works more so that, in their role as consumers, they can buy more.
Once one's basic needs are met, which has a upper limit on how much needs to be purchased, what else is there to buy? In the olden days people needed to buy things to keep themselves entertained, but in this day of age we just hop onto the internet for free (effectively).
Re: VCs Are Just Tired
#39Everyone is tired because they are overworked: engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, police, cooks, janitors. Long shifts, split shifts, long commutes, homework, constant interruptions, questionable management practices, weak labor laws, weak enforcement thereof, asymmetric legal costs, self-training on your own time, expectations of faster and faster turnaround times, less and less support staff...
How did you conclude that “everyone” is overworked from this article? The managerial class notion of overwork/busyness is completely voluntary.
Yes but those voluntary hours are necessary signaling to justify one's place in the contemporary social order. Without them, someone's peers might think them undeserving of their salary and/or status. So they wouldn't want to be the one VP at the company who has adequate leisure time, fulfills family obligations, and regularly gets a full night's rest. Or if they are somehow that person, they keep quiet about it!
I began typing this intending it to be sarcastic, but at its conclusion, I am no longer certain about that.
Re: VCs Are Just Tired
#40It's almost as if capital is too concentrated, to the point that the people with who control it don't know what to do with it. Oh wait. The basis of capitalism is markets, and the wisdom of the crowd (the "invisible hand") controlling them and making them efficient. VC's (and wealth concentration in general) are the opposite of that. They are the very-much-visible hand. We'd solve this problem with progressive taxati…
> IMO, if you believe in free markets, then your position is inconsistent if you also believe if you also believe in unconstrained wealth collection. But if you believe in free markets, then your position is also inconsistent if you don't believe in unconstrained wealth collection. Because that's one of the things that the market sometimes does when it's free. And I'm sure that someone will say "That means that the i…
More likely is that there is no objective "free" market. Is it more "free" to include pricing information from externalities (say with a carbon tax)? Or is it more "free" when those participating in the market are able to harm me without my consent through those externalities?
There's no ground standard for non-interference in the affairs of others.