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FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

businessinsider.com

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Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#91

Post by erk__ »

Hamuko wrote: post #87
ZeljkoS wrote: post #61

There are some golden statements in the original Sequoia article: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... For example, Sam's opinion on books: “Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.” I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actual…

> I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post. Either his three books are really short, or they're one of his several fuck ups.

I think that is a inline response in the article to SBF's statement

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#92

Post by lordnacho »

jgalt212 wrote: post #82
300bps wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that explains a lot No explanation necessary. Anyone paying attention knew this was a scam. SBF used his well connected parents to start a scam company. He created back doors in his accounting software to hide money flows. He hired his girlfriend (Harry Potter fan in her 20s) to be CEO of Alameda trading and transferred $10 billion in client funds for her to trade like it was their own money. Declared bankrup…

This is interview with Alameda CEO (Caroline Ellisaon) is bonkers. I would not trust her with $10 of my money at the dog track, much less $10B of mis-used client funds. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/ys4lmo/she_...

I thought this was one of those jokes people play on the internet. The two guys in casual clothes looking at her, a lack of acting ability, gibberish about investment... all points towards it being the beginning scene of a certain kind of movie.

I didn't think it was genuinely an interview with the CEO of Alameda.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#93

Post by foobiekr »

ForHackernews wrote: post #79
bitcharmer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Alameda's CEO. https://youtu.be/aW6SqLXw944 Un fucking believable.

She's not any younger or more awkward than Vitalik Buterin and many people consider that guy to be some sort of boy-genius.

Those people are just as dumb. Crypto attracts this weird sort of clueless hero-worshipper type, similar to the Musk thing.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#94

Post by astoor »

ZeljkoS wrote: post #61

There are some golden statements in the original Sequoia article: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... For example, Sam's opinion on books: “Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.” I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actual…

There are so many red flags in that article, and that article is coming from Sequoia Capital itself. I can't understand how anyone would have invested anything at all in FTX, let alone an astonishing $1.3 billion in Series B and Series C. Does no-one at these VCs do any form of due diligence (e.g. reading the articles on their own web sites), or are they unfathomably incompetent, or living in some alternate reality from the rest of us where everything is reversed (incompetence is competence, war is peace, ignorance is strength, etc.), or is there something else I'm missing?

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#95

Post by UncleMeat »

ahelwer wrote: post #83
lordnacho wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I'm really surprised. Of all the people who could make anti-intellectual statements, I really thought SBF was one of the last. I get that many books these days are long winded (looking at you Nassim Taleb) ways to make a point, but someone absolutely needs to document all the thinking somewhere. Whether you read the whole book in detail is also optional. But to generalize this much about all books is astonishing…

Being an effective altruist doesn't make someone an intellectual. They teach the boy-in-pond thought experiment the first week of any college elective ethics class. They hand out The Life You Could Save to all harvard undergrads in the first week. Locking yourself into a myopic utilitarianism that avoids all structural critiques seems roughly the opposite of an open intellectual perspective.

I think that the very very base level of EA (consider the relative good/efficiency of various charitable giving options; per-dollar things like mosquito nets save lots of lives) is not unreasonable, but the steps beyond are outrageous. You've got people saying that the only ethical giving is to AI organizations so that we either don't create the AI apocalypse or somehow convert all of our minds to digital form and this future benefit will outweigh every possible thing you could achieve today.

When people say "what use is the humanities" I just gawk at this new generation of tech billionaires who seemingly have developed very strongly held opinions about the social organization of people without looking at all at the prior work in this area.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#96

Post by BobbyJo »

astoor wrote: post #94
ZeljkoS wrote: post #61

There are some golden statements in the original Sequoia article: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... For example, Sam's opinion on books: “Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.” I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actual…

There are so many red flags in that article, and that article is coming from Sequoia Capital itself. I can't understand how anyone would have invested anything at all in FTX, let alone an astonishing $1.3 billion in Series B and Series C. Does no-one at these VCs do any form of due diligence (e.g. reading the articles on their own web sites), or are they unfathomably incompetent, or living in some alternate reality f…

They likely thought they'd be able to front run any issues. VCs don't invest to build viable businesses, they invest to make money. You can make a lot of money as an insider to a Ponzi scheme.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#97

Post by Scoundreller »

BobbyJo wrote: post #96
astoor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many red flags in that article, and that article is coming from Sequoia Capital itself. I can't understand how anyone would have invested anything at all in FTX, let alone an astonishing $1.3 billion in Series B and Series C. Does no-one at these VCs do any form of due diligence (e.g. reading the articles on their own web sites), or are they unfathomably incompetent, or living in some alternate reality f…

They likely thought they'd be able to front run any issues. VCs don't invest to build viable businesses, they invest to make money. You can make a lot of money as an insider to a Ponzi scheme.

I was kinda thinking the sell to investors was that only the depositors were going to lose all their money and that suited the equity investors just fine.

But seems like even that wasn’t the case.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#98

Post by wslh »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #68
pmorici wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were all inexperienced is maybe the most plausible explanation. There was reported to be no board of directors and the CEO of the related proprietary trading firm Alameda was only a couple years out of school with one prior year of work experience as an entry level employee at Jane Street.

I know some people who worked with SBF at Jane Street, and their opinion was that he was both very smart and extremely risk tolerant. And this comes from a company where people regularly bet thousands of dollars with each other on trivial things (one guy I know lost $10000 on coin flips at one party). It turned out that FTX itself was just one giant leveraged trade, not the legitimate exchange business we all thought…

It is interesting you separate "immense tolerance for risk and a disregard for the exact definitions of rules". You can be infinitely tolerant for risk but not at the expense of (some) ethics: stealing other people money. So, there is tolerance for risk and there is: your are a f****** plain (white collar) thief. We can also include the factor of being an American citizen which makes could make things worse in this case.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#99

Post by Scoundreller »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #89
jgalt212 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an advocate for more regulation. Perhaps he was envisioning a GFC style bailout in case one of his martingale bets increased beyond the size of M2.

He knew that playing friends with people in power was good insurance policy and that he could trick them.

Seems to have worked for him so far.

Will be interesting to find out what his personal assets are and how much he gets to keep.

If he was smart, he bought everyone in his family a nice house at least a year ago.

Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried

#100

Post by baq »

300bps wrote: post #76
ZeljkoS wrote: post #61

There are some golden statements in the original Sequoia article: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... For example, Sam's opinion on books: “Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.” I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actual…

I guess that explains a lot No explanation necessary. Anyone paying attention knew this was a scam. SBF used his well connected parents to start a scam company. He created back doors in his accounting software to hide money flows. He hired his girlfriend (Harry Potter fan in her 20s) to be CEO of Alameda trading and transferred $10 billion in client funds for her to trade like it was their own money. Declared bankrup…

The Harry Potter part is actually one of the few positives. The whole operation was a drug-laden clown show.
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