The bit about him playing League of Legends during a meeting with Sequoia reads like something straight out of Silicon Valley.
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FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
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Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
#152The bit about him playing League of Legends during a meeting with Sequoia reads like something straight out of Silicon Valley.
Perhaps Mike Judge should be running a VC firm, instead of simply writing the playbook for future conmen.
I think his contributions to society are far greater in the role he's played. More than enough VCs out there. Not enough clear-eyed interpreters.
Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
#153What is striking about the Sam Bankman-Fried case is that for a long time he was considered to be one of the few who really knew what he was doing and also an advocate for more regulation. It appears to have been a smoke screen, given the financial fragility of his multiple companies, he could not have been looking for more scrutiny and regulation, he was playing Poker with politicians and his competitors. Same with…
It's a remarkable veneer. The nepotism and elite corruption is bold faced.
SBF's parents are Stanford lawyers who specialize in compliance and ethics. Alameda CEO's dad runs the economics department at MIT, where the current head of the SEC was a professor.
"I'm a big advocate for Sam because he has two parents that are compliance lawyers. If there's ever a place I can be where I'm not going to get in trouble, it's gonna be FTX" https://twitter.com/Guruleaks1/status/1591086077489844224
FBX's chief lobbyist is a former CFTC commissioner, who is now distancing himself. https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1591194581843836928
Senators are still going forward with an SBF-backed bill https://www.theblock.co/post/185746/senators-moving-forward-...
Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
#154What is striking about the Sam Bankman-Fried case is that for a long time he was considered to be one of the few who really knew what he was doing and also an advocate for more regulation. It appears to have been a smoke screen, given the financial fragility of his multiple companies, he could not have been looking for more scrutiny and regulation, he was playing Poker with politicians and his competitors. Same with…
> It appears to have been a smoke screen... He was playing poker...
This is every small tech company.
Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
#155Another Theranos. How many until SV investors lose credibility?
Madoff would be more appropriate. Most normal people weren't affected by Theranos.
Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
#156I don't get how the directors, councelors, and compliance people at the company didn't raise their hand. Jail isn't a nice place to go.
Yes, but South America is lovely this time of year.
Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he stole from the rich. They'll track him down and make an example of him.
On one hand yes BUT on the other he donated something like $40 million to Democratic Party candidates last cycle. 2nd largest donation. https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-bid...
But if we assume he can't perform similarly in the future - what reason do the Democrats have to help him now?
Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
#158What is striking about the Sam Bankman-Fried case is that for a long time he was considered to be one of the few who really knew what he was doing and also an advocate for more regulation. It appears to have been a smoke screen, given the financial fragility of his multiple companies, he could not have been looking for more scrutiny and regulation, he was playing Poker with politicians and his competitors. Same with…
Unfortunately I think the biggest red flag is one that doesn't become widely publicized, and I don't know if it happened in this case: a well-respected senior hire comes into the firm and leaves quickly, after discovering the mess. Excuses are made if it does become public, but most people brush it off as not clicking with the culture. Someone I know joined a rather large investment firm and this happened. I only kne…
Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
Yes, you can take huge risks within the law if you want, and if you do, have fun! You're probably going to lose it all at some point soon. Cryptocurrency/Web3 has had a lot of actual fraudsters and thieves, and a lot of them deserve jail time. Hopefully, some of them will get some.
By the way, expanding on the arbitrage I mentioned, the Kimchi arbitrage was a well-known trade and the big players in cryptocurrency weren't doing it for good reasons. South Korea's capital controls and anti-money laundering laws would make it very difficult to do legally without risking your other trading operations in the country. SBF was brazen enough to go for it (and risk-tolerant enough to carry a huge number of Bitcoins on his balance sheet for the ~week it takes for them to actually move) and it worked out well for him. In retrospect, it revealed a lot about his personality.
Re: FTX investor Sequoia removed its glowing profile of Sam Bankman-Fried
#160> It’s just SBF, his family (his mother, father and brother are all in town) and close friends. A small team dedicated to fixing the world—via the magic of quantitative reasoning and the overwhelming force of goodwill. (...) It’s not worth the salt in one’s tears to be sad for the plight of the oligarchy—but there is a downside to billions. Reciprocity becomes difficult between the post-economic and the merely civili…
There are so many ridiculous sentences and passages in that article. It's not worth the cheese in our navels to tally them all, though they do not approach infinity in any way.
I wonder why it took more than a day to remove from their site.