491–500 of 544 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Fed doesn’t give VCs money.
It prints money, that money flows into institutions and chases returns. Much of it flows to VC, guaranteed. That’s what the Fed was literally created to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I regret to inform you that it was not isolated to "crypto funds". A lot of VCs mish-mashed them together with their other investments and slapped a Cathy Wood style name on it like "future innovation fund". VCs are mostly just salespeople, and so are founders. VCs sell to organizations such as pension funds, and founders sell to VCs. Most VCs lose money, especially in an environment full of froth, and most VCs don't…
> VCs are mostly just salespeople Only halfway. Don't the GPs have skin in the game?
I feel sorry for the retail investors caught up in yet another crypto scam. Let me try to articulate my view of what’s actually going on with these seemingly endless scams, in hopes of saving future retail investors some pain: Prominent venture capital firms like A16Z, Sequoia, etc have discovered a new get rich quick scheme: they raise a fund and invest it in a some shitcoin like FTX, SOL, etc. the shitcoin founders…
They are investors in these web3 shitcoins, so it’s complicated to prosecute them for anything when the law sees them as the victims.
In reality these VCs are co-conspirators in creating these unregulated securities, and hopefully the SEC will eventually make an example out of someone like a16z. Their Coinbase pipeline has been an absolute sham because they’ve had board-level influence on Coinbase which they’ve used to make the crypto exchange list all the shitcoins that a16z just happened to buy six months earlier. This shouldn’t be legal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pretty much how a lot of "unicorns" felt in the past 2-3 years
I once heard that a well-known gig economy company would open up new cities by giving employees essentially-unlimited credit cards and telling them to buy whatever they thought was needed, with no controls or multi-person approvals. It'll be interesting to see how VC changes in the modern environment - will they still be all-in on founders willing to unsustainably burn money just to incrementally boost the probabilit…
Option A- you task some employees with buying office furniture and equipment and then waste everyone's time by having some extra meetings and emails and bureaucracy where someone asks "is that a good price for 50 desks? Did you get multiple quotes?" and the employee says "yes" and then they approve the expense.
Option B- the same employees make the same decisions, but without the extra meetings and emails and paperwork.
Being more efficient, giving employees more autonomy and focusing on what actually matters is why startups displace incumbents. These are good things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is the model, as I currently understand it: 1) some people are rich and want to get richer 2) Ivy educated VCs invest money for group (1) in start-up companies, while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 3) Ivy educated kids start companies using money from group (2), while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 4) sometimes, through a combo of hard work, skill and luck, t…
So where is the due diligence that the VCs talk so much about, especially in the case with FTX, which supposedly didn’t have any appropriate financial management?
On that basis, the FTX thing is kind of baffling because the financial controls would seem to be core to the thesis. Having read some of the things sequoia said about their original meetings with SBF it seems they were dazzled by him personally and allowed their greed to overcome basic prudence.
[1] So for example for SVF I had to go through all the transitive dependencies of all our software (which for JS and python is generally a lot), check the licenses and actually track down authors of a few packages in the node ecosystem and ask the authors to explicitly license their software so we knew we had a right to “depend” on it.
Somehow these guys peaked at about 900 employees, according to linkedin ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockfi ) They've raised about a billion dollars of VC - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor... (note, CB lists $1.4b, of which 400M is debt from FTX, which I imagine they never got) Unbelievable the amount of destruction of value here... it's just total carnage.
> Unbelievable the amount of destruction of value here... it's just total carnage. I don't see any other replies hypothesizing this in terms that rhyme with the dot com "bust" of 2000. In late 90s, in addition to whatever product-market-fit from their "blue ocean strategies", the dot coms generally invested in and bought services from each other. Wall St didn't look at where the dollars came from or went to the secon…
This isn't just crypto, this is a fundamental strategy for most VC funds. The most valuable VC funds select portfolio companies based on whether they will succeed at selling to each other. This shows a growth multiple that is used to position the company for raising funding from the next sucker VC. That VC then "introduces" their portfolio company to their other portfolio companies, in continuum, until exit. Eventually the public market understands that the growth multiple is a house of cards and the stock tanks. But the VC is happy because they took their exit, the government is happy because these companies collectively employ hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who pay above-average tax rates, and even institutional investors are happy so long as the stocks tank individually and not in concert, making little difference to their overall portfolio. So the practice continues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
99% of the time when someone can’t hire the problem isn’t the tech or the product-space, it’s that they aren’t paying enough. If you pay me a million per year I will build boring crud apps and web integrations for you all day.
This is exactly the answer. I've worked on one very old codebase in my career. I was paid well for doing so. The graph of investment in software starts high with greenfield projects, drops over time to an all-time low as optimizations take hold, and as the software continues existing will rise to the greenfield (or more) levels of cost. The interesting thing to me is what substantiates the rises; for instance, in gre…
But there is always this HN comment with, no matter how much you pay, they put exclamation marks about how little the compensations are in France and how 35hrs is too long or having to be in office a few days a week is the bane of their existence. I’m always wondering whether we’re unionized here, it looks like a systematic complaint, no matter the conditions.
Well, I don’t know, create your own company I guess.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the legal sense, a 'Ponzi Scheme' has a specific meaning. In conversation, the definition is a bit looser. Sorta like how expressive has a different definition when you say 'that is an expressive programming language' and 'that is an expressive face'. Crypto, as a whole, is about early adopters trying to convince newcomers that crypto has value. If the early adopters can't convince anyone that crypto has value, it…
Technically everything is a ponzi scheme based on the assumption that it correlates with world GDP growth. Land, Homes, Gold, Stocks are all Ponzi. It's just that the duration of the scheme is longer. If an asteroid hits and kill all humans tomorrow except 100 people, those 100 people can get all the above 'assets' for $0. E.g The Gold Scheme has lasted over 5,000 years. Who is to say that BTC will not last at least…
I personally like to think of Gold as of Babylonians Bitcoin, it has very little value of its own - but it has a long history of being a store of value (like 5k years vs Bitcoin's 5k days). So at least in this case we have a lot of track record that Gold works.
Beside Gold, silver was also used for monetary purposes, but with time it lose its role - as more and more silver was produced as e.g. side product of copper mining. Countries that were relying on silver as the store of value (China) where hit very hard by silver inflation.
Time will show if Bitcoin is a bubble, cyber silver or cyber gold. I personally would be interested in having stable coin based on Gold, that would basically mean return of the gold standard. But in that case we have to trust some institution to keep all that gold safe...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not FUD. They used 2FA to reset his coinbase password, then accessed it as him and drained the account. On top of that they drained his bank account (also using 2FA) into the coinbase account, then drained that too. Coinbase has (or had at the time) elevated levels of trust that they just gave him, which allowed the hacker to immediately buy crypto with transferred funds. Then the hacker just transferred the cry…
so they used sms based 2fa. I had 2fa based on google authenticator (not sms), because of that attack vector. I only had a few thou dollars. But they decided google auth is not accepted anymore and I failed to login and reset it and so the result was locking my account for a year - until recently when I spent multiple days getting it reset. Thus my skepticism. No one should allow/use text message based 2fa of course.
The link I posted basically describes exactly what happened to my buddy and how they pulled it off. T-Mobile + text-2FA + coinbase is a chain of weak links.