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VCs aren’t your friends

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Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#301

Post by _yb2s »

I learned that VCs aren't my friends the hard way... they stole my company from me and left me with nothing.

I discovered a promising new medical treatment- a small molecule drug with impressive experimental results. My name is on the patent and my co-inventors decided to form a startup and gave me co-ownership/stock, although I did some work to help get the company started I didn't want to leave my current job to be involved in full time running the startup at the level they were.

They got big VC funding and the VCs reformed the startup as a new company. During the pandemic lockdown, trying to work at home while parenting a toddler with no childcare, I was sent a form to sign by a new VC firm funding the company, and I was so stressed with the pandemic situation that I just trusted them and signed it without reading it.

The VCs cut me out entirely... just deleted my shares and ownership of a company based on tech I invented and patented. I can't revoke the patent rights either, because they already had a contract licensing it from my employer.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#302

Post by throwaway11460 »

dblohm7 wrote: post #292
alephnerd wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VC Internships are intense, and not every Stanford student can land one. While some advice might be a bit meh, a lot of it is information that has value. And, no offense, but there is a massive difference in calibre between a Stanford/Cal/MIT/T10 CS program (they tend to have 2-4% acceptance rates to either the college or the CS department) and other programs. This doesn't mean that there aren't high calibre candidat…

> (they tend to have 2-4% acceptance rates to either the college or the CS department) This leads me to a broader question: What does their acceptance rate of high schoolers have to do with anything? We're always using that as some kind of proxy, but high schoolers (even the top ones) don't know much...

They probably meant universities (bachelor or masters program), but yeah I agree with you. People place way too much faith in institutions and take it as universal endorsement of ability, meanwhile many competent people are "misfits" that have all the brains and ability but can't stand the rules and mind games of these institutions; and those accepted are not significantly better than the ones below the acceptance line.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#303

Post by fairity »

leashless wrote: post #139
chollida1 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember: if VCs believed in what they were doing they would not take a 2% annual management fee and 20% of the upside. This makes no sense. Companies have fees, junior associates have student loans, buldings require rent to be paid. This is a foolish sentiment, unless you would apply it to all employees everywhere. If startup employees truly believe in their company they would also take no salary at all and just l…

VC as an asset class loses money. Within that loss, some companies do better than others. Whether that is skill , luck or finding some way to tilt the board in your favour (political influence for example) depends on who you ask. I have read that the statistics the distribution of success in the VC field was compatible with a random distribution with a very small skill bias. I do not know if that analysis was accurat…

> VC as an asset class loses money.

If you're actually open to changing your mind, provide the source for this claim.

I think you'll find you're wrong by most reasonable definitions of "losing money".

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#304

Post by throwaway11460 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #185
jorvi wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can't imagine someone like Steve Jobs or Nikola Tesla passing these VC/Ivy League kinds of tests. My "favorite" "test" is the one more for soft studies (think law or public policy) rather than STEM: for example UN internships typically have no compensation and they often require you to relocate to extremely expensive CoL areas, meaning there is an automatic filter built in where only children of very well-off paren…

Unpaid internships in general are the same "people with rich parents only" filter, to a lesser extent.

On the other hand, it's a way to get inside without being evaluated too harshly because they might lose money on you. I know people who started from nothing, couldn't pay the scholarships and were self taught, and the unpaid internship was what propelled them into a serious well paid career.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#305

Post by zrn900 »

_yb2s wrote: post #301

I learned that VCs aren't my friends the hard way... they stole my company from me and left me with nothing. I discovered a promising new medical treatment- a small molecule drug with impressive experimental results. My name is on the patent and my co-inventors decided to form a startup and gave me co-ownership/stock, although I did some work to help get the company started I didn't want to leave my current job to be…

Can you expose the names and/or the company name of those s**stains?

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#306

Post by fuzzfactor »

llamaimperative wrote: post #211
MichaelZuo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The competent ones can.

That is a ridiculous claim belied by the distribution of positive outcomes in VC. Any VC making this claim with any confidence is immediately dismissible IMO. I would literally never speak to that person again. Like in all fields, true competence comes with a deep skepticism of one’s own capabilities. Especially in a field absolutely chock full of luck, uncontrollable variables, motivated reasoning, and outright dece…

I would say that if an investor was intending to partner with someone who was uniquely advanced intellectually, it would be from spending enough time directly with the potential partner to be able to well recognize the upper echelon like it could not be accomplished any other way.

The most competent at this would sensibly not be relying very much on slides at all, and capable of clearly seeing beyond the factors like luck and uncontrollable elements.

It couldn't happen overnight, and especially not in a single slideshow, much less an email.

What happens when a founder is open to investment and only a super-genius capitalist would be appropriate?

The relevance of a slideshow might still mainly be in the "signaling" more than anything else.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#307

Post by ryandrake »

alephnerd wrote: post #267
humansareok1 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of Stanford Juniors with 1 summer internship at a VC posting 'deep' Startup insights or advice is shocking. Like what do these kids with literally no experience running or starting anything know about companies? It's mind boggling.

VC Internships are intense, and not every Stanford student can land one. While some advice might be a bit meh, a lot of it is information that has value. And, no offense, but there is a massive difference in calibre between a Stanford/Cal/MIT/T10 CS program (they tend to have 2-4% acceptance rates to either the college or the CS department) and other programs. This doesn't mean that there aren't high calibre candidat…

Does a low acceptance rate necessarily say anything about the calibre of the students? These schools can be filtering for a great many things that have nothing to do with intelligence or competence. Legacy admissions as an obvious example.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#308

Post by zrn900 »

keiferski wrote: post #21

The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It's more about whether you're smart enough and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutiona…

> The way VCs filter out potential investments seems fairly similar to the way Ivy League schools filter out potential students. (Probably because they are comprised of the same people.) It is not really about technical brilliance, or innovation, or anything that is written on their website as a core value. It's more about whether you're smart enough and can follow instructions and fit into the overarching institutional structure of school and work.

Its the same for the entire education system as Chomsky explains: It seeks to educate people smart enough to do what they are told, but dumb enough to not question it.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#309

Post by _yb2s »

zrn900 wrote: post #305
_yb2s wrote: post #301

I learned that VCs aren't my friends the hard way... they stole my company from me and left me with nothing. I discovered a promising new medical treatment- a small molecule drug with impressive experimental results. My name is on the patent and my co-inventors decided to form a startup and gave me co-ownership/stock, although I did some work to help get the company started I didn't want to leave my current job to be…

Can you expose the names and/or the company name of those s**stains?

I've spread the story around the biotech startup community in person, but can't share it here without de-anonymizing my HN account, which I would rather not do.

Re: VCs aren’t your friends

#310

Post by fuzzfactor »

data_maan wrote: post #223
MichaelZuo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if they are a bonafide super genius, then it's entirely possible. That's the minimum bar without traction however. A regular genius isn't that impressive.

How about a stable genius?

As we have seen, you can be very stable at ones utmost intellectual level year after year, and sometimes it can amazingly be someone who is naturally the complete opposite of advanced anyway.
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