Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Three of our worst VC stories

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 170 posts

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#121

Post by lrvick »

momojo wrote: post #118
lrvick wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy a few GPUs so you can skip the Claude subscription, and never have to worry about rate limits, privacy, or refusals. Will pay for itself with a small team in a few months. I mostly work on custom from scratch Linux operating systems and packages across dozens of languages. I do 100% of my AI work today using two AMD r9700 pro GPUs on a 10yo pc I pulled out of an old arcade machine. AI subscriptions only make sens…

How long has this been your daily driver? How has this setup worked for you compared to enterprise models? Which models?

Maybe 2 months. I have mostly used the Qwen series, and currently running Qwen3.6 27B for programming and debugging and Qwen3.6 35B for speed and research. Both punch way way above their weight and replaced Qwen3.5 122B for me. Qwen 3.6 27B even is, for my workloads, preferable over Big Pickle (GLM-4.6) which is the only large third party model I have used extensively for reference and comparison as it is free and requires no signup or PII via OpenCode. My go to agent solution though is Charm Crush.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#122

Post by c2h5oh »

camel_gopher wrote: post #17

Next up, one of our worst CEO stories

A CEO got entire 20 man dev team into boardroom and asked everyone to voice any concerns about technical debt, bad development practices, anti patterns as well as project management issues.

The 4 people who spoke up were all fired on the same day 3 or 4 weeks later. 7 more quit shortly after - as soon as they got any decent offer. 6 months later about a quarter of the 20 were still with the company.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#123

Post by lrvick »

simmschi wrote: post #120
lrvick wrote: post #114

I once had a VC ask to meet my founders and I for his morning breakfast at a run down diner in texas. So we fly out from Florida pitch deck in hand, and meet him at his booth. We pull out the deck, he says "Do not need that. How many paying customers do you have?" Given we were at MVP stage and were running a public sentiment analysis driven social media search engine using our published academic AI work (15 years ag…

So, how long did it take you to go 100 customers after this pitch?

In the end my co-founders and investors wanted to sell to a single specific political party exclusively. I chose not to participate as it did not align with my goals, and started a small IT company instead. The original project was dead within a couple months of me leaving given no one else had any idea what ssh was.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#124

Post by __alexs »

mitchellh wrote: post #11
stevepotter wrote: post #2

All I ever hear are horror stories. Can someone tell me a good story about VC that isn't Facebook or something?

As with all things, the horror stories just get the most attention. People love to rage. There are plenty of boring (good, even!) VCs out there. They just work more quietly, professionally. I'll share a story, but its about a close friend and not me so I won't name any explicit actors and I'm going to round out the numbers. You either trust me or you don't, but this is a very direct relationship I have to both the fo…

I wonder how the LPs in the fund felt when they heard they lost out on this?

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#125

Post by youngtaff »

jaggederest wrote: post #30
giancarlostoro wrote: post #20

The first I heard of Cloudflare was a recommendation from someone who used to DDoS websites (and yes they've been arrested for related crimes, long story), and I thought "what the heck is Cloudflare" then over the coming years, I kept seeing other friends using it. It's really interesting that Cloudflare was able to pop into a market that Akamai could have snagged for themselves or outright tried to buy out Cloudflar…

And as someone who briefly had to interact with Akamai, the deficiencies in their product are not even close to subtle.

And yet Akamai is profitable… whereas Cloudflare is not…

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#126

Post by iJohnDoe »

keiferski wrote: post #119
lrvick wrote: post #114

I once had a VC ask to meet my founders and I for his morning breakfast at a run down diner in texas. So we fly out from Florida pitch deck in hand, and meet him at his booth. We pull out the deck, he says "Do not need that. How many paying customers do you have?" Given we were at MVP stage and were running a public sentiment analysis driven social media search engine using our published academic AI work (15 years ag…

At what point does this kind of groveling behavior actually become a negative signal, though? If you’re willing to fly halfway across the country just to talk to a VC in a diner, it signals a lot of desperation IMO. I haven’t had a ton of interactions with VCs; however, I have read innumerable books about the VC world, and a recurring theme is that VCs are competitive and don’t like being left out of a deal / losing…

You're not really wrong. However, it was a power play by the VC and to make themselves feel important. Hopefully they grew up a bit since then.

No matter how you look at it, if the only question was, "Do you have 100 customers?" then they could have sent and read that e-mail over breakfast.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#127

Post by malshe »

tty456 wrote: post #72
malshe wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone asked him this down the thread. He replied that it was said to him. So it’s a first party account.

It's interesting he provides quotes for the other stories, but not this one. And still doesn't in the thread. Again, i'm not debating the authenticity, but is it possible he's inferring that based on something not-so-explicit being said? I'd love to see/hear the words that people actually say when I hear stories like "they said they wouldn't [invest/buy/etc] from me because i'm a woman".

Maybe he wrote his first tweet then thought of putting direct quotes in the next two. Not everything needs to be a conspiracy.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#128

Post by nailer »

dang wrote: post #105
nailer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please fix the URL? HN policy is to link to the canonical site rather than an archive service, which I’m sure you are aware of. Thanks!

Which URL?

These ones:

https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/2062768969560510486

https://x.com/typesfast/status/2062791307094048937

https://x.com/awxjack/status/2062605286683336757

https://x.com/travisk/status/2062224472426365045

https://x.com/mark_cummins/status/2062293061426663612

Which were replaced with non-canonical URLs:

https://xcancel.com/dunkhippo33/status/2062768969560510486

https://xcancel.com/typesfast/status/2062791307094048937

https://xcancel.com/awxjack/status/2062605286683336757

https://xcancel.com/travisk/status/2062224472426365045

https://xcancel.com/mark_cummins/status/2062293061426663612

Apparently by you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420245

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#129

Post by tempaccount420 »

youngtaff wrote: post #125
jaggederest wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as someone who briefly had to interact with Akamai, the deficiencies in their product are not even close to subtle.

And yet Akamai is profitable… whereas Cloudflare is not…

There are more important things than money.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#130

Post by throw1234567891 »

lrvick wrote: post #123
simmschi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how long did it take you to go 100 customers after this pitch?

In the end my co-founders and investors wanted to sell to a single specific political party exclusively. I chose not to participate as it did not align with my goals, and started a small IT company instead. The original project was dead within a couple months of me leaving given no one else had any idea what ssh was.

Was ssh essential to the product?
Post reply on HN