121–130 of 234 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I wonder if people will one day wake up and just ditch all the tech. That's seems to be the only way to be out of this mess.
Hard disagree. Societal change and more inventions are needed, not a degrowth attitude.
Wow, TIL a16z hired the NYC subway guy as a partner purely as a political stunt. This on top of the $115M in the midterms, them no longer legally being a VC firm, and recent discussion on dark patterns in their portfolio [1]. I'm inclined to agree with the thesis of the article especially with regards to this firm. Looking forward to the other articles in the series. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416055
a16z has always struck me as the shadiest vc - i associate them with NFT's, crypto and god knows what. They personify the amorality of chasing money over anything (Maybe indicative of SV culture these days in general).
Wow, TIL a16z hired the NYC subway guy as a partner purely as a political stunt. This on top of the $115M in the midterms, them no longer legally being a VC firm, and recent discussion on dark patterns in their portfolio [1]. I'm inclined to agree with the thesis of the article especially with regards to this firm. Looking forward to the other articles in the series. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416055
a16z has always struck me as the shadiest vc - i associate them with NFT's, crypto and god knows what. They personify the amorality of chasing money over anything (Maybe indicative of SV culture these days in general).
I’m a VC and agree with much of this. The mega firms have totally warped VC and the desire for massive cash appreciation has led to a host of bad characters getting involved. I still love working with early stage companies but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence. There are so many issues destroying early sta…
I'm in a startup, and we are (somewhat lazily) trying to do Series A fundraising. We _are_ a company that has AI as a part of our app, but not an LLM company. The advice from our early investors was to basically overhype ourselves, telling that we can transform the world overnight. And also to remove any mentions of our _actual_ product that has real paying users because it can muddy the grand vision. Another hot thi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I wonder if people will one day wake up and just ditch all the tech. That's seems to be the only way to be out of this mess.
Hard disagree. Societal change and more inventions are needed, not a degrowth attitude.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Y'all need ethics is what ya need.
I agree. Ethics is at the forefront of everything I do both personally and professionally. I used to serve on an ethics in business council. All the investments we make are grounded in genuinely improving the world. It’s unfortunate that so much money flows to certain VC firms when people like me exist since I reckon I’m much more aligned with what the general population wants.
I’m a VC and agree with much of this. The mega firms have totally warped VC and the desire for massive cash appreciation has led to a host of bad characters getting involved. I still love working with early stage companies but it is hard to cut your own lane when these mega groups control so many aspects of the stack and have such outsized capital and political influence. There are so many issues destroying early sta…
I'm in a startup, and we are (somewhat lazily) trying to do Series A fundraising. We _are_ a company that has AI as a part of our app, but not an LLM company. The advice from our early investors was to basically overhype ourselves, telling that we can transform the world overnight. And also to remove any mentions of our _actual_ product that has real paying users because it can muddy the grand vision. Another hot thi…
Doing a raise has always been weird, there are lots of things that impact it, and different players in PE have totally different theses and motivations.
As a founder, finding the right investment partner has always been one of the most important and difficult things.
As a rule of thumb, I recommend to founders that only about 50% of the value of the investor is their cash investment. In many cases, less than that.
The things that are at least as important are their advisors (who open doors for you), their portfolio companies that can partner with you, and the alignment of their thesis and worldview.
I don't see any of that as having really changed much recently, other than a tightnening of capital for non-AI companies, but I suspect we're going to see a big shift there over the next 18-24 months, as the pressure from the LPs to deploy stays the same, but fingers get burnt from this bubble.
Also, don't forget family offices and industry VCs (Optum Ventures, etc...) that have a lot of these features built in to their structure, not just the fund.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s the second gilded age Hopefully this one will pass, just as the first did
The Gilded Age didn’t just “pass”. It was ended by strong unions and antitrust legislation (and enforcement). Passivity will kill us if we let the oligarchs have their way. Hope is not a plan. Appeasement will have no more success than it did in WWII.
Firefights with guns, hand-to-hand violence, and real deaths were needed to give unions the leverage they had.
For some reason this history isn't taught in schools.
VC was good when a guy with no technical skills raised 10s of millions of dollars. That was when VC was good, right? This guy has been grifting his entire career but it's those other people who are the problem, guys! He's not wrong about VC but he's another Chamath - a guy who grifts a thing to death, moves on to the next grift and goes 'look, that grift I'm no longer doing - it's bad, very bad!'
You should ask Chamath how he feels about empowering workers through unions.
When you get caught stealing candy, saying 'look, he stole more than me!' doesn't work. Were you raised in a human society? I thought people learned these things when they were 7.