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Three of our worst VC stories

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Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#131

Post by throw1234567891 »

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?

You are not shipping all your intellectual property to a third party. There’s nothing more valuable than that.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#132

Post by burnt-resistor »

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…

PSA: Integrity is worth more than any amount of money. Anyone who doesn't prioritize that and keeping their word isn't worth anything. One appearance of a selfish move is all it takes to ruin reputations. The subset of big ego celebrity VCs whom cheat almost everyone are liabilities to run away screaming from... deal only with honest people because there's never getting a good deal with a viper.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#134

Post by lrvick »

throw1234567891 wrote: post #130
lrvick wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Being capable of sshing to servers to maintain things sure was.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#135

Post by dang »

nailer wrote: post #128
dang wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/20627913070…

Ah, I see. I actually originally posted the x.com links but plenty of HN users can't read Twitter threads that way, so we usually try to provide a readable alternative. (Plus this helps to reduce offtopic complaints in threads.) You'll therefore often see both a twitter/x link and the corresponding xcancel link in toptext - like in these recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317774

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48311485

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212493

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071262

In the current case, I decided not to do that because it would have made the toptext way too noisy, so I chose the domain that most people would be able to read.

As for HN's policy, you're right about the rule but not its scope. It only applies to submission links, i.e. the URL that a story title is linked to, which also determines the domain displayed to the right of the title.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#136

Post by lrvick »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #126
keiferski wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, first "real" startup and we were absolutely desperate for some seed cash. Mistakes were made.

These days I have significantly higher self respect, always have multiple income and funding sources, and a lot more protective of my time.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#137

Post by nailer »

dang wrote: post #135
nailer wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/20627913070…

Ah, I see. I actually originally posted the x.com links but plenty of HN users can't read Twitter threads that way, so we usually try to provide a readable alternative. (Plus this helps to reduce offtopic complaints in threads.) You'll therefore often see both a twitter/x link and the corresponding xcancel link in toptext - like in these recent examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317774 https://news.ycom…

> HN users can't read Twitter threads that way

This doesn’t seem correct. I can view all of these without a Twitter login. Compare this with nytimes, where a login is required but we still always post the canonical URL per the guideline.

> Plus this helps to reduce offtopic complaints in threads.

That can be a fixed with moderation and bans.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#138

Post by keiferski »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #126
keiferski wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For sure, hugely rude move by the VC. But unfortunately I’d just expect that from them.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#139

Post by toomuchtodo »

lrvick wrote: post #121
momojo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

Do you have a write up available on your build? A friend is looking for a similar solution where they can offer an API/service for internal use.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#140

Post by bombcar »

CPLX wrote: post #46
cryzinger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people fail to recognize that they're the next target, or convince themselves they're special in some way that makes them immune. It's like when someone knowingly participates in an affair and tells themselves "Sure, they're cheating on their current partner to be with me, but after they break things off I know we'll be together forever!"

Some people really do thrive on this shit though. They know the rules of the game and want to play it. What they’re really thinking is they’ll be better at the game than their opponents. I mean can you actually imagine the internal monologue of a guy like Sam Altman?

LLMs have more of an internal monologue, and they have none.
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