61–70 of 102 posts
> including the extension of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission surveillance and whistleblower program, investor due diligence reform, and dedicated entrepreneurship education interventions Wasn't the SEC essentially gutted to the point it's basically toothless right now?
The SpaceX IPO is perhaps the latest and most damning outcome of that gutting.
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I’m really not trying to virtue signal. There’s a lot more nuance to my reasoning to leave the traditional VC game. All of them led me to declaring it fundamentally incompatible with my world view. Which then led me to my current path of attempting to form a syndicate of like-minded individuals. But this study validates a lot of feelings I’ve had over the last several months. There’s a ton of people that never get ca…
Oh, I did not take it as virtue signaling at all! I do actually admire you for looking at a dirty game and saying "I will not play this, I will find a better way." If I ever win the lottery, I'm going to create the Joseph Welch Foundation. The foundation will give monetary awards to people who have demonstrably pushed back against corruption, lies, and bullshit. For those who don't recognize the name, Joseph Welch is…
If you do that, given enough time, you will be awarding people that learnt how to game the award. Back to corruption, lies and bullshit.
A lot of 'numbers' startups cite are basically fake I think. Like if someone says we have this many users as a statement to TechCrunch you have no idea what they are actually calculating But there is a clear line that gets crossed if you start actually making a database of millions of synthetic users and that's what happened with 'Frank' that sold to JP Morgan and eventually the founder was prosecuted
Even some users are just bots... (At least their behavior is/are)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The SpaceX IPO is perhaps the latest and most damning outcome of that gutting.
Seems the current SEC head is a moron. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/sec-chair-defends-...
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What is nontraditional? Seems like it could be even more rife with fraud with lower oversight.
Probably a bad qualifier. Maybe non-VC would have been better. Myself and my co-founder are trying to raise via a syndicate of like-minded investors/angels in lieue of the "traditional" VC dance.
I don't know the details of her situation, what else she could have done to protect her investments, or how common an experience that was, but there were many comments in agreement under her post, so I'm just curious if it's widespread.
"Entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances (façades) that externally project high-growth performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual underperformance." This would accurately describe a some of the startups I've worked at. ;-P
Everyone does this at every level, from Execs down to middle managers, for every possible metric.
My thinking is that the post-ZIRP era, with its more limited funding, will probably require a lot more honesty, transparency, and vetting from founders. “Casting a wide net” makes more sense when funding comes cheap and easy.
Isn't venture capital just playing along too, though? They also benefit from all the myth making and hype storms, even if they are technically getting defrauded while funding it. They could actually audit the companies they invest in, and go after the frauds. The Nikola example is a great one--if anyone had looked carefully behind the marketing the fraud should have been obvious. But by and large they don't, really.…
The real problem with façading is the selection effect downstream: founders who inflate metrics attract investors who expect inflation, creating a system where honesty becomes a competitive disadvantage. You end up filtering out exactly the people you'd want on your cap table.
“Our theoretical framework captures how entrepreneurs facing minor, wide, and extreme expectation-reality gaps engage in evermore sophisticated efforts to detach the venture’s externally projected appearance from its actual operational reality.” Look, I’m not promoting fraud at all, but having been doing seed raising for the last eight months, there have been many times where I thought the only way to compete was by…