71–80 of 252 posts
I think the average person thinks social media is the drizzling shits but if they have to use it, they'll just stick to the large platforms.
Are softbank actually the biggest idiots in VC? It almost seems like everything they invest in is a handshake deal built on "just trust me bro" numbers.
LOL I personally know an asshat VP at SoftBank — "just trust me bruh" ! In early 2017, while being ousted from another banking system, he advised me to invest in a Retail Mall Holdings company, instead of Bitcoin (because the latter is "idiotic"). I did NOT take his advice. See CBL's returns verse BTC's.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have brought this up in another comment, but my experience in the VC world is that it operates too heavily based on 4 types of "trust": 1) Institutional trust (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, "ex-FAANG", "ex-McKinsey", etc.), 2) Social trust (someone you know that has already established one of the three other kinds of trust), 3) Serial trust ("3-exits", "former CEO/CTO/VP of..."), and 4) Transitive trust ("Sequoia investe…
I've always had this background thought that it would be a fun job to do "due diligence" on behalf of VCs. I remember being on the receiving end of some of that work, and I wasn't all that impressed. Do today's VCs take technical due diligence seriously? If not, why not?
For the technical aspects, our vcs didn't / don't care. That's our job to figure out, and if we don't, they fire founders.
I'm honestly not sure how you would seriously audit chat app numbers, and I suspect and hope Abraham Shafi is going to prison. For most businesses, if you have to seriously audit things like that, you probably shouldn't be investing. A company inflating their numbers by 20x will be pretty hard to detect, and our safeguard as an industry is that's fraud, and people go to prison for committing fraud.
Why is it always Softbank getting scammed?
https://www.businessinsider.com/13-slides-softbanks-vision-f...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/golden-geese-unicorns-inside-...
I guess this is the way to get rich quick now. Imagine a company with millions of fake users all created by a LLM app.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have brought this up in another comment, but my experience in the VC world is that it operates too heavily based on 4 types of "trust": 1) Institutional trust (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, "ex-FAANG", "ex-McKinsey", etc.), 2) Social trust (someone you know that has already established one of the three other kinds of trust), 3) Serial trust ("3-exits", "former CEO/CTO/VP of..."), and 4) Transitive trust ("Sequoia investe…
I've always had this background thought that it would be a fun job to do "due diligence" on behalf of VCs. I remember being on the receiving end of some of that work, and I wasn't all that impressed. Do today's VCs take technical due diligence seriously? If not, why not?
The first thing is that the product has to scale, be popular, then maybe make money. You can always hire people who will rewrite.
The opposite doesnt work. Technically brilliant product might be unpopular or unknown.
Please note: I dont say that things should be built poorly.
Are softbank actually the biggest idiots in VC? It almost seems like everything they invest in is a handshake deal built on "just trust me bro" numbers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always had this background thought that it would be a fun job to do "due diligence" on behalf of VCs. I remember being on the receiving end of some of that work, and I wasn't all that impressed. Do today's VCs take technical due diligence seriously? If not, why not?
Technical due dilligence isnt that important. The first thing is that the product has to scale, be popular, then maybe make money. You can always hire people who will rewrite. The opposite doesnt work. Technically brilliant product might be unpopular or unknown. Please note: I dont say that things should be built poorly.
I suspect some Theranos and uBeam investors disagree with you