91–100 of 252 posts
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Without a phone number how do you prevent abuse and spam?
You can purchase access to phone numbers for the purposes of verifying accounts. While phone numbers are a method to prevent easy sybil attacks, it is not effective when dealing with a determined actor.
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They all want to be the WeChat of the rest of the world. They want a platform that people live inside and all other companies just become apps inside their store (where they collect a tax of course). None of the mentioned apps have managed to do this. Maybe that is because there is no consumer interest, but it doesn't make the goal any less appealing.
They all seem to be missing the part where WeChat played out this way because the Chinese government mandated it, not because people have an inherent desire to do everything in a single "app". WeChat is an island of Chinese-controlled services and content within a sea of Western-run mobile 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.
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…
Serial trust is especially interesting for me.
Someone could have founded 3 companies that weren't good investments (possibly all lost money), and VCs will throw money at that person before they try someone new.
Transitive trust is also interesting. The majority of "rockstar VCs" made one good investment. Not really possible to rule out luck... And the majority of the people there now had nothing to due with that decision way back when.
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Hi Charlie! You could be onto something here... what you have enumerated seem to be examples of various forms of "Social Proof" (for lack of a better way of saying/defining it). It would be interesting, highly interesting, I think, to try and enumerate all of the possible forms of Social Proof. You've definitely nailed 4 of them -- but are there others? What if we broaden our search outside of the VC world? Whatever…
Actually, when I think about it some more -- perhaps the broader topic area here is not necessarily that about "trust" or "social proofs" -- maybe it's about "Credibility" -- what causes a person or organization or business or business idea -- to have credibility (or apparent credibility as some cases may be) -- especially when large amounts of money, large financial transactions, large investments -- are at stake? W…
The parent described 4 of the common heuristics of how we develop trust.
I work in cybersecurity, so I tend to mentally put a “how could these heuristics be abused to get a well intentioned employee/customer to misplace their trust in a scammer?” scenario.
When it comes to society, I have been trying to empathize with those poor souls who fell for QAnon, Stop the Steal, Flat Eartherism, and dozens of other farcical claims that millions of people have adopted, despite some of those people being extremely bright.
Your parent is not really “onto something”; they are just enumerating a few heuristics that marketers, salespeople, people of influence, scammers/conmen have known for millennia.
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.
Yep, cue the "free market" folks celebrating poorly-informed transactions between VCs dumping these companies on construction workers investing to try to fight inflation enough to send their kids to college.
Double whammy of screwing poor people with monetary policy.
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.
Having recently completed fundraising for a pre-seed, it's wild to me that I had VCs spending multiple weeks sometimes on "due diligence" for an idea-stage product, yet there are many examples of just yolo huge investments. It's who you know or what hype is around you in these cases I suppose.
That, however, doesn’t mean that later or faster investment rounds are any more informed.
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Yep, cue the "free market" folks celebrating poorly-informed transactions between VCs dumping these companies on construction workers investing to try to fight inflation enough to send their kids to college.
Inflation caused by the central bank that gives free money to the rich and makes classic investments in a safety account pay less than inflation. Double whammy of screwing poor people with monetary policy.
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.
Having recently completed fundraising for a pre-seed, it's wild to me that I had VCs spending multiple weeks sometimes on "due diligence" for an idea-stage product, yet there are many examples of just yolo huge investments. It's who you know or what hype is around you in these cases I suppose.
Everyone on and around social media wants new and better forms of social media. 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.
s/computers/furniture/, or kitchen ware (cooking), or any other daily thing that some people have significantly above-average interest in.
This also goes for software: word processors, machine learning frameworks, browsers.