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Soylent green is people. The founder's personal problems have everything to do with the business. If a founder's life falls apart, then it's the business that

Soylent green is people. The founder's personal problems have everything to do with the business. If a founder's life falls apart, then it's the business that will suffer. Keeping founders poor is a great way to make an investment more risky.

tptacek 16y ago
Let's not veer off into crazytown here. I'm not saying the founders are irrelevant to the business. I see why you think I might have been. I'm saying that it's not despicable for venture capitalists not to care about the founders wedding. They are making an investment. Do I care about the well being of the guy who manages VFINX? What percentage of the founder/investor drama you read about on HN comes from misunderstandings about that basic fact? 90%? You can imagine a better world in which everyone worked together as a team to the betterment of all involved, but the reality is that you are in business, and there are going to be times when business doesn't give a sh#t about your problems. I think this gets overlooked because we read a lot about a very specific investor who seems unusually attuned to the well-being of its investments. But they do that because it makes very good business sense, and because they've rigged their model so that the success or failure of any one investment is much less impactful than it would be at Battery Ventures; they have less incentive to be ruthless.
- natrius 16y ago
  > Do I care about the well being of the guy who manages VFINX? Well he is pretty replaceable...
  - tptacek 16y ago
    And that's a business decision, not a moral one.
  - stevenbedrick 16y ago
    That being sort of the whole point of VFINX... :-)
- cperciva 16y ago
  VCs shouldn't care about a founder's wedding -- but they should care about whether a founder is going to be stressed about going into debt to pay for a wedding. A founder's personal life becomes relevant the moment it affects the successful management of the company.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    I think everyone here is recognizing that. I'm only pushing back on the notion that words like "despicable" apply to investments and similar business decisions. They don't.

tptacek 16y ago

Let's not veer off into crazytown here. I'm not saying the founders are irrelevant to the business. I see why you think I might have been. I'm saying that it's not despicable for venture capitalists not to care about the founders wedding. They are making an investment. Do I care about the well being of the guy who manages VFINX? What percentage of the founder/investor drama you read about on HN comes from misunderstandings about that basic fact? 90%? You can imagine a better world in which everyone worked together as a team to the betterment of all involved, but the reality is that you are in business, and there are going to be times when business doesn't give a sh#t about your problems. I think this gets overlooked because we read a lot about a very specific investor who seems unusually attuned to the well-being of its investments. But they do that because it makes very good business sense, and because they've rigged their model so that the success or failure of any one investment is much less impactful than it would be at Battery Ventures; they have less incentive to be ruthless.

natrius 16y ago
> Do I care about the well being of the guy who manages VFINX? Well he is pretty replaceable...
- tptacek 16y ago
  And that's a business decision, not a moral one.
- stevenbedrick 16y ago
  That being sort of the whole point of VFINX... :-)
cperciva 16y ago
VCs shouldn't care about a founder's wedding -- but they should care about whether a founder is going to be stressed about going into debt to pay for a wedding. A founder's personal life becomes relevant the moment it affects the successful management of the company.
- tptacek 16y ago
  I think everyone here is recognizing that. I'm only pushing back on the notion that words like "despicable" apply to investments and similar business decisions. They don't.