17 ms·

Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex

119 points by anonu 4y ago

draw_down 4y ago
God, all this shit is so embarrassing. The way VCs just absolutely idolized this guy is really something to see.
anshumankmr 4y ago
This is 404ing. Do you have a copy? Edit: Here's a Google Cached Copy https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33lYOGAJ:https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33... In case that is past its TTL, try this:https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...
- quantumwannabe 4y ago
  Another archive: https://archive.ph/Yg64e https://archive.ph/Yg64e
- alpb 4y ago
  Haha they replaced the page entirely with a paragraph saying: > Update: November 9, 2022 A liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.
  - anshumankmr 4y ago
    So are they walking back this statement? Not sure what they really achieved by deleting this puff piece. Everytime a puff piece is written and blows up spectacularly, it’s pretty much immortalized through the internet. The articles on Elizabeth Holmes come to mind or when someone declared M Night Shyamalan as the next Spielberg.
- adolph 4y ago
  A key awesome bit noted elsewhere: “Embarrassingly, we had never tried to reach out to Sam, because we figured he didn’t need us,” Bailhe admits. “I thought they were just minting money and had absolutely no need for investors.” Learning otherwise, they quickly contacted SBF and organized a last-minute Zoom call between him and the partners at Sequoia—at four California time on a hot July Friday afternoon. [...] The Zoom went well for all concerned. SBF looked relaxed as he answered questions, talking, as he usually does, in complete paragraphs about topics of extreme complexity. Ramnik Arora, FTX’s head of product and another ex-Facebook engineer, remembers the meeting clearly: “We’re getting all these questions from Sequoia toward the end. He’s absolutely fantastic.” [...] That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.” Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. “YES!!!” exclaimed a third. [...] “I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that f....r was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
  - NickC25 4y ago
    That's terrifying. Guy is just casually spouting bullshit while playing LoL, and one of the top VCs are just tripping over themselves to throw money at him. i can only hope the actual due diligence at top VCs is much, much more robust and deep than this. If this isn't an extreme outlier and is more the norm than I realized, well, I had way too high hopes for the so-called gatekeepers of the top echelons of society.
    - TechBro8615 4y ago
      he speaks in complete paragraphs!
- markisus 4y ago
  > But, at Jane, SBF osmosed another trading principle. He learned to be “risk-neutral”: In simple terms, a trader, given a choice between $50 and a 50 percent chance at $100, must be agnostic if they want to maximize the expected value of earnings over a lifetime. Huh? Over a lifetime, both bets have the same expected value. Is there a mathematical explanation why the more risky one is better?
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    Actually Sam hopefully understands Kelly criterion in which people optimize for log(EV), in which case here not wagering is the Kelly optimum.
- ravenhappy 4y ago
  From the article: "Just do the math: At $2,000 per life, a million dollars could save 500 people, a billion could save half a million, and, by extension, a trillion could theoretically save half a billion humans from a miserable death." The math...
- robocat 4y ago
  And a pastebin of the text: https://controlc.com/3af6a40f https://controlc.com/3af6a40f
gennarro 4y ago
Interesting update yesterday: >>UPDATE: Nov 9, 2022: Since this article was published, a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  Of course investors want to come before customers in real life, I'm sure there are backdoor deals going on about which ,,customer'' to pick.
seibelj 4y ago
> This interview has morphed into my own personal economics seminar, and Professor Bankman-Fried is my tutor. He’s as good at explaining the principles of macroeconomics as anyone out there in the world today—and I know this for a fact because I’ve subsequently watched YouTube’s best on the same subject. But SBF teaches me Macro while simultaneously playing round after round of Storybook Brawl. > Still, I’ve got my answer. And it turns out that I’ve aimed too low. A trillion isn’t enough money to fix the world’s problems, so SBF won’t stop at merely a trillion. It’s an answer that begs the next question, which SBF, ever helpful, has already anticipated: “So, is five trillion all you could ever use to help the world?” > SBF is now interviewing himself. He slows down for a moment, and I assume that’s because of the cognitive load of doing three things at once. He’s asking good questions (my job); he’s formulating answers (his job); and he’s playing Storybook Brawl (no one’s job). But then I hear the tap-tap-tapping from his fingers start to accelerate, and I realize he’s not slowing down under the load at all. Just the opposite, in fact: This guy is in the Storybook Brawl equivalent of a gank! This entire profile is incredible. SBF is one of the greatest conmen of all time, the absolute gall to testify in Congress, pal around with celebs, buy the naming rights to the Miami Heat stadium, claim he is "the most transparent", all built on a total scam of stealing billions. If this guy doesn't go to jail why do we even have jails?
TechBro8615 4y ago
Does anyone from his class at MIT know this guy? Was he involved in the Bitcoin community there? Where did he come from? How did he go from Jane Street intern to $25 million per day arbitrage?
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  my guy comes from the "elite", both his parents are stanford professors, i'm sure a smart guy like him can raise money.
  - TechBro8615 4y ago
    Ah yes, the mysterious elite and their impenetrable opaque social circles that spawn wunderkind out of thin air...
    - scifibestfi 4y ago
      Aren't they just referring to the rich elite class that uses nepotism?
    - croes 4y ago
      Spawn investment money out of thin air
    - biggoodwolf 4y ago
      Just good nature and good nurture.
    - strikelaserclaw 4y ago
      i'm sure SBF is very smart, i just meant more like "How would this guy get access to that kind of capital"
      - chucksmash 4y ago
        The article mentions it. He started doing the arb with $50k of his own money through a bank account another Effective Altruist in Japan helped him set up, then: > With SBF’s initial $50,000 compounding at 10 percent each day, the next step was to increase the amount of capital. At the time, the total daily volume of crypto trading was on the order of a billion dollars. Figuring he wanted to capture 5 percent of that, SBF went looking for a $50 million loan. Again, he reached out to the EA community. Jaan Tallinn, the cofounder of Skype, put up a good chunk of that initial $50 million.
skippyboxedhero 4y ago
The story about SBF playing LoL whilst Sequoia partners are fawning over him couldn't look worse for them. I also notice that they don't say what proportion of gains FTX was...given that it was $150 into a few billion, it is fair to assume that it was a substantial proportion (and...tbh...that reads as deceptive). Ofc, they won't die, you have to pay the toll of fees for these guys because they have the whole VC network locked up (to some extent, Sequoia has fallen away a bit more recently). But these funds are just pure beta.
exogeny 4y ago
I have a few friends who knew him (and Caroline) at Jane Street; their recollections are nothing like this garbage puff piece. Sequoia should be beyond embarrassed. Yes, their fund is way up. But they did next to zero actual diligence here, and acted like complete fools (and bragged about it!) during the pitch process. Perhaps even worse, they were apparently fine with their investment conveying zero governance, zero board seats and zero information rights.
- eachro 4y ago
  what are their recollections like?
40acres 4y ago
How embarrassing - VC over the past decade has simply been folks riding market beta, zirp and piggybacking on their friends deals. Maybe this market crunch will weed out the bad bunch but I’m not holding my breath.
- twblalock 4y ago
  VC didn't change. Their job is not to be judicious about investment. Their job is to invest in everything that might pay off, knowing that much of it will fail but even a single big win like finding the next Amazon will outweigh all the losses on the other investments.
bmitc 4y ago
I don’t understand the title’s relevance to what is posted/linked. What is an LP, mentioned in the update?
- newfonewhodis 4y ago
  Sequoia deleted the original post. Here's the cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33lYOGAJ:https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33...
  - williamstein 4y ago
    With choice quotes such as “To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.”
    - quantumwannabe 4y ago
      My favorite quote from the article: “FTX did need money, after all. And it needed that money from credible sources so it could continue to distinguish itself from the bottom-feeders who came to crypto to fleece the suckers.”
    - adolph 4y ago
      Why did he do so much for Biden, someone he has never met? Well, because he said he crunched the numbers on how much impact each dollar would have if he donated it. That’s the same approach that led him to get involved with Mind the Gap, a data-driven donor group very popular in Silicon Valley led by his mother, Stanford professor Barbara Fried. https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/20/22335209/sam-bankman-fried-joe-biden-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/20/22335209/sam-bankman-fr...
      - disqard 4y ago
        Any sufficiently large crypto scam is indistinguishable from an episode of "Silicon Valley" (Clark3's Law)
NickC25 4y ago
What I don't get is why some of these guys just cash out when they're near the top. Guy was 29 and had some 20+ billion dollars to his name (supposedly). Leave the trading firm to a few folks, keep a bit of equity to enjoy the continued success, and that's it! Just walk away, call it a day and enjoy your life. Same could be said for Zuck - except he had like 25 or 30 billion (not adjusted for inflation) at the same age. I just don't understand it. NINJA EDIT: changed the amount of money he was apparently worth. Wiki said it got to 28 billion.
- shuckles 4y ago
  Did you read the article? He didn't cash out for the same reason he left a job with guaranteed wealth at Jane Street: he doesn't think he has the same diminishing marginal utility for money that you do.
- escapecharacter 4y ago
  Maybe I’m in the wrong tax bracket but I’m fine walking away from anything once I have more than a billion dollars regardless of age.
- jjulius 4y ago
  Greed, power, narcissism, the list goes on. Not attributing any one of those specifically to any individual, but yeah.
  - herodoturtle 4y ago
    Or ambition.
    - the-printer 4y ago
      Which is often synonymous with “Greed, power, narcism” when billions of dollars are at play.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  Poor man wants to be rich. Rich man wants to be king.
propter_hoc 4y ago
Oh god they took it down! I tried to read this yesterday - it was truly nauseating.
saadatq 4y ago
Can’t wait for the HBO special on SBF. My money is on Jonah Hill to play SBF.
bogomipz 4y ago
Why has the title been editorialized? Also why is the date September 2022 in the post's title when the linked post's most prominent detail is "Update: November 9, 2022"?
- eat_veggies 4y ago
  The logical conclusion is that the title hasn't been editorialized, and the date is accurate, but Sequoia have took down the post because it's an embarrassment for them. Here's an archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...
  - bogomipz 4y ago
    Oh wow. Yes that makes perfect sense. Thanks
deck4rd 4y ago
That link now 301s to another page. Here is an archive of the article: https://archive.ph/Yg64e https://archive.ph/Yg64e
drewmate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/Yg64e https://archive.ph/Yg64e
mediaman 4y ago
Many of these VCs seem to just be grifting into whatever market they can get the most potential capital gains from the 'greater fool theory.' In other words, they don't care what value it generates; they care if there's a good opportunity to cash out capital gains by conning other people to pay much more than what they paid. A while ago, the Freakonomics podcast interviewed Arianna Simpson, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and who manages some of their crypto investments. The host, Stephen Dubner, asked what is now the classic question of 'what problem does crypto solve?' A question you'd expect a crypto investor to easily anticipate. Her main response -- and I promise I'm not joking here -- was that you could resell access to your home wifi with crypto tokens, mainly to your neighbors. When pressed further for a more commercially credible response, she engaged in a remarkable attempt to appeal to authority, saying that "if you were in the meetings I'm in...with top founders, from the top schools...you wouldn't be questioning this." But without any further explanations. From what I could tell, Arianna frankly didn't care about any utility it could provide. If it did provide some, she couldn't name it. But she recognized a grift, and knew she could likely make some money using other peoples' money to get in on it. To be fair, Andreessen is not an investor in FTX, though they've lost plenty of LPs money in other crypto investments. But this attitude is reflective of the approach of many VCs, including those at Sequoia. They don't care about the product, or the value created. What they care about is that there's this masterful story-teller with wild hair, that the press will adore, and with an addressable market that seems unconstrained, which is easiest to do when it is undefined. These stories can be flipped for a hundred or a thousand times their original investment not because they generate that much value but because there is a frenzy of momentum and fear of losing out. And often this works: the market frenzy begins to crest, and they can sell into it. But eventually the wave does crest and crashes down, and they are caught in it. And in the aftermath we look at the enablers, the funders, and their logic looks preposterous, because we assume they care about building lasting value. And we wonder what exactly it is they do, what their purpose is, what value they leave behind.
lvl102 4y ago
I find it hilarious that he’s lying about overlooking basic accounting. I call bullshit and even if it were gross negligence, he should serve time in jail. What he and Do Kwon did is far more egregious than Madoff. And perhaps even Theranos’ Holmes. We are living through the Golden Age of Digital Frauds.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/Yg64e https://archive.ph/Yg64e
2-718-281-828 4y ago
Could someone please ELI5 for me what this is about? How does the linked page justify the HN headline?

119 points by anonu 4y ago

God, all this shit is so embarrassing. The way VCs just absolutely idolized this guy is really something to see.

This is 404ing. Do you have a copy? Edit: Here's a Google Cached Copy https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33lYOGAJ:https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33... In case that is past its TTL, try this:https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...

quantumwannabe 4y ago
Another archive: https://archive.ph/Yg64e https://archive.ph/Yg64e
alpb 4y ago
Haha they replaced the page entirely with a paragraph saying: > Update: November 9, 2022 A liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.
- anshumankmr 4y ago
  So are they walking back this statement? Not sure what they really achieved by deleting this puff piece. Everytime a puff piece is written and blows up spectacularly, it’s pretty much immortalized through the internet. The articles on Elizabeth Holmes come to mind or when someone declared M Night Shyamalan as the next Spielberg.
adolph 4y ago
A key awesome bit noted elsewhere: “Embarrassingly, we had never tried to reach out to Sam, because we figured he didn’t need us,” Bailhe admits. “I thought they were just minting money and had absolutely no need for investors.” Learning otherwise, they quickly contacted SBF and organized a last-minute Zoom call between him and the partners at Sequoia—at four California time on a hot July Friday afternoon. [...] The Zoom went well for all concerned. SBF looked relaxed as he answered questions, talking, as he usually does, in complete paragraphs about topics of extreme complexity. Ramnik Arora, FTX’s head of product and another ex-Facebook engineer, remembers the meeting clearly: “We’re getting all these questions from Sequoia toward the end. He’s absolutely fantastic.” [...] That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.” Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. “YES!!!” exclaimed a third. [...] “I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that f....r was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
- NickC25 4y ago
  That's terrifying. Guy is just casually spouting bullshit while playing LoL, and one of the top VCs are just tripping over themselves to throw money at him. i can only hope the actual due diligence at top VCs is much, much more robust and deep than this. If this isn't an extreme outlier and is more the norm than I realized, well, I had way too high hopes for the so-called gatekeepers of the top echelons of society.
  - TechBro8615 4y ago
    he speaks in complete paragraphs!
markisus 4y ago
> But, at Jane, SBF osmosed another trading principle. He learned to be “risk-neutral”: In simple terms, a trader, given a choice between $50 and a 50 percent chance at $100, must be agnostic if they want to maximize the expected value of earnings over a lifetime. Huh? Over a lifetime, both bets have the same expected value. Is there a mathematical explanation why the more risky one is better?
- xiphias2 4y ago
  Actually Sam hopefully understands Kelly criterion in which people optimize for log(EV), in which case here not wagering is the Kelly optimum.
ravenhappy 4y ago
From the article: "Just do the math: At $2,000 per life, a million dollars could save 500 people, a billion could save half a million, and, by extension, a trillion could theoretically save half a billion humans from a miserable death." The math...
robocat 4y ago
And a pastebin of the text: https://controlc.com/3af6a40f https://controlc.com/3af6a40f

gennarro 4y ago

Interesting update yesterday: >>UPDATE: Nov 9, 2022: Since this article was published, a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain. Many have been affected by this unexpected turn of events. For Sequoia, our fiduciary responsibility is to our LPs. To that end, we shared this letter with them today regarding our investment in FTX. For FTX, we believe its fiduciary responsibility is first to its customers, and second to its shareholders. As such, FTX is exploring all opportunities to ensure its customers are able to recover their funds as quickly as possible.

xiphias2 4y ago
Of course investors want to come before customers in real life, I'm sure there are backdoor deals going on about which ,,customer'' to pick.

seibelj 4y ago

> This interview has morphed into my own personal economics seminar, and Professor Bankman-Fried is my tutor. He’s as good at explaining the principles of macroeconomics as anyone out there in the world today—and I know this for a fact because I’ve subsequently watched YouTube’s best on the same subject. But SBF teaches me Macro while simultaneously playing round after round of Storybook Brawl. > Still, I’ve got my answer. And it turns out that I’ve aimed too low. A trillion isn’t enough money to fix the world’s problems, so SBF won’t stop at merely a trillion. It’s an answer that begs the next question, which SBF, ever helpful, has already anticipated: “So, is five trillion all you could ever use to help the world?” > SBF is now interviewing himself. He slows down for a moment, and I assume that’s because of the cognitive load of doing three things at once. He’s asking good questions (my job); he’s formulating answers (his job); and he’s playing Storybook Brawl (no one’s job). But then I hear the tap-tap-tapping from his fingers start to accelerate, and I realize he’s not slowing down under the load at all. Just the opposite, in fact: This guy is in the Storybook Brawl equivalent of a gank! This entire profile is incredible. SBF is one of the greatest conmen of all time, the absolute gall to testify in Congress, pal around with celebs, buy the naming rights to the Miami Heat stadium, claim he is "the most transparent", all built on a total scam of stealing billions. If this guy doesn't go to jail why do we even have jails?

TechBro8615 4y ago

Does anyone from his class at MIT know this guy? Was he involved in the Bitcoin community there? Where did he come from? How did he go from Jane Street intern to $25 million per day arbitrage?

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
my guy comes from the "elite", both his parents are stanford professors, i'm sure a smart guy like him can raise money.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  Ah yes, the mysterious elite and their impenetrable opaque social circles that spawn wunderkind out of thin air...
  - scifibestfi 4y ago
    Aren't they just referring to the rich elite class that uses nepotism?
  - croes 4y ago
    Spawn investment money out of thin air
  - biggoodwolf 4y ago
    Just good nature and good nurture.
  - strikelaserclaw 4y ago
    i'm sure SBF is very smart, i just meant more like "How would this guy get access to that kind of capital"
    - chucksmash 4y ago
      The article mentions it. He started doing the arb with $50k of his own money through a bank account another Effective Altruist in Japan helped him set up, then: > With SBF’s initial $50,000 compounding at 10 percent each day, the next step was to increase the amount of capital. At the time, the total daily volume of crypto trading was on the order of a billion dollars. Figuring he wanted to capture 5 percent of that, SBF went looking for a $50 million loan. Again, he reached out to the EA community. Jaan Tallinn, the cofounder of Skype, put up a good chunk of that initial $50 million.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago

The story about SBF playing LoL whilst Sequoia partners are fawning over him couldn't look worse for them. I also notice that they don't say what proportion of gains FTX was...given that it was $150 into a few billion, it is fair to assume that it was a substantial proportion (and...tbh...that reads as deceptive). Ofc, they won't die, you have to pay the toll of fees for these guys because they have the whole VC network locked up (to some extent, Sequoia has fallen away a bit more recently). But these funds are just pure beta.

exogeny 4y ago

I have a few friends who knew him (and Caroline) at Jane Street; their recollections are nothing like this garbage puff piece. Sequoia should be beyond embarrassed. Yes, their fund is way up. But they did next to zero actual diligence here, and acted like complete fools (and bragged about it!) during the pitch process. Perhaps even worse, they were apparently fine with their investment conveying zero governance, zero board seats and zero information rights.

eachro 4y ago
what are their recollections like?

40acres 4y ago

How embarrassing - VC over the past decade has simply been folks riding market beta, zirp and piggybacking on their friends deals. Maybe this market crunch will weed out the bad bunch but I’m not holding my breath.

twblalock 4y ago
VC didn't change. Their job is not to be judicious about investment. Their job is to invest in everything that might pay off, knowing that much of it will fail but even a single big win like finding the next Amazon will outweigh all the losses on the other investments.

bmitc 4y ago

I don’t understand the title’s relevance to what is posted/linked. What is an LP, mentioned in the update?

newfonewhodis 4y ago
Sequoia deleted the original post. Here's the cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33lYOGAJ:https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33...
- williamstein 4y ago
  With choice quotes such as “To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.”
  - quantumwannabe 4y ago
    My favorite quote from the article: “FTX did need money, after all. And it needed that money from credible sources so it could continue to distinguish itself from the bottom-feeders who came to crypto to fleece the suckers.”
  - adolph 4y ago
    Why did he do so much for Biden, someone he has never met? Well, because he said he crunched the numbers on how much impact each dollar would have if he donated it. That’s the same approach that led him to get involved with Mind the Gap, a data-driven donor group very popular in Silicon Valley led by his mother, Stanford professor Barbara Fried. https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/20/22335209/sam-bankman-fried-joe-biden-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/20/22335209/sam-bankman-fr...
    - disqard 4y ago
      Any sufficiently large crypto scam is indistinguishable from an episode of "Silicon Valley" (Clark3's Law)

NickC25 4y ago

What I don't get is why some of these guys just cash out when they're near the top. Guy was 29 and had some 20+ billion dollars to his name (supposedly). Leave the trading firm to a few folks, keep a bit of equity to enjoy the continued success, and that's it! Just walk away, call it a day and enjoy your life. Same could be said for Zuck - except he had like 25 or 30 billion (not adjusted for inflation) at the same age. I just don't understand it. NINJA EDIT: changed the amount of money he was apparently worth. Wiki said it got to 28 billion.

shuckles 4y ago
Did you read the article? He didn't cash out for the same reason he left a job with guaranteed wealth at Jane Street: he doesn't think he has the same diminishing marginal utility for money that you do.
escapecharacter 4y ago
Maybe I’m in the wrong tax bracket but I’m fine walking away from anything once I have more than a billion dollars regardless of age.
jjulius 4y ago
Greed, power, narcissism, the list goes on. Not attributing any one of those specifically to any individual, but yeah.
- herodoturtle 4y ago
  Or ambition.
  - the-printer 4y ago
    Which is often synonymous with “Greed, power, narcism” when billions of dollars are at play.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
Poor man wants to be rich. Rich man wants to be king.

propter_hoc 4y ago

Oh god they took it down! I tried to read this yesterday - it was truly nauseating.

saadatq 4y ago

Can’t wait for the HBO special on SBF. My money is on Jonah Hill to play SBF.

bogomipz 4y ago

Why has the title been editorialized? Also why is the date September 2022 in the post's title when the linked post's most prominent detail is "Update: November 9, 2022"?

eat_veggies 4y ago
The logical conclusion is that the title hasn't been editorialized, and the date is accurate, but Sequoia have took down the post because it's an embarrassment for them. Here's an archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...
- bogomipz 4y ago
  Oh wow. Yes that makes perfect sense. Thanks

deck4rd 4y ago

That link now 301s to another page. Here is an archive of the article: https://archive.ph/Yg64e https://archive.ph/Yg64e

drewmate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/Yg64e https://archive.ph/Yg64e

mediaman 4y ago

Many of these VCs seem to just be grifting into whatever market they can get the most potential capital gains from the 'greater fool theory.' In other words, they don't care what value it generates; they care if there's a good opportunity to cash out capital gains by conning other people to pay much more than what they paid. A while ago, the Freakonomics podcast interviewed Arianna Simpson, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and who manages some of their crypto investments. The host, Stephen Dubner, asked what is now the classic question of 'what problem does crypto solve?' A question you'd expect a crypto investor to easily anticipate. Her main response -- and I promise I'm not joking here -- was that you could resell access to your home wifi with crypto tokens, mainly to your neighbors. When pressed further for a more commercially credible response, she engaged in a remarkable attempt to appeal to authority, saying that "if you were in the meetings I'm in...with top founders, from the top schools...you wouldn't be questioning this." But without any further explanations. From what I could tell, Arianna frankly didn't care about any utility it could provide. If it did provide some, she couldn't name it. But she recognized a grift, and knew she could likely make some money using other peoples' money to get in on it. To be fair, Andreessen is not an investor in FTX, though they've lost plenty of LPs money in other crypto investments. But this attitude is reflective of the approach of many VCs, including those at Sequoia. They don't care about the product, or the value created. What they care about is that there's this masterful story-teller with wild hair, that the press will adore, and with an addressable market that seems unconstrained, which is easiest to do when it is undefined. These stories can be flipped for a hundred or a thousand times their original investment not because they generate that much value but because there is a frenzy of momentum and fear of losing out. And often this works: the market frenzy begins to crest, and they can sell into it. But eventually the wave does crest and crashes down, and they are caught in it. And in the aftermath we look at the enablers, the funders, and their logic looks preposterous, because we assume they care about building lasting value. And we wonder what exactly it is they do, what their purpose is, what value they leave behind.

lvl102 4y ago

I find it hilarious that he’s lying about overlooking basic accounting. I call bullshit and even if it were gross negligence, he should serve time in jail. What he and Do Kwon did is far more egregious than Madoff. And perhaps even Theranos’ Holmes. We are living through the Golden Age of Digital Frauds.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/Yg64e https://archive.ph/Yg64e

2-718-281-828 4y ago

Could someone please ELI5 for me what this is about? How does the linked page justify the HN headline?