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FTX Implodes, and a Top VC Backer Falls on Its Face
- sn0w_crash 4y agoSequoia took a major L with that post. It was a massive 90 minute listen. Even if he wasn’t a scam artist this would still be too long of a profile.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rasz 4y agoDid they? The way I read it Sequoia bought ~$200m of magic beans from FTX, but in exchange banksman fraud invested ~$200mil back in Sequoia ventures.
- djbusby 4y agoThat's a wash-bet. Nothing was gained.
- rasz 4y agoMagic beans gained market cap and valuation.
- fasthands9 4y agoPresumably Sequoia wouldn't have done it if they weren't getting anything out of it. Is it too crazy to assume that they agreed to invest ~200M, in return for ~200M back and a percent of some token or stream? Both they and SBF would know a 200M investment would attract serious attention and retail buyers but both would need the other to make the headline. I don't want to sound too conspiratorial but seems odd they would bother to do a transaction for this while lending their name unless they were getting something back.
- RockyMcNuts 4y agowhen Elon Musk talks about 'citizen journalism' disrupting the media, that post is what he means ... 'private historians' and puffers employed by VCs and tycoons controlling the narrative. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591121142961799168 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591121142961799168
- fareesh 4y agoIn this case it doesn't seem to matter whether the puffer is employed by a VC or the New York Times.
- RockyMcNuts 4y agomy personal view is, it does matter. the biggest problem with NYT is they bend over backwards to appear neutral and give all sides the benefit of the doubt. it becomes doublespeak and provides cover for bad faith. for instance today's article on SBF - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-crypto-bankruptcy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/ftx-sam-bankma... . it's an embarrassment to let him call looting client funds 'a margin position' without hard pushback. but in the NYT they distinguish fact from opinion, and take reasonable steps to verify the stuff they print as fact. so even if they don't discount what SBF says as they should and draw the appropriate conclusions, a critical reader can. (even if it's while they are yelling at the screen) so they are not going to print something like the Sequoia garbage that is completely one-sided, with technical absurdities and factual inaccuracies (and they will copy-edit properly and trim 14K-word vanity pieces). people say the NYT is 'biased' but I think that accusation is misguided. Of course they have a point of view (like, democracy and government are usually good). the word 'bias' presumes the existence of some unbiased reference frame like 19th century ether theory. many people who call things 'biased' are just announcing, my own point of view is the one that must be privileged. the question is not, do they have a point of view, but what is the point of view, is it transparent, do they check facts and distinguish between fact and opinion and dig regardless of who benefits. and the NYT is, despite its infuriating God-like view from nowhere, hard professional journalism. the crap media is this stuff that has, not just a point of view, but an agenda, bogus facts, one-sided and self-serving, doesn't distinguish between fact and opinion. and yes, it's important to know that Sequoia and Musk and other people want to control the narrative with wholly-owned crap media like this, and a Twitter zone they control and flood with BS. they want it so bad they hire 'private historians', try to discredit the real journalists, and spend megabucks for their own ecosytem.
- metadat 4y agohttps://archive.today/mXCYE https://archive.today/mXCYE
- ChaitanyaSai 4y agoAs ridiculous as that article was, the deletion is worse. Decentralized write-only communication that "cannot" be deleted is foundational to establishing trust in the crypto space (at least as it was originally envisoned). How does one claim to empower change for the good by backing projects in this space, and yet try and make something vanish if it shows them in a bad light? If anything, this should go right at the top of an anti-portfolio as a counter-balance when business cycles are inevitably looping back into insanity territory. https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... (linking it here because this deserves to be preserved as a cautionary tale in our collective memory)
- notatoad 4y agoWe don’t need decentralized write-only communication. People have memories and reputation have power, and technical solutions aren’t going to change that. What the crypto folks need to do to gain trust is stop behaving as though a lack of decentralized write-only communication means they can say whatever they want and nobody will remember the times they were wildly wrong.
- cl0ckt0wer 4y agoWouldn't a real newspaper fulfill the "decentralized, write-only" model?
- ChaitanyaSai 4y agoEven if entirely objective in the presentation of "just the facts", merely through the act of curation (what is noteworthy enough to appear in the paper), we make memory selective, and therefore biased. Interesting that real newspapers did serve as "proof of date" until very recently but generative AI might puncture that.
- cl0ckt0wer 4y agoThere needs to be some sort of curation or else you run out of paper.
- brindlejim 4y agoLet's be clear: Alfred Lin championed the investment in FTX. It's not Sequoia. It's a limited number of partners.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoWhile bad press and shaming them is ok, what should really happen is Sequoia should be investigated closely and punished if found guilty. The money trail needs to be investigated for bribery, side deals, hiding of information from the public, lack of due diligence etc. In a terrorist attack the money trail is investigated. Same applies here.
- andirk 4y ago> lack of due diligence From everything we're learning, the writing was on the wall from day 1; these people were just enchanted by it.
- ceres 4y agoWhy is this article hiding its hyperlinks? On my iOS all the links are black and indistinguishable from the rest of the text.
- kriskrunch 4y agoAnchor links are underlined with a very thin grey line... Easy to make out with my eagle-like vision after zooming in.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cee_el123 4y agoIs there any Silicon Valley personality left who has an unquestionable/undamaged credibility/legacy ?
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI don’t know if they operate out of Silicon Valley but the Collison brothers seem to be pretty well-respected.
- rapsey 4y agoBeauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you consider credible is not the same as what others would.
- apengwin 4y agoAndrew Iguodala, maybe
- andrewinardeer 4y agoErlich Bachman who founded airfare collator Aviato and then sold it seems the real deal. Last I heard he was in Tibet though.
- marsven_422 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- spaceman_2020 4y agoAt some level, these big name funds also deserve some portion of the blame. A lot of people implicitly trusted FTX because of its backers. Even when the first signs of FTX imploding emerged, some people chose to stick with it because “Blackrock, Softbank and Sequoia can’t be that wrong”. Little did they know that the due diligence process for Sequoia wasn’t any better than any random no-name fund.
- throwoutway 4y agoSoftBank’s ignored the results of some due diligence before (WeWork)
- andirk 4y agoAn investment firm writes a puff piece about one of their investments, investment tanks, they delete the puff piece. Yeah they have no integrity when it comes to their image. Not sure who is shocked by that.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
- rich_sasha 4y agoEveryone is now saying "wow that article was tone-deaf before, now it is ridiculous". But where are all the criticisms from before? While FTX was a multi-billion business, seemingly everyone kept quiet. Only when they went tits up suddenly everyone remembered how it was always a bad article.