8 ms·

Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex–and Maybe You Should Too

108 points by gunapologist99 4y ago

fidesomnes 4y ago
650 4y ago
>Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’” >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. >What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet. >“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 fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  "you can exchange your money for goods and services" "HOLY SHIT WHAT A VISIONARY 10 OUT OF 10" Clearly SBF will truly be the first trillionaire
  - autotune 4y ago
    In a centralized exchange, controlled by 8 people, with 0 oversight. What a revolutionary.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    It’s a sight to behold to see the mechanizations these parts of the economy go through to ascribe to skill and vision what is purely luck and confidence. Truly sophisticated allocators of capital. https://youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY https://youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- malermeister 4y ago
  This whole saga, together with the Twitter and Meta shitshows have been exposing the Emperor for wearing no clothes. Turns out the rich and powerful of Silicon Valley aren't super smart and wise folks to be looked up to. They're just regular people, a lot of them ignorant, that got lucky. Enough with the pedestals.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    Especially with Elon, who is the definition of failing up and getting lucky (see Zip2, Tesla, Space-X). Just having capital was enough to have actually intelligent people flocking to him. When Elon makes decisions (see PayPal, Twitter) they are shit.
    - memish 4y ago
      See here's the problem. Getting distracted by the "spaceman bad" programming, while being robbed blind by media darlings like SBF. An actual fraud.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - ModernMech 4y ago
        Musk is an actual fraud: https://twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/1593307541932474368 https://twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/159330754193247436... Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma - but not in science. Note: You may have to refresh a couple times, because as Twitter slowly collapses under Musk's leadership, it is now randomly unable to serve some Tweets reliably (been a user of Twitter for a long time, this is the first time I've ever seen this happen at this scale). I had to refresh the page a couple times to get past the "This tweet is unavailable" error. Edit: Here's a link to the sources with everything: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zPeWaaCZHqfq0tnkPwc61A6bGHySdj91 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zPeWaaCZHqfq0tnkPwc6...
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet. But like, it’s not even a story about how he might accomplish that goal. It’s literally just saying “my vision is to facilitate every financial transaction in the world.” You’d think it would take more than that to impress those partners.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    There's a reason we don't go to the bank to buy bananas, and it isn't because our banks lack "vision".
    - layer8 4y ago
      It’s because it lacks bananas? ;)
      - JamesianP 4y ago
        and it hasn't spent billions in investor money to subsidize our banana-purchasing experience.
- colpabar 4y ago
  It’s almost like he has rich, well-connected parents who got him all this positive coverage and will make sure he never spends a day in jail.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 4y ago
  This has the same vibe as NFT guys who have clearly never played video games thinking that moving items between games is a killer app. Except that these are professional financiers. I don't get it.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  As is we needed more proof that venture capitalists are clowns. Oh well. Extract money from these fools and hopefully don't be an FTX, make something that is useful to society. The more they lose on ventures, the more their capital is redistributed, hopefully to either competent people, or people that need it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Animats 4y ago
  I'm amazed at that reaction from Sequoia. He was basically saying "I want to build Tencent's WeChat app." Except that WeChat does more.
willmadden 4y ago
- loceng 4y ago
  Look to who has captured MSM to find the answer.
  - dang 4y ago
    We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests not to do that and also not to post flamewar comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30197457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30197457 (Feb 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26116840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26116840 (Feb 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274517 (Feb 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195104 (Oct 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815709 (May 2019) Your account has been hovering in bannability for a long time, and yes, an anti-Semitic trope (let's call it what we all know it is) is enough to push it over the finish line. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - loceng 4y ago
      1) Sorry, what - "... an anti-Semitic trope (let's call it what we all know it is) is enough to push it over the finish line." What a huge assumption and massive misinterpretation by you. Holy hell. You seem to be projecting that I must be Kayne West? I wasn't casually referencing Jewish people. Did I suggest ANYWHERE about Jewish people? No. I didn't. You made the assumption and then ban me on it. I was being literal when I said to look at who has captured the mainstream media for your answers - and I didn't suggest nor was hinting at looking through a racial lens. Who would you put that as if asked that? Do you know who I would put that as? If you look at the actual advertising revenues of MSM in the U.S. - it's something like 80% of ad revenues coming from the pharmaceutical industry; I'm sure if you search my comment history for "big pharma" you'll see plenty of distaste from me for that industry. 2) No "this is your final warning" message? Firstly, as far as I remember I have only seen 2 of your "requests" replies in the past - and I remember the one email thread/interaction we had awhile ago. I don't always check to see for responses to my comments, or not necessarily thoroughly if I do glance at comment history. Don't you think it'd be the responsible, reasonable, and the fair thing to do is warn a person by email and/or confirm they have seen them - especially since there aren't Notifications as part of the HN interface? Don't you find it problematic in UI/UX that this isn't the case - that it's a failure in design to not highlight important messages from you? 3) I hope you'll unban me as I'm formally requesting here, especially as your premise for what "push[ed] it over the finish line" was a wrong assumption on your part. I have Jewish ancestors and my grandfathers fought in both world wars - and I'll withhold the rest of my commentary as to how offensive your assertion is. Otherwise now that I know you've requested/"warned" 5 previous times - and now that I know I'm "hovering in bannability" - I'll tone everything down. I'd also highly recommend implementing a new mechanism to guarantee a commenter sees your comments/warnings. Maybe some kind of a 'prompt' or 'notify' flag that you hit that alerts to an unavoidable message to see your comment - or just everyone gets notified of your comments? Maybe it'll make whomever you're warning take your requests/warnings more seriously as well - but at minimum it will guarantee they've seen it, and then there's a much higher probability they'll check their behaviour if they've actually seen your messages. If flags set by you then perhaps a required confirmation by the user that 'yes, I've seen this warning/request' - and disabling commenting features until they click that they've seen it? That way you can also have a record and a situation can't arise where they claim they didn't see the majority of them - like I am claiming now, however that is the truth. I hope you'll acknowledge your mistake and undo the action you took based on that mistake. I've also emailed this to you.
colpabar 4y ago
Related: SBF is still scheduled to speak at a NYT sponsored event. The media sure likes this guy for some reason! https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers
- s28l 4y ago
  Against better judgement (and advice of counsel, presumably), this guy is still running his mouth to the media. If you had a disgraced former crypto CEO who was still willing to speak at your finance conference, wouldn't you keep him on the docket? I certainly would.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Matt Levine says he's a fan, and that makes sense to me - Levine was pretty well respected as a journalist before he interviewed Fried, but it probably gave him a huge bump in interest when he did and even more now.
    - schintan 4y ago
      Matt Levine said he 'liked' him, liking someone is very different than being a fan.
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        Ah, then whoever I'm quoting from HN who said that was mistaken, or I've remembered it incorrectly. I don't think it changes the point - he's good for Levine professionally; he'll never run out of material for his column at this point.
        vba616 4y ago
        Saying that the mess is good for him to write about now is completely different than insinuating he was promoting FTX this spring, especially while simultaneously taking the position that he exposed it (which is mostly hindsight). He's always talked about criminal and unethical behavior in an understated and humorous way in his column, and as a private individual, should be exempt from the slimy methods of character assassination used on politicians.
_bqrf 4y ago
Sequoia capital published this. That should be in the title. Without knowing that this was a real article published by real people at Sequoia a couple of months ago, this reads like a try-hard troll. No! It’s real! (Sequoia is like the Stanford of venture capital and is one of ftx’s biggest investors)
- davidgerard 4y ago
  And then quietly deleted it, lol.
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    Which is somehow even more embarrassing.
- clpm4j 4y ago
  Still crickets from the Sequoia partners (Alfred Lin, Michelle Bailhe) who backed and hyped FTX and SBF.
  - _bqrf 4y ago
    Not silence. Sequoia posted a letter declaring that their FTX investment is $0 and that this is not a notable fraction of their portfolio. FTX may have been a theoretically sound investment for Sequoia because many venture investments are marked to $0, and FTX got to huge-or-zero much faster than any other investment. A company that slowly goes to $0 is equally bad but worse for time-value. What hurts my brain is that theoretically this investment strategy is sound, but the implementation of it looks like: FTX. It's horrific. It's like total war logic. Logically it works, probabilistically it's reasonable, living it is grotesque and insane.
    - clpm4j 4y ago
      Yeah I saw that, but I meant directly from Alfred or Michelle (both had been vocal advocates on Twitter prior to this blowup).
    - 4y ago
davidgerard 4y ago
Whenever you hear of a VC's "due diligence", remember this.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  Clearly, I suspected it from the few interactions I had with VCs. Well...
- jstx1 4y ago
  And Theranos.
- mkhpalm 4y ago
  I keep telling people you don't drop hundreds of millions on something without glancing at a few numbers first. They had to know something wasn't quite right but infused him with their cash anyways.
  - hackandtrip 4y ago
    Apparently when another VC firm (Social Capital) suggested to create a board before going through with their investment, they received a plain&clear "f*k you". Corporate governance, accounting, and all the other boring stuff should literally be the first things which you should look at when assessing whether to fuel or not an exchange.
  - davidgerard 4y ago
    the number they looked at was "number go up". This was an "investment" for the purpose of surfing a ponzi wave. They could not possibly have looked at any numbers any deeper than what FTX told them.
fedeb95 4y ago
Effective altruism is just nonsense. Giving money "away" is so vague that it's obviously tax discounts. Away to whom? Will give money blindly really help solving problems or keeps them alive? A lot of questions pop up.
- ryanwaggoner 4y ago
  That’s a pretty funny take, and suggests you have no familiarity with EA, because it’s explicitly an approach to giving money away while taking exactly these questions into account.
- skybrian 4y ago
  Are you against all charity then? It's possible to give money away without doing it "blindly."
- Emma_Goldman 4y ago
  Why are you holding forth on something which you clearly know absolutely nothing about? I say this as someone who thinks that effective altruism is broken.
- karpierz 4y ago
  It is nonsense, but I don't think this is the right critique. EA is very focused on answering "where should money go". EA is notably less interested in answering "where should money come from" and "what impact does the manner in which I earn money have".
  - gruez 4y ago
    >EA is notably less interested in answering "where should money come from" and "what impact does the manner in which I earn money have". Says who? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give#Earning_to_give_through_jobs_that_may_cause_harm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give#Earning_to_giv...
    - fedeb95 4y ago
andirk 4y ago
>Jaan Tallinn, the cofounder of Skype, put up a good chunk of that initial $50 million. So we have the cofounder of Skype to thank for this mess huh?
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
I've learned from this article that altruism means stealing billions to prop up your girlfriend's company. Thanks SBF!
- randal_handle 4y ago
  It's not her company. He owns most of the company and she was just the CEO. He was giving money to himself.
  - nervlord 4y ago
jasmer 4y ago
This article is the absolute crescendo of the overture of all of the rubbish of the last era of Valley shenanigans in a masterfully written dumpster fire of a puff piece. As the show 'Silicon Valley' started the era with harmless satire, they made it real with this FTX big tent clownshow. Every paragraph dripping with absolute glib, lack of self awareness. "Compassionate To The Core" ... my god man I fell off my chair, got back on, and then fell off again ... I suggest there exists no author who could have created such an inane story that makes 'Wolf of Wall Street' seem like a Dilbert cartoon. Reality itself is much, much more entertaining than anything Netflix or god forbid even Scorsese himself could ever contrive.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jterrys 4y ago
  >Reality itself is much, much more entertaining than anything Netflix or god forbid even Scorsese himself could ever contrive. Spend enough time on this world and you realize that the absolute crazy shit out there would never be made into a movie because nobody would believe it's real. Make me an action flick of the guy who fought for three sides in WWII: Finnish Winter War, the Nazis, the Americans, only to have him die fighting in Vietnam and I'll tell you a movie that will be a complete box office flop because nobody would think this person actually existed.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > Every paragraph dripping with absolute glib, lack of self awareness. > ... "Compassionate To The Core" ... The elites are truly out of touch with the reality. Some are unhinged. It is baffling. Just the other day, some exec, who worked with Musk at Tesla, wrote that him acquiring Twitter was the part of a master plan to fix the climate: https://archive.is/uSz6I https://archive.is/uSz6I Read also: The Michael Scott theory of social class (2021), https://danco.substack.com/p/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social https://danco.substack.com/p/the-michael-scott-theory-of-soc...
sn0w_crash 4y ago
The #1 VC in tech wrote this. Never forget that.
giantdude 4y ago
not again... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33672924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33672924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33573636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33573636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33543718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33543718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33527047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33527047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33551288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33551288 Maybe enough with this. Hacker _News_, please
- sn0w_crash 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- holyharvey 4y ago
  - enraged_camel 4y ago
    I’ve been here for the past ten years, and not much has changed, including people who complain that things are just not the same.
    - holyharvey 4y ago
- voisin 4y ago
  It’ll stop when Sequoia puts it back on their website :-)
RockyMcNuts 4y ago
previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33604877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33604877
rossdavidh 4y ago
'But, right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red-brick floor, SBF’s purpose in life was set: He was going to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake.' What an excellent way to rationalize any psychopathic move you might want to make for money. Not saying SBF is a psychopath, 'cause I don't know enough about him, but this rationale could be used to justify almost anything: stealing, lying, fraud...
- deleted 4y ago
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civilized 4y ago
I've been wondering about this for years. If VCs make thousands of bets, knowing that most of them won't work out but a tiny number will be huge and more than make up for it.... won't people eventually learn how to game this system and hoover up the money for 99.9999999% or 100% useless purposes, instead of just 99%? Or, the world will simply run out of trillion dollar ideas for the VCs to make their money back on, and eventually your 1% of good investments don't cover the 99% of shit anymore, and you have to improve your due diligence, and become more of an ordinary investor?

650 4y ago

>Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’” >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. >What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet. >“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 fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”

Jasper_ 4y ago
"you can exchange your money for goods and services" "HOLY SHIT WHAT A VISIONARY 10 OUT OF 10" Clearly SBF will truly be the first trillionaire
- autotune 4y ago
  In a centralized exchange, controlled by 8 people, with 0 oversight. What a revolutionary.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  It’s a sight to behold to see the mechanizations these parts of the economy go through to ascribe to skill and vision what is purely luck and confidence. Truly sophisticated allocators of capital. https://youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY https://youtube.com/watch?v=wz-PtEJEaqY
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
malermeister 4y ago
This whole saga, together with the Twitter and Meta shitshows have been exposing the Emperor for wearing no clothes. Turns out the rich and powerful of Silicon Valley aren't super smart and wise folks to be looked up to. They're just regular people, a lot of them ignorant, that got lucky. Enough with the pedestals.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  Especially with Elon, who is the definition of failing up and getting lucky (see Zip2, Tesla, Space-X). Just having capital was enough to have actually intelligent people flocking to him. When Elon makes decisions (see PayPal, Twitter) they are shit.
  - memish 4y ago
    See here's the problem. Getting distracted by the "spaceman bad" programming, while being robbed blind by media darlings like SBF. An actual fraud.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      Musk is an actual fraud: https://twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/1593307541932474368 https://twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/159330754193247436... Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma - but not in science. Note: You may have to refresh a couple times, because as Twitter slowly collapses under Musk's leadership, it is now randomly unable to serve some Tweets reliably (been a user of Twitter for a long time, this is the first time I've ever seen this happen at this scale). I had to refresh the page a couple times to get past the "This tweet is unavailable" error. Edit: Here's a link to the sources with everything: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zPeWaaCZHqfq0tnkPwc61A6bGHySdj91 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zPeWaaCZHqfq0tnkPwc6...
tshaddox 4y ago
> What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet. But like, it’s not even a story about how he might accomplish that goal. It’s literally just saying “my vision is to facilitate every financial transaction in the world.” You’d think it would take more than that to impress those partners.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  There's a reason we don't go to the bank to buy bananas, and it isn't because our banks lack "vision".
  - layer8 4y ago
    It’s because it lacks bananas? ;)
    - JamesianP 4y ago
      and it hasn't spent billions in investor money to subsidize our banana-purchasing experience.
colpabar 4y ago
It’s almost like he has rich, well-connected parents who got him all this positive coverage and will make sure he never spends a day in jail.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PhasmaFelis 4y ago
This has the same vibe as NFT guys who have clearly never played video games thinking that moving items between games is a killer app. Except that these are professional financiers. I don't get it.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
As is we needed more proof that venture capitalists are clowns. Oh well. Extract money from these fools and hopefully don't be an FTX, make something that is useful to society. The more they lose on ventures, the more their capital is redistributed, hopefully to either competent people, or people that need it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Animats 4y ago
I'm amazed at that reaction from Sequoia. He was basically saying "I want to build Tencent's WeChat app." Except that WeChat does more.

willmadden 4y ago

loceng 4y ago
Look to who has captured MSM to find the answer.
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests not to do that and also not to post flamewar comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30197457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30197457 (Feb 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26116840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26116840 (Feb 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22274517 (Feb 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195104 (Oct 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815709 (May 2019) Your account has been hovering in bannability for a long time, and yes, an anti-Semitic trope (let's call it what we all know it is) is enough to push it over the finish line. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - loceng 4y ago
    1) Sorry, what - "... an anti-Semitic trope (let's call it what we all know it is) is enough to push it over the finish line." What a huge assumption and massive misinterpretation by you. Holy hell. You seem to be projecting that I must be Kayne West? I wasn't casually referencing Jewish people. Did I suggest ANYWHERE about Jewish people? No. I didn't. You made the assumption and then ban me on it. I was being literal when I said to look at who has captured the mainstream media for your answers - and I didn't suggest nor was hinting at looking through a racial lens. Who would you put that as if asked that? Do you know who I would put that as? If you look at the actual advertising revenues of MSM in the U.S. - it's something like 80% of ad revenues coming from the pharmaceutical industry; I'm sure if you search my comment history for "big pharma" you'll see plenty of distaste from me for that industry. 2) No "this is your final warning" message? Firstly, as far as I remember I have only seen 2 of your "requests" replies in the past - and I remember the one email thread/interaction we had awhile ago. I don't always check to see for responses to my comments, or not necessarily thoroughly if I do glance at comment history. Don't you think it'd be the responsible, reasonable, and the fair thing to do is warn a person by email and/or confirm they have seen them - especially since there aren't Notifications as part of the HN interface? Don't you find it problematic in UI/UX that this isn't the case - that it's a failure in design to not highlight important messages from you? 3) I hope you'll unban me as I'm formally requesting here, especially as your premise for what "push[ed] it over the finish line" was a wrong assumption on your part. I have Jewish ancestors and my grandfathers fought in both world wars - and I'll withhold the rest of my commentary as to how offensive your assertion is. Otherwise now that I know you've requested/"warned" 5 previous times - and now that I know I'm "hovering in bannability" - I'll tone everything down. I'd also highly recommend implementing a new mechanism to guarantee a commenter sees your comments/warnings. Maybe some kind of a 'prompt' or 'notify' flag that you hit that alerts to an unavoidable message to see your comment - or just everyone gets notified of your comments? Maybe it'll make whomever you're warning take your requests/warnings more seriously as well - but at minimum it will guarantee they've seen it, and then there's a much higher probability they'll check their behaviour if they've actually seen your messages. If flags set by you then perhaps a required confirmation by the user that 'yes, I've seen this warning/request' - and disabling commenting features until they click that they've seen it? That way you can also have a record and a situation can't arise where they claim they didn't see the majority of them - like I am claiming now, however that is the truth. I hope you'll acknowledge your mistake and undo the action you took based on that mistake. I've also emailed this to you.

colpabar 4y ago

Related: SBF is still scheduled to speak at a NYT sponsored event. The media sure likes this guy for some reason! https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#speakers

s28l 4y ago
Against better judgement (and advice of counsel, presumably), this guy is still running his mouth to the media. If you had a disgraced former crypto CEO who was still willing to speak at your finance conference, wouldn't you keep him on the docket? I certainly would.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Matt Levine says he's a fan, and that makes sense to me - Levine was pretty well respected as a journalist before he interviewed Fried, but it probably gave him a huge bump in interest when he did and even more now.
  - schintan 4y ago
    Matt Levine said he 'liked' him, liking someone is very different than being a fan.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      Ah, then whoever I'm quoting from HN who said that was mistaken, or I've remembered it incorrectly. I don't think it changes the point - he's good for Levine professionally; he'll never run out of material for his column at this point.
      - vba616 4y ago
        Saying that the mess is good for him to write about now is completely different than insinuating he was promoting FTX this spring, especially while simultaneously taking the position that he exposed it (which is mostly hindsight). He's always talked about criminal and unethical behavior in an understated and humorous way in his column, and as a private individual, should be exempt from the slimy methods of character assassination used on politicians.

_bqrf 4y ago

Sequoia capital published this. That should be in the title. Without knowing that this was a real article published by real people at Sequoia a couple of months ago, this reads like a try-hard troll. No! It’s real! (Sequoia is like the Stanford of venture capital and is one of ftx’s biggest investors)

davidgerard 4y ago
And then quietly deleted it, lol.
- JamesianP 4y ago
  Which is somehow even more embarrassing.
clpm4j 4y ago
Still crickets from the Sequoia partners (Alfred Lin, Michelle Bailhe) who backed and hyped FTX and SBF.
- _bqrf 4y ago
  Not silence. Sequoia posted a letter declaring that their FTX investment is $0 and that this is not a notable fraction of their portfolio. FTX may have been a theoretically sound investment for Sequoia because many venture investments are marked to $0, and FTX got to huge-or-zero much faster than any other investment. A company that slowly goes to $0 is equally bad but worse for time-value. What hurts my brain is that theoretically this investment strategy is sound, but the implementation of it looks like: FTX. It's horrific. It's like total war logic. Logically it works, probabilistically it's reasonable, living it is grotesque and insane.
  - clpm4j 4y ago
    Yeah I saw that, but I meant directly from Alfred or Michelle (both had been vocal advocates on Twitter prior to this blowup).
  - 4y ago

davidgerard 4y ago

Whenever you hear of a VC's "due diligence", remember this.

stephc_int13 4y ago
Clearly, I suspected it from the few interactions I had with VCs. Well...
jstx1 4y ago
And Theranos.
mkhpalm 4y ago
I keep telling people you don't drop hundreds of millions on something without glancing at a few numbers first. They had to know something wasn't quite right but infused him with their cash anyways.
- hackandtrip 4y ago
  Apparently when another VC firm (Social Capital) suggested to create a board before going through with their investment, they received a plain&clear "f*k you". Corporate governance, accounting, and all the other boring stuff should literally be the first things which you should look at when assessing whether to fuel or not an exchange.
- davidgerard 4y ago
  the number they looked at was "number go up". This was an "investment" for the purpose of surfing a ponzi wave. They could not possibly have looked at any numbers any deeper than what FTX told them.

fedeb95 4y ago

Effective altruism is just nonsense. Giving money "away" is so vague that it's obviously tax discounts. Away to whom? Will give money blindly really help solving problems or keeps them alive? A lot of questions pop up.

ryanwaggoner 4y ago
That’s a pretty funny take, and suggests you have no familiarity with EA, because it’s explicitly an approach to giving money away while taking exactly these questions into account.
skybrian 4y ago
Are you against all charity then? It's possible to give money away without doing it "blindly."
Emma_Goldman 4y ago
Why are you holding forth on something which you clearly know absolutely nothing about? I say this as someone who thinks that effective altruism is broken.
karpierz 4y ago
It is nonsense, but I don't think this is the right critique. EA is very focused on answering "where should money go". EA is notably less interested in answering "where should money come from" and "what impact does the manner in which I earn money have".
- gruez 4y ago
  >EA is notably less interested in answering "where should money come from" and "what impact does the manner in which I earn money have". Says who? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give#Earning_to_give_through_jobs_that_may_cause_harm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earning_to_give#Earning_to_giv...
  - fedeb95 4y ago

andirk 4y ago

>Jaan Tallinn, the cofounder of Skype, put up a good chunk of that initial $50 million. So we have the cofounder of Skype to thank for this mess huh?

PM_me_your_math 4y ago

I've learned from this article that altruism means stealing billions to prop up your girlfriend's company. Thanks SBF!

randal_handle 4y ago
It's not her company. He owns most of the company and she was just the CEO. He was giving money to himself.
- nervlord 4y ago

jasmer 4y ago

This article is the absolute crescendo of the overture of all of the rubbish of the last era of Valley shenanigans in a masterfully written dumpster fire of a puff piece. As the show 'Silicon Valley' started the era with harmless satire, they made it real with this FTX big tent clownshow. Every paragraph dripping with absolute glib, lack of self awareness. "Compassionate To The Core" ... my god man I fell off my chair, got back on, and then fell off again ... I suggest there exists no author who could have created such an inane story that makes 'Wolf of Wall Street' seem like a Dilbert cartoon. Reality itself is much, much more entertaining than anything Netflix or god forbid even Scorsese himself could ever contrive.

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jterrys 4y ago
>Reality itself is much, much more entertaining than anything Netflix or god forbid even Scorsese himself could ever contrive. Spend enough time on this world and you realize that the absolute crazy shit out there would never be made into a movie because nobody would believe it's real. Make me an action flick of the guy who fought for three sides in WWII: Finnish Winter War, the Nazis, the Americans, only to have him die fighting in Vietnam and I'll tell you a movie that will be a complete box office flop because nobody would think this person actually existed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ignoramous 4y ago
> Every paragraph dripping with absolute glib, lack of self awareness. > ... "Compassionate To The Core" ... The elites are truly out of touch with the reality. Some are unhinged. It is baffling. Just the other day, some exec, who worked with Musk at Tesla, wrote that him acquiring Twitter was the part of a master plan to fix the climate: https://archive.is/uSz6I https://archive.is/uSz6I Read also: The Michael Scott theory of social class (2021), https://danco.substack.com/p/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social https://danco.substack.com/p/the-michael-scott-theory-of-soc...

sn0w_crash 4y ago

The #1 VC in tech wrote this. Never forget that.

giantdude 4y ago

not again... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33549059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33672924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33672924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33573636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33573636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33543718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33543718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33527047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33527047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33551288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33551288 Maybe enough with this. Hacker _News_, please

sn0w_crash 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
holyharvey 4y ago
- enraged_camel 4y ago
  I’ve been here for the past ten years, and not much has changed, including people who complain that things are just not the same.
  - holyharvey 4y ago
voisin 4y ago
It’ll stop when Sequoia puts it back on their website :-)

RockyMcNuts 4y ago

previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33604877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33604877

rossdavidh 4y ago

'But, right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red-brick floor, SBF’s purpose in life was set: He was going to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake.' What an excellent way to rationalize any psychopathic move you might want to make for money. Not saying SBF is a psychopath, 'cause I don't know enough about him, but this rationale could be used to justify almost anything: stealing, lying, fraud...

deleted 4y ago
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civilized 4y ago

I've been wondering about this for years. If VCs make thousands of bets, knowing that most of them won't work out but a tiny number will be huge and more than make up for it.... won't people eventually learn how to game this system and hoover up the money for 99.9999999% or 100% useless purposes, instead of just 99%? Or, the world will simply run out of trillion dollar ideas for the VCs to make their money back on, and eventually your 1% of good investments don't cover the 99% of shit anymore, and you have to improve your due diligence, and become more of an ordinary investor?