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I talked to an employee that left last spring. She said they had literally no idea what they were doing. The founders are just ivy educated 30 year olds. So the

I talked to an employee that left last spring. She said they had literally no idea what they were doing. The founders are just ivy educated 30 year olds. So they decided to just start hiring everyone they could from paypal, to move into "blockchain payments". They paid huge sums. The directors there had no experience ever managing huge teams of people. It was a giant mess of unqualified people funded by cheap capital. She also said the money movements on the blockchain facilitated by BlockFi were done manually by blockfi employees. The software was a facade and wasnt trusted for large sums of money

seydor 4y ago
VC wealth redistribution
- tehwebguy 4y ago
  Yeah until today. Now it's customer deposit and VC redistribution.
- ilamont 4y ago
  There are LPs behind a lot of these incompetent VCs dumping money into in crypto, including public workers' pension funds.
  - seydor 4y ago
    Pension funds are investing in VCs?
    - kasey_junk 4y ago
      Yes? It’s extremely common.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Pension funds are investing in VCs? Yes, commonly [1]. At the portfolio level, VC is about as risky as buyout [2]. [1] https://www.thebusinessofvc.com/blog/lp-universe?format=amp https://www.thebusinessofvc.com/blog/lp-universe?format=amp [2] https://timesofe.com/vc-fund-returns-are-more-skewed-than-you-think/ https://timesofe.com/vc-fund-returns-are-more-skewed-than-yo...
    - twiddling 4y ago
      There is a lot of literature on how much pension funds are chasing exotic and high-risk investments due to the unexpected longevity of pensioners and persistence, until recently, of low interest rates example: https://reason.org/commentary/with-interest-rates-low-us-pension-funds-make-risky-emerging-market-debt-investments/ https://reason.org/commentary/with-interest-rates-low-us-pen...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    My hope is most of the crypto investing was isolated to crypto funds, though I still lost some respect for VCs for even playing the crypto game.
    - rescripting 4y ago
      Even big institutional investors were swindled by FTX: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/18/pension-giant-ontario-teachers-plans-to-write-off-all-95-million-invested-in-crypto-exchange-ftx/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/18/pension-giant-o...
      - kristjansson 4y ago
        I mean ... that big fund carves off a tiny slice to make speculative, risky bets, and a small one of those bets failed. Hard to call it swindled.
    - bloodyplonker22 4y ago
      I regret to inform you that it was not isolated to "crypto funds". A lot of VCs mish-mashed them together with their other investments and slapped a Cathy Wood style name on it like "future innovation fund". VCs are mostly just salespeople, and so are founders. VCs sell to organizations such as pension funds, and founders sell to VCs. Most VCs lose money, especially in an environment full of froth, and most VCs don't know what they are really doing. From what I have observed, a lot of laypeople have a ton of respect when they hear the word "VC".
      - dehrmann 4y ago
        > VCs are mostly just salespeople Only halfway. Don't the GPs have skin in the game?
        bloodyplonker22 4y ago
        Yes, tiny fractions of basis points worth of their net worth.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Those pension funds have a small part of their portfolio chasing high-yield investments. I don't cry crocodile tears when they overperform the SP500, and I can't say I'll be crying them when they underperform. ... Although given how frequently the Ontario Teachers' Pension fund has made the 'Pension funds invests into an incredibly dumb startup' news cycle, I suppose grifters, thieves, and conmen might consider them to be an easy mark.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Some aren't so small https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7000201102700818432/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7000201... This would be between 5 and 10% or so.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    VC is a very small component of a pension fund; it's money that's often deliberately invested in weird decorrelated shit, for portfolio-theoretic reasons. There are lots of reasons to have a problem with crypto and defi! But the safety of pension funds vis a vis institutional VC is probably not really one of them. (You can imagine batshit pension funds that invest directly in crypto/defi stuff; that's extremely problematic.)
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Don’t they get their money from pension funds?
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    What Could Possibly Go Wrong™
herval 4y ago
That's pretty much how a lot of "unicorns" felt in the past 2-3 years
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  With all of the capital they have, you would think they would hire competent people from big tech. Instead they just find some stanford grad with a few years of experience to manage 50 people. It doesnt even make sense
  - herval 4y ago
    I've seen a couple startups with ~10 people and no market fit paying $500k/y to hire a FAANG VP. That's even more damaging than a fresh grad kid managing 50 people!
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Thinking about it, market fit would be the latest point to hire an experienced adult. Preferably from one to two levels below the role a start-up is hiring for, e.g. director level for a VP position. Maybe hire earlier, as soon as an adult is needed to set up proper structure, processes and operations. If a company screws this up, e.g. when inexperienced founders hire former COOs and senior VPs from big names for those big names only, things can turn south pretty well.
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      Getting the FAANG VP is usually critical to landing the next round of funding. If sending $500K/year [1] out the door brings in $50M for your next round of funding, it's well worth it. Particularly if you recognize that your enterprise is a Ponzi scheme [2] and that getting that next round of investors is how everyone gets paid. [1] seems ridiculously low BTW, that's a line manager or extremely skilled software engineer at a FAANG, VPs make multiple millions per year. [2] and anyone running a crypto startup should.
  - awhitby 4y ago
    It does if you consider self-selection: the competent person from big tech (i) can see a disaster a mile off (ii) has more to risk
hsavit1 4y ago
Only 1 of the BlockFi founders (Flori) has an ivy league degree (from Cornell). Zac is a moron who made his wealth playing poker and through a scam loans startup (Zibby).
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  >Only 1 of the BlockFi founders (Flori) has an ivy league degree (from Cornell). Zac is a moron who made his wealth playing poker and through a scam loans startup (Zibby). It's much, much harder to make millions at the poker table than it is to get a degree from an Ivy. There have been 141 people that have made over a million in 2022 from poker (https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/7339/2 https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/7339/2) and that doesn't count all of their losses, staking, etc. The eight Ivies collectively graduate roughly 75,000 people a year.
  - varunprasad 4y ago
    It's also much harder to make millions from the lottery than it is to get a degree from an Ivy. There might be a few hundred winning the lottery every year. So I'm not really sure what information the statistic that there are about 140 Poker millionaires in a year vs 75k Ivy grads conveys.
    - ntr-- 4y ago
      > So I'm not really sure what information the statistic that there are about 140 Poker millionaires in a year vs 75k Ivy grads conveys. Poker is played competitively both online and in the casinos of every country all over the world 24/7. There are a phenomenal number of players compared to Ivy league students. Unlike the lottery, it is also largely considered to be a game of skill based on a combination of statistics and social manipulation. GP is generally implying that because the ratio of players to successful players is so small for a game so widespread that is is very difficult and requires a huge amount of skill to make a significant amount of money playing poker.
    - c0m 4y ago
      If you have an open mind, I encourage you to look in to poker theory. It's far deeper than you appear to think, requiring a competent understanding of statistics, good mental maths, and an ability to perform under pressure. There's a reason many consistently successful modern poker players have some math pedigree. Many pro players go on to work at trading firms, Jesse Martin and Vanessa Selbst come to mind. If you do truly think it's no different to the lottery, I'm interested in your explanation as to why these people (a) come from the background they do (a high schooler with decent maths can tell you why the lottery is -EV) and (b) go on to the careers they go on to.
Beldin 4y ago
So, Theranos for the blockchain, roughly?
- rchaud 4y ago
  Theranos had all the financial backing they needed, and a coterie of ex-gov, ex-military elites playing defense for them against the FDA for years. Their plan was explicitly to lie, mislead and obsfuscate for as long as they could. BlockFi is just incompetence without the SBF-like malice.
- himinlomax 4y ago
  Theranos was exceptional in its industry, where most actors sell valuable products, have existed for decades if not centuries and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. BlockFi is just your typical blockchain company, a complete waste of money if not a scam, see FTX, Terra, BitConnect, MtGox and so on. An exception to the rule would be a company that's not a complete disaster run by ignorant, arrogant scammers.
Melting_Harps 4y ago
> They've raised about a billion dollars of VC - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor... > talked to an employee that left last spring. She said they had literally no idea what they were doing. The founders are just ivy educated 30 year olds So was SBF (MIT) and raised from Sequoia and Blackrok and his GF was a Stanford'ite with a Math degree and is responsible for the largest loss of funds from that cluster**. Can we finally admit the biggest scammers in this space are those from Ivy League, and connections with SV insiders traditional VC/Banking/Finance without out a clue of what they are doing or how this tech actually works; as a fintech boot strapped founder with over a decade in the Bitcoin community its been fairly obvious for at least 7 years since Blythe Masters and all her cronies from traditional finance got involved this was the case. Maybe now the rest of you vocal sideliners can finally see that is the case and that most of you are part of the problem more than most of us who have built startuprs using this tech without any of those things and did it the hard way outside of the VC/SV Ivy League World.
- psychlops 4y ago
  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  Pretty clear some ivy league degree holders are raising money with no product/no qualified background. While others are slaving away to get "product market fit" before a VC will touch them
- ummonk 4y ago
  > Maybe now the rest of you vocal sideliners can finally see that is the case and that most of you are part of the problem more than most of us who have built startuprs using this tech without any of those things and did it the hard way outside of the VC/SV Ivy League World. What? Why are we the problem?
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > What? Why are we the problem? This may just be me because I from CA and was inspired to work in tech as kid in the 90s and saw the drastic and detrimental culture changes that have come over the years/decades: many of you keep attributing these scamming events to us when in reality you FAANG/SV/VC insider types likely went to school or worked with them and turned a blind eye to this very obvious behavior that bred this culture; if you worked for or with them you likely even enabled this behavior in order to clout/status chase for a 'disrupter's' reference or network connections for funding. I've seen it far too often, and somehow for calling it out we become 'persona non-grata' in our homes because trnsplants who only came to SV for the money and status rather than make remarkable tools and disrupt legacy gate-keepers 'want to get theirs' all while all playing some odd cosplay to the contrary. The truth is that the tech that underlies cryptocurrency's like Bitcoin have it's roots in SV and has been advocated by Cypherpunks from the late 80s-90s and many of it's most notable people in this space were around in that time (eg Hal Finney worked for Phil Zimmerman during the Crypto wars and took on the US Government and risked prison). And it's a slap in the face to be told how we're not wanted or just scamming people with our focus and pursuits in tech because of this gross over-generalization that is based on an immense blind spot that who you are talking about is within your side more often than amongst out own--I admit we have had scams but the most notable are due to incompetence and ignorance in dealing with new tech (MTGOX) in real-time rather than an outright desire to scam. Bad players have existed in Bitcoin, I've seen it plenty of times, but as is the case with the biggest ones like FTX and BlockFi it tends to be from your ilk, not ours.
jsemrau 4y ago
Ah the good old "Investment Banking or Consulting Background (Big 4) required"
thepasswordis 4y ago
The old “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”, seems to have become “nobody ever got fired for hiring a Stanford PhD”.
treeman79 4y ago
Implemented the “facade” for a services company a dozen years ago. Request comes in and sales agents manually find a good local in the area. Got it the point where we were ready to scale nation wide. Leadership decided it was useful to have as something to prove we knew had great tech. But really wanted to do manual sales of other services. They were only looking at next quarter profits. Not seizing the industry. Finally left in disgust. They gradually faded as manual wasn’t scalable. Was years before I saw comparable competitors.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  I think part of it is non technical people not trusting their technical people/not willing to give them the keys to the business. They can "see" the manual parts and control it.
mring33621 4y ago
Here is the model, as I currently understand it: 1) some people are rich and want to get richer 2) Ivy educated VCs invest money for group (1) in start-up companies, while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 3) Ivy educated kids start companies using money from group (2), while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 4) sometimes, through a combo of hard work, skill and luck, things work out and everyone makes more money than was spent 5) sometimes, because they are mostly, actually a bunch of yahoos and/or scammers, things don't work out and group (1) loses their money There are some oversimplifications here, but in general, this seems to be the way.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  This seems to be largely what is going on. I think also, there are a few startup ideas considered to be "the future", and VCs are basically just choosing which horse they will bet on for that idea. So they pick through different founders chasing that market, and invest. Then all the other VCs pile in on those chosen horses, regardless of the due diligence. As a naive and younger outsider I always thought these people were all very competent. Clearly there is something very different going on here.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    > I think also, there are a few startup ideas considered to be "the future" This. I’m getting annoyed with my jQuery/Spring app with ~million of revenue that I can’t get sexy for employees nor for funding; sometimes I want to throw away ethics and say we’re building “a blockchain of solar-powered AI european-central-bank ledgers”. It would be so much easier. Nah, we’re just storied field data in 7 tables, and customers love it. But the tide is turning. I have a friend who mentioned the blockchain on his funding papers and he can’t even get an office in my city (France). I’m happy the tide finally turns for the blockchain, to value it for what it’s worth: A good idea for 1% of the present usecases, and bad idea for everything else. Even though not being able to sign an office lease for insurance reasons is quite comical.
    - GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
aswanson 4y ago
That is hilarious on every level.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
Crypto just seems like a lesson someone made up to teach kids why the world works the way it does.
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
It was a giant mess of unqualified people funded by cheap capital. Isn’t true for 80% of white collar industries?

seydor 4y ago

VC wealth redistribution

tehwebguy 4y ago
Yeah until today. Now it's customer deposit and VC redistribution.
ilamont 4y ago
There are LPs behind a lot of these incompetent VCs dumping money into in crypto, including public workers' pension funds.
- seydor 4y ago
  Pension funds are investing in VCs?
  - kasey_junk 4y ago
    Yes? It’s extremely common.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Pension funds are investing in VCs? Yes, commonly [1]. At the portfolio level, VC is about as risky as buyout [2]. [1] https://www.thebusinessofvc.com/blog/lp-universe?format=amp https://www.thebusinessofvc.com/blog/lp-universe?format=amp [2] https://timesofe.com/vc-fund-returns-are-more-skewed-than-you-think/ https://timesofe.com/vc-fund-returns-are-more-skewed-than-yo...
  - twiddling 4y ago
    There is a lot of literature on how much pension funds are chasing exotic and high-risk investments due to the unexpected longevity of pensioners and persistence, until recently, of low interest rates example: https://reason.org/commentary/with-interest-rates-low-us-pension-funds-make-risky-emerging-market-debt-investments/ https://reason.org/commentary/with-interest-rates-low-us-pen...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dehrmann 4y ago
  My hope is most of the crypto investing was isolated to crypto funds, though I still lost some respect for VCs for even playing the crypto game.
  - rescripting 4y ago
    Even big institutional investors were swindled by FTX: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/18/pension-giant-ontario-teachers-plans-to-write-off-all-95-million-invested-in-crypto-exchange-ftx/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/18/pension-giant-o...
    - kristjansson 4y ago
      I mean ... that big fund carves off a tiny slice to make speculative, risky bets, and a small one of those bets failed. Hard to call it swindled.
  - bloodyplonker22 4y ago
    I regret to inform you that it was not isolated to "crypto funds". A lot of VCs mish-mashed them together with their other investments and slapped a Cathy Wood style name on it like "future innovation fund". VCs are mostly just salespeople, and so are founders. VCs sell to organizations such as pension funds, and founders sell to VCs. Most VCs lose money, especially in an environment full of froth, and most VCs don't know what they are really doing. From what I have observed, a lot of laypeople have a ton of respect when they hear the word "VC".
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      > VCs are mostly just salespeople Only halfway. Don't the GPs have skin in the game?
      - bloodyplonker22 4y ago
        Yes, tiny fractions of basis points worth of their net worth.
- vkou 4y ago
  Those pension funds have a small part of their portfolio chasing high-yield investments. I don't cry crocodile tears when they overperform the SP500, and I can't say I'll be crying them when they underperform. ... Although given how frequently the Ontario Teachers' Pension fund has made the 'Pension funds invests into an incredibly dumb startup' news cycle, I suppose grifters, thieves, and conmen might consider them to be an easy mark.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Some aren't so small https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7000201102700818432/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7000201... This would be between 5 and 10% or so.
- tptacek 4y ago
  VC is a very small component of a pension fund; it's money that's often deliberately invested in weird decorrelated shit, for portfolio-theoretic reasons. There are lots of reasons to have a problem with crypto and defi! But the safety of pension funds vis a vis institutional VC is probably not really one of them. (You can imagine batshit pension funds that invest directly in crypto/defi stuff; that's extremely problematic.)
moneywoes 4y ago
Don’t they get their money from pension funds?
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  What Could Possibly Go Wrong™

herval 4y ago

That's pretty much how a lot of "unicorns" felt in the past 2-3 years

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
With all of the capital they have, you would think they would hire competent people from big tech. Instead they just find some stanford grad with a few years of experience to manage 50 people. It doesnt even make sense
- herval 4y ago
  I've seen a couple startups with ~10 people and no market fit paying $500k/y to hire a FAANG VP. That's even more damaging than a fresh grad kid managing 50 people!
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Thinking about it, market fit would be the latest point to hire an experienced adult. Preferably from one to two levels below the role a start-up is hiring for, e.g. director level for a VP position. Maybe hire earlier, as soon as an adult is needed to set up proper structure, processes and operations. If a company screws this up, e.g. when inexperienced founders hire former COOs and senior VPs from big names for those big names only, things can turn south pretty well.
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    Getting the FAANG VP is usually critical to landing the next round of funding. If sending $500K/year [1] out the door brings in $50M for your next round of funding, it's well worth it. Particularly if you recognize that your enterprise is a Ponzi scheme [2] and that getting that next round of investors is how everyone gets paid. [1] seems ridiculously low BTW, that's a line manager or extremely skilled software engineer at a FAANG, VPs make multiple millions per year. [2] and anyone running a crypto startup should.
- awhitby 4y ago
  It does if you consider self-selection: the competent person from big tech (i) can see a disaster a mile off (ii) has more to risk

hsavit1 4y ago

Only 1 of the BlockFi founders (Flori) has an ivy league degree (from Cornell). Zac is a moron who made his wealth playing poker and through a scam loans startup (Zibby).

alasdair_ 4y ago
>Only 1 of the BlockFi founders (Flori) has an ivy league degree (from Cornell). Zac is a moron who made his wealth playing poker and through a scam loans startup (Zibby). It's much, much harder to make millions at the poker table than it is to get a degree from an Ivy. There have been 141 people that have made over a million in 2022 from poker (https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/7339/2 https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/7339/2) and that doesn't count all of their losses, staking, etc. The eight Ivies collectively graduate roughly 75,000 people a year.
- varunprasad 4y ago
  It's also much harder to make millions from the lottery than it is to get a degree from an Ivy. There might be a few hundred winning the lottery every year. So I'm not really sure what information the statistic that there are about 140 Poker millionaires in a year vs 75k Ivy grads conveys.
  - ntr-- 4y ago
    > So I'm not really sure what information the statistic that there are about 140 Poker millionaires in a year vs 75k Ivy grads conveys. Poker is played competitively both online and in the casinos of every country all over the world 24/7. There are a phenomenal number of players compared to Ivy league students. Unlike the lottery, it is also largely considered to be a game of skill based on a combination of statistics and social manipulation. GP is generally implying that because the ratio of players to successful players is so small for a game so widespread that is is very difficult and requires a huge amount of skill to make a significant amount of money playing poker.
  - c0m 4y ago
    If you have an open mind, I encourage you to look in to poker theory. It's far deeper than you appear to think, requiring a competent understanding of statistics, good mental maths, and an ability to perform under pressure. There's a reason many consistently successful modern poker players have some math pedigree. Many pro players go on to work at trading firms, Jesse Martin and Vanessa Selbst come to mind. If you do truly think it's no different to the lottery, I'm interested in your explanation as to why these people (a) come from the background they do (a high schooler with decent maths can tell you why the lottery is -EV) and (b) go on to the careers they go on to.

Beldin 4y ago

So, Theranos for the blockchain, roughly?

rchaud 4y ago
Theranos had all the financial backing they needed, and a coterie of ex-gov, ex-military elites playing defense for them against the FDA for years. Their plan was explicitly to lie, mislead and obsfuscate for as long as they could. BlockFi is just incompetence without the SBF-like malice.
himinlomax 4y ago
Theranos was exceptional in its industry, where most actors sell valuable products, have existed for decades if not centuries and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. BlockFi is just your typical blockchain company, a complete waste of money if not a scam, see FTX, Terra, BitConnect, MtGox and so on. An exception to the rule would be a company that's not a complete disaster run by ignorant, arrogant scammers.

Melting_Harps 4y ago

> They've raised about a billion dollars of VC - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor... > talked to an employee that left last spring. She said they had literally no idea what they were doing. The founders are just ivy educated 30 year olds So was SBF (MIT) and raised from Sequoia and Blackrok and his GF was a Stanford'ite with a Math degree and is responsible for the largest loss of funds from that cluster**. Can we finally admit the biggest scammers in this space are those from Ivy League, and connections with SV insiders traditional VC/Banking/Finance without out a clue of what they are doing or how this tech actually works; as a fintech boot strapped founder with over a decade in the Bitcoin community its been fairly obvious for at least 7 years since Blythe Masters and all her cronies from traditional finance got involved this was the case. Maybe now the rest of you vocal sideliners can finally see that is the case and that most of you are part of the problem more than most of us who have built startuprs using this tech without any of those things and did it the hard way outside of the VC/SV Ivy League World.

psychlops 4y ago
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
Pretty clear some ivy league degree holders are raising money with no product/no qualified background. While others are slaving away to get "product market fit" before a VC will touch them
ummonk 4y ago
> Maybe now the rest of you vocal sideliners can finally see that is the case and that most of you are part of the problem more than most of us who have built startuprs using this tech without any of those things and did it the hard way outside of the VC/SV Ivy League World. What? Why are we the problem?
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > What? Why are we the problem? This may just be me because I from CA and was inspired to work in tech as kid in the 90s and saw the drastic and detrimental culture changes that have come over the years/decades: many of you keep attributing these scamming events to us when in reality you FAANG/SV/VC insider types likely went to school or worked with them and turned a blind eye to this very obvious behavior that bred this culture; if you worked for or with them you likely even enabled this behavior in order to clout/status chase for a 'disrupter's' reference or network connections for funding. I've seen it far too often, and somehow for calling it out we become 'persona non-grata' in our homes because trnsplants who only came to SV for the money and status rather than make remarkable tools and disrupt legacy gate-keepers 'want to get theirs' all while all playing some odd cosplay to the contrary. The truth is that the tech that underlies cryptocurrency's like Bitcoin have it's roots in SV and has been advocated by Cypherpunks from the late 80s-90s and many of it's most notable people in this space were around in that time (eg Hal Finney worked for Phil Zimmerman during the Crypto wars and took on the US Government and risked prison). And it's a slap in the face to be told how we're not wanted or just scamming people with our focus and pursuits in tech because of this gross over-generalization that is based on an immense blind spot that who you are talking about is within your side more often than amongst out own--I admit we have had scams but the most notable are due to incompetence and ignorance in dealing with new tech (MTGOX) in real-time rather than an outright desire to scam. Bad players have existed in Bitcoin, I've seen it plenty of times, but as is the case with the biggest ones like FTX and BlockFi it tends to be from your ilk, not ours.

jsemrau 4y ago

Ah the good old "Investment Banking or Consulting Background (Big 4) required"

thepasswordis 4y ago

The old “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”, seems to have become “nobody ever got fired for hiring a Stanford PhD”.

treeman79 4y ago

Implemented the “facade” for a services company a dozen years ago. Request comes in and sales agents manually find a good local in the area. Got it the point where we were ready to scale nation wide. Leadership decided it was useful to have as something to prove we knew had great tech. But really wanted to do manual sales of other services. They were only looking at next quarter profits. Not seizing the industry. Finally left in disgust. They gradually faded as manual wasn’t scalable. Was years before I saw comparable competitors.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
I think part of it is non technical people not trusting their technical people/not willing to give them the keys to the business. They can "see" the manual parts and control it.

mring33621 4y ago

Here is the model, as I currently understand it: 1) some people are rich and want to get richer 2) Ivy educated VCs invest money for group (1) in start-up companies, while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 3) Ivy educated kids start companies using money from group (2), while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 4) sometimes, through a combo of hard work, skill and luck, things work out and everyone makes more money than was spent 5) sometimes, because they are mostly, actually a bunch of yahoos and/or scammers, things don't work out and group (1) loses their money There are some oversimplifications here, but in general, this seems to be the way.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
This seems to be largely what is going on. I think also, there are a few startup ideas considered to be "the future", and VCs are basically just choosing which horse they will bet on for that idea. So they pick through different founders chasing that market, and invest. Then all the other VCs pile in on those chosen horses, regardless of the due diligence. As a naive and younger outsider I always thought these people were all very competent. Clearly there is something very different going on here.
- eastbound 4y ago
  > I think also, there are a few startup ideas considered to be "the future" This. I’m getting annoyed with my jQuery/Spring app with ~million of revenue that I can’t get sexy for employees nor for funding; sometimes I want to throw away ethics and say we’re building “a blockchain of solar-powered AI european-central-bank ledgers”. It would be so much easier. Nah, we’re just storied field data in 7 tables, and customers love it. But the tide is turning. I have a friend who mentioned the blockchain on his funding papers and he can’t even get an office in my city (France). I’m happy the tide finally turns for the blockchain, to value it for what it’s worth: A good idea for 1% of the present usecases, and bad idea for everything else. Even though not being able to sign an office lease for insurance reasons is quite comical.
  - GartzenDeHaes 4y ago

aswanson 4y ago

That is hilarious on every level.

WeylandYutani 4y ago

Crypto just seems like a lesson someone made up to teach kids why the world works the way it does.

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

It was a giant mess of unqualified people funded by cheap capital. Isn’t true for 80% of white collar industries?