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Andreessen Horowitz is now openly courting capital from Saudi Arabia
- rqtwteye 4y agoIf something is not made illegal, money will always win over any kind of ethics. Same happening in sport.
- GiorgioG 4y agoI think you can just leave it at "money will always win over any kind of ethics" - with enough money, anything can be made legal.
- anovikov 4y agoWhy not take dumb money if it's available? And money hardly gets any dumber than there.
- xiphias2 4y agoIt's not simply just they being dumb, they are also not the firsr choice for premium deals. And I wouldn't put Andreeseen Horowitz a premium VC at this point.
- rapsey 4y agoIs there an industry that would not take SA money? I don't understand the point of this article.
- rcarr 4y agoI think the point is that the prototypical coder, according to the narrative, is a left-leaning lawful good person that wants to change the world for the better. Think early google with “don’t be evil”. The fact that one of the most high profile VCs are now courting Saudi Arabian money is basically the final nail in the coffin of this narrative and that the tech industry is just as immoral, dirty and corrupt as any other. Just in case all the scandals from the past decade hadn’t quite got the point across.
- EGreg 4y agoThe same industries who said they would divest from all things Russian court Saudi Arabian money? I guess words like “unelected dictator who has been carrying on a brutal war and bombing campaign of a neighboring country with 40 million people” only apply when someone isn’t our ally? Once Saudis make peace with Iran and join BRICS, we may change our rhetoric.
- web3-is-a-scam 4y agoIt’s easy: Anti-Russia is the current thing Anti-Saudi Arabia is not the current thing I do the current thing because I am a moral person, and none of that other stuff matters because I am good person because I support current thing.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y agoComrade Stalin liked this post.
- rapsey 4y agoThis industry has taken plenty of SA money via softbank.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoOnly the tech industry thinks of itself that way. Outside the tech industry, everyone thinks of us as investment bankers - overly paid, out of touch clowns surviving largely on cheap money. You should see the sheer glee online after every round of layoffs.
- tiffanyh 4y agoGolf. PGA vs LIV.
- vanilla_nut 4y agoIndustry? Nope, there's always someone in every space willing to take blood money. Company? I can think of a few private, small companies with morals and a sustainable business model who wouldn't take SA money if it was a gift. But those kinds of businesses aren increasingly hard to find in the current climate of late stage capitalism.
- akudha 4y agoThis is like saying there are a few engineers who wouldn’t work for Monsanto, Palantir etc for any amount of money. Sure there are, but they are too few to make any meaningful difference. Greed wins, all the time
- meepmorp 4y agoThe fed turned off the taps, still need that cash from somewhere. Edit: > Meanwhile, the three reportedly laid it on thick, with Horowitz praising Saudi Arabia as a “startup country” and saying that “Saudi has a founder; you don’t call him a founder, you call him his royal highness.” that is some next level groveling
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 4y agoIt fills be with a combination of joy and disgust to see wealthy Americans sucking up to Saudi money.
- silexia 4y agoThis is what it looks like when governments become too strong. Everyone has to go along with what they are doing. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship and everyone has to march to the leaders tune. The UK and the US are seeing our governments become ever larger and stronger. Every time we let these governments pass a law to "protect" the children or the poor or whoever, our freedoms shrink and the time when we all must say and do what we are told draws nearer.
- ReptileMan 4y agoPecunia non olet
- hiyer 4y ago> Andreessen Horowitz is now openly courting capital from Saudi Arabia, despite U.S. strains. I didn't know US' relations with Saudi Arabia were strained. SA imports hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons from USA every year.
- anonkogudhyfhhf 4y agoThey did murder an American journalist for criticising their rules in his writing
- samirillian 4y ago[flagged]
- jjtheblunt 4y agoWhat?
- aww_dang 4y ago>Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old United States citizen who was killed while eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Yemen by a drone airstrike ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama on October 14, 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... >Nawar "Nora" al-Awlaki was an eight-year-old American citizen who was killed on January 29, 2017, during the Raid on Yakla, a commando attack ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nawar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nawar_al-Awlaki >Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki was an American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a U.S. government drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike from the U.S. government.[7][8] US government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
- jossclimb 4y agoRight, because US dollars are so clean.
- unmole 4y agoSaudi Rials are essentially US Dollars in a different packaging. Three and three quarter Rials on top of each other in a trench coat would probably pass as a Dollar and no one would mind.
- jabradoodle 4y agoThe issue isn't the currency the exchange takes place in, the problem is doing business with dictators after pretending to altruistic.
- jossclimb 4y agoEveryone pretends to be altruistic until it suits them not to be. Do people buying iPhones really care about the child labour that mined the silicon or the Chinese workers throwing themselves off the roof of Foxconn. Of course not, we just tell ourselves we are abstracted away far enough to be guilt free. Don't get me wrong, I am sure a16z are being hypocritical, but he who is without sin can throw the first stone.
- jabradoodle 4y ago[flagged]
- andsoitis 4y ago> after pretending to altruistic I have a hard time believing a VC pretended to be altruistic. When did they pretend to have a selfless concern for others (altruism)?
- jabradoodle 4y ago"We are delighted to announce that the six General Partners of Andreessen Horowitz, with our families, are all committing to donate at least half of all income from our venture capital careers to philanthropic causes during our lifetimes." https://a16z.com/2012/04/25/our-philanthropic-commitment/ https://a16z.com/2012/04/25/our-philanthropic-commitment/
- stuaxo 4y agoEthics? We've heard of it.
- soumyadeb 4y agoThe US govt has been courting the Saudi regime to help with the oil prices for a while now so its unfair to call out a16z.
- 1_1xdev1 4y agoPolitician A got away with corruption (even if called out, in another article, years ago) so it’s unfair to call out Politician B for corruption. Come on
- soumyadeb 4y agoDecisions like whether it's ok to do business with Saudi, whether they were responsible for killing etc should be left to politicians. They should make the laws which businesses should follow.
- seanhunter 4y agoYou don’t get to delegate ethical decision-making to anyone else. You have to decide for yourself what the right thing is for you to do given your own particular circumstances and beliefs.
- postsantum 4y agoRuss Hanneman moment
- popcorncowboy 4y agoThis guy fucks!
- somesortofsystm 4y agoOh, suddenly we're not happy with giving a totalitarian-authoritarian dictatorship weapons to execute genocide on tens of millions of innocent people and just really want their money for our play time.. What changed? Edit: I mean, this isn't news and its no conspiracy theory. The USA really is in league, militarily, with a fascist totalitarian-authoritarian dictatorship which regularly murders children as well as its own citizens. It deserves your attention, fellow citizens. Whether it makes you feel uncomfortable about your investments - or not.
- orsenthil 4y agoa16z bet heavily on crypto ecosystem to fly. They even backed many sham concepts. But I guess their wish wasn't granted, and now looking for money from oil.
- anongraddebt 4y agoI’m not an insider, so I wouldn’t know, but there is an alternative take on their motivations for courting the Saudi’s. Namely, they are becoming a bit like SoftBank: they’ve been raising mega funds the past couple years and have started to run out of traditional institutional investors to court. While this could be an alternative take all its own, it can also be combined with the crypto take (they aren’t mutually exclusive).
- paxys 4y agoa16z has become a joke in the VC industry. They invested upwards of $10 billion in "web3" startups, and are unlikely to see a single dollar of it back. And they keep doubling down on the idiocy, for example dumping $350M into Adam Neumann's new company (which not even he can actually describe). A decade ago they had their fingers in every big tech exit. Today hardly any name in their portfolio is recognizable. No wonder they are desperate for the cash.
- birdyrooster 4y agoEgg man bad (yes this is post irony)
- ShamelessC 4y ago> a joke in the VC industry Bit like a hat on a hat.
- dieselgate 4y agoInteresting to see this. I’m familiar with one startup that’s received quite a bit of their series a from Andreessen Horowitz (don’t think they’re web3 but rather hospitality/real estate) and it seems like they are pushing their ties to a16z super hard, like that’s one of their biggest “assets” or advantages. I’m not in the startup space so not really sure about how it all works but just kind of comes across like an appeal to authority to me and name dropping a16z all over the place etc. Also skeptical of the business in general (and don’t get along well with the founder heh) but that’s another thing.
- lazzlazzlazz 4y agoA decade ago a16z was new (less than four years old, founded in 2009) and had no track record. Today, they are in almost every major tech company in every category, and continue to win seemingly every competitive deal. There's no vantage point from which they seem to be losing. Take "web3". Consider the fact that a16z never invested in FTX, Terra, BlockFi — the largest crypto failures/scams, that their competitors invested in. Yet they led Uniswap, Optimism, Matter Labs, and OpenSea which have proven to be some of the most interesting and powerful projects in the space. If you get all of your news from Hacker News you're going to get a distorted view of reality.
- surfingdino 4y agoIs this news? The wealthy people have been telling us for years that paupers have no money and no morals.
- haram_masala 4y agoSaudi money in the startup world isn’t new. SoftBank is bundles quite a bit of it under a less-noxious brand.
- ianai 4y agohttps://docs.google.com/document/d/13h84RV5MXZpImXxelaYOcI6B5OUwjL1H4ERxW7EjTGQ/preview https://docs.google.com/document/d/13h84RV5MXZpImXxelaYOcI6B... The letter meant to make svb more desirable to a potential buyer over that 'hail Mary' deal weekend. Of note is who didn't sign that letter.
- eigenvalue 4y agoThis doesn’t really surprise me. The Saudis have a ton of money and like to invest it aggressively in passive vehicles. If your job is to drum up investment money then it makes sense to focus on them from a purely economic standpoint. I once went to a meeting at Credit Suisse’s offices in my earlier days in finance and was amused to see a huge framed image on the wall that was the family tree of the Saudi royal family, showing all the wealthy and influential cousins and uncles who dominate key governmental ministries and hold the purse strings. The bank had practically made a science of how to best target them to pitch their schemes (didn’t end up saving them in the end though!)
- haliskerbas 4y agoIsn’t Marc Andreessen the “keep your politics out of work” guy? He openly applauded Coinbase ceo for the being a stellar example of a company doing it correctly. If you liked that then you should be fine with this too right?
- thrill 4y agoWhat next - we'll be buying their oil?
- cguess 4y agoWe're doing that substantially less year by year. Right now we're at about the same levels as we were in 1975. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRIMUSSA2&f=M https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
- postsantum 4y agoThe good thing the US is increasingly buying oil from democratic countries, such as India or Malta
- cguess 4y agoIt's that we're making a lot of it ourselves now. Fracking is horrifying, but it does help us stay local.