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SV does reject con artists, it's just that con artists love to fake associate themselves with SV and then people who don't know any better believe that the con
by MichaelZuo 3y ago
SV does reject con artists, it's just that con artists love to fake associate themselves with SV and then people who don't know any better believe that the con artists are real because of that fake association.
(If you define 'SV' to mean only the major companies, VC firms, and big decision makers actually HQed in SV.)
This isn't a solvable problem, while still remaining a somewhat free country, since roughly half the population will always be below average in sniffing out dupes. So some fraction of con artists will always be able to succeed in duping some folks.
Of course there are a lot of SV entry level and middle management types that go bad since even a 2% corruption rate means thousands of people per annum at SV scale.
- jhbadger 3y agoThe major companies aren't "Silicon Valley" to the normal person, though. There was a reason the show "Silicon Valley" was about a startup and not some boring middle manager working for Google or Facebook.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThere's obviously too many startups to form a solid impression of percentages but I don't think the rate of fraud in startups is noticeably higher then in any other major city. Some small fraction of startups, businesses, entrepreneurs, etc., will be outright frauds anywhere. Maybe some viewers believed that literally 100% of the startup population has honest intentions, and then they become disappointed in reality?
- runnerup 3y ago> SV does reject con artists The incredible amount of money Andreesen Horowitz poured into so many different crypto scams contradicts this. Not to mention the incredible amount of terrible companies which had business plans that were prima facie ridiculous.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoDid you really expect a 100% perfect rate? i.e. infallibility? No real system can accomplish that, even 99.9% is already a very high bar.
- reaperman 3y agoA16Z has a portfolio size of $35 billion and invested nearly $8 billion in pure cryptocurrency schemes (probably quite a bit more additional investment through some of their funds which aren't exclusively crypto plays). We're not talking "99.9% avoidance of obvious scams" or any other tiny fraction. Their flagship crypto fund was down 40% in 2022. Even if it returned profits to shareholders since its seed investments in 2009, it did so at the expense of people who bought in later, like all crypto wins. They didn't "create value" they, at best, extracted value from crypto scams. And at this point it's not even clear to me how the fund is performing overall.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoYes but we're talking about SV as a whole, not a specific firm? If we assume a quarter of a16z's crypto investments will turn out to be actual frauds, which is a big assumption, that's only a small bit of all the money flowing through SV. And plus I think even a 98% success rate of avoiding scams is already pretty noteworthy, like I said 99.9% is a very high bar.
- runnerup 3y agoWhere did you get 98% from?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt's my personal bar for someone/some group to be considered honest. I'm not sure what 'reaperman's threshold is but I doubt it's literally 100% or even 99.9%.
- 3y ago