I'm glad to see the parents getting some scrutiny here because it sounds like FTX probably wouldn't have been successful without them. But it also wouldn't have

I'm glad to see the parents getting some scrutiny here because it sounds like FTX probably wouldn't have been successful without them. But it also wouldn't have been this widespread without Sequoia, and this part really got me: > No one in Silicon Valley likes to think of themselves as privileged. Ayn Rand-reading VCs and entrepreneurs tend to bristle at the suggestion that their decisions are anything other than a product of calculated reasoning. Yet the valley’s knee-jerk elitism is so blindingly obvious that it seems almost beside the point to bring up. Investors overwhelmingly favor companies run by White men, often hailing from a tiny group of elite colleges, while shunning anyone who deviates from their superficial sense of what a successful founder should look, talk and act like. Some openly discriminate against founders over the age of 30, against founders with an accent and against anyone who comports themselves as if they’re not already rich. God help you if you show up to a pitch meeting wearing a suit. When the money becomes so detached from reality as to think that people over the age of 30 aren't capable of building products, you know stuff like this is going to keep happening. So much of the stupid stuff SBF did reads as pure inexperience wrapped around an untouchable genius persona. The fact that FTX ran on Quickbooks and had zero internal financial controls really just shows how little due diligence Sequoia really did when they were vetting SBF. FTX couldn't have been such a colossal disaster without the Sequoia funding, but they'll plead ignorance and move on to fund the next major 20-something fraud without thinking twice about it.