7 ms·

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are now VCs

48 points by dwynings 15y ago

draggnar 15y ago
that was painful
mtgentry 15y ago
Tyler Winklevoss: "We were there at the beginning of web 2.0.." Yes, technically you were both alive on earth at the time. So was my Nana, my creepy uncle Hank, and about 6 billion other people.
rollypolly 15y ago
Would working for the Winklevoss'es be a black mark on someone's resume? For one thing, you'd never get hired at Facebook after that. Then again, Facebook isn't the only game in town.
- kmfrk 15y ago
  Facebook have people in many places, though. There's a Facebook mafia as there is a PayPal mafia.
- fuzzythinker 15y ago
  Mark officially worked for them before ;)
- jonnathanson 15y ago
  Honestly, I doubt they occupy more than a passing thought in Mark Zuckerberg's, or Facebook's, minds these days.
tdfx 15y ago
"Operational experience" == "litigation experience"?
- untitledwiz 15y ago
  I LOL-ed really hard when they claimed they had relevant/useful "operational experience".
  - maaku 15y ago
    I don't know about you, but I remember ConnectU.com being an actual, usable website. Not that it at any point gained traction over Facebook, but they did at least execute the idea.
adaml_623 15y ago
So since I have only watched the Social Network I'm very uninformed about the Winklevoss brothers and facebook. Can someone throw up some links to give me some more datapoints on the issue. From my point of view they are the same as normal VCs
- mkramlich 15y ago
  I didn't downvote you but I wanted to respectfully point out that your question could have been more easily answered by taking a moment to Google about the Winklevoss brothers and the Social Network, rather than post your comment here. That kind of thing is all just a few clicks away at any time, on the web.
  - adaml_623 14y ago
    Thanks for the reply, I was wondering why my HN points had dropped. I think my original post should have read, "The Winklevoss brothers seem to be fairly normal VCs with a short track record of backing good ideas. Why are people _here_ on HN dismissive of them." Live and learn I guess.
- T_S_ 15y ago
  Sure, just check their Facebook pages.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
joshmlewis 15y ago
I guess one good thing that came out of the Social Network is that they will never live down their parts in the movie. Especially being portrayed as "bad guys." Just the start of the interview the first 30 seconds must have been very awkward for them.
- c250d07 15y ago
  I only saw it once a while ago, but I don't think they were portrayed as 'bad guys' in the film. They even came out in support of how their story was told in the movie.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    To me it portrayed them as money-grabbing, egotistical and a bit moronic. Is it possible that the film manages to re-inforce whatever views the watcher had before seeing the film, I wonder what somebody who had never heard of those twins before seeing the film would think of them.
    - hprhpr 15y ago
      I had never heard of them before I saw it, and had about the same interpretation as you.
    - intended 15y ago
      Is that because in the end we are rooting for Zuckerberg? I mean I could understand 'naive' and even understand dislike for kids who come from old money. Yet money-grabbig/egotistical is a bit weird to parse. Heck if it was a kid from lesser beginnings and he fought back, he would have been the hero of the movie.
      - corin_ 15y ago
        I'm not a huge fan of Zuckerberg in real life - I admire what he's done, but not his personality. But in the movie, he's written to be the hero, a hero with flaws certainly but hero none-the-less. So yes that's certainly part of it, but just as he was written to be the hero, so too were the twins written to be the bad guys, even if they weren't as bad as we might expect hollywood villains to be. I don't think egos is weird to parse, they didn't just come from money (incidentally I come from money, to a lesser extent, so that doesn't set me automatically against people), they were the type of people that think their coming from money makes them superior in more ways that just their bank account balance. As to money-grabbing, it's my opinion both from the actual story and also the movie, that they frankly didn't deserve the money they got from Facebook, so yeah they were money-grabbing in their legal pursuits.
eli_gottlieb 15y ago
Who?
cheebla 15y ago
Money is the great equalizer. I don't imagine they'll have any trouble getting start-ups to take their money. Then again, 65 million seems like a lot of money but if these guys don't know what they're doing it won't last them very long.
- wallawe 15y ago
  That initial 65 million in equity is worth easily 3x that much now, even more post-IPO
- tlrobinson 15y ago
  I'm sure they can get their dad and his buddies to invest in their fund.
SkyMarshal 15y ago
They didn't seem to have much original to say. Everything they discussed could have been gleaned from Techcrunch, Mashable, etc. I wonder if their money and network will be enough to compensate for lack of (real) operational experience when they court top tier startup teams. Reading PG or Thiel, or watching Andreesen's presentations at http://ecorner.stanford.edu http://ecorner.stanford.edu, there's a world of value beyond money that they bring to table.
ojbyrne 15y ago
I didn't watch the video, but the first question I had was - wouldn't they have become VCs anyway? Harvard Business School, upper class background (right schools, right clubs, etc), probably a massive rolodex (Larry Summers at the very least), and one startup that failed because they didn't hire good lawyers to make sure their programmer didn't get uppity. This seems to fit the profile of thousands of people in the valley.
- yequalsx 15y ago
  I don't think they have Summers' info on their rolodex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJgUlme1XQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJgUlme1XQ
spitfire 15y ago
They actually come across fairly well. They mention the history of timesharing. Which is an important indicator that they pay attention to history. This is key, we've had "social networks" since the 80's. We called them BBSes. We dialled them up to chat, play online games, etc. Bring some historical perspective to the party and you can short circuit a lot of work - or just pass off something old as new again. Their focus on enterprise tech is probably a good one too.
joelrunyon 15y ago
"We focus on early stage disruptive startups." Does this scare anyone else? Just feels like people with money are throwing it around and making it look pretty with buzz words.
- wallawe 15y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. I wonder how far they have delved into learning about the technology that they are so interested in becoming apart of?
  - joelrunyon 15y ago
    The scary part to me was that they didn't have any criteria at all for the companies they were looking at besides "disruptive tech."
- raverbashing 15y ago
  "Just feels like people with money are throwing it around" Also, there is this quote: "One of the areas of focus for their fund is cloud computing" So, it looks like EXACTLY that. They will probably end up with lots of "Pets.com 2.0"
  - joelrunyon 15y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if the entire startup ecosystem doesn't end with a bunch of Pets.com clones.
nikcub 15y ago
"we think the cloud will be really big" mind. blown.
- bborud 14y ago
  followup question: "how big? can you show me?"
binarray2000 15y ago
Imagine they invest in your startup and later say "It was our idea!"... But on a serious note: I'm happy for them because they'll see now that business is more than suing someone for the mere idea.
bborud 15y ago
I think they should hire Aleksey Vayner as their spokesperson.
- BadassFractal 15y ago
  I wonder how many will get that. I still remember the guy, he's awesome.
IsaacL 15y ago
People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story. Does this warrant their eternal membership in the tech community's pantheon of evil? It seems to me like they're trying to put the Facebook thing behind them and use their wealth constructively. If you think startups are generally a net positive for the world, then more money going into startups has to be a good thing. And you have to admit they do have some ability to spot big ideas.
- bermanoid 15y ago
  People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story. I'd be fine with the negativity if that was even what happened. But it's not. They didn't "fail to execute". They were fairly far along in the process of executing ("the previous HarvardConnection programmers had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, back-end coding, and a way users could connect with each other", according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU), and would have finished up just fine with someone else if Zuck hadn't signed on and lied about progress specifically to delay them (that this was his intention came out pretty clearly in the IM conversations that were leaked a couple years ago, he basically lays out his plan to feign progress so that they don't look for someone else to finish ConnectU up before Facebook launches). It's one thing to get beat to market because you didn't hire the right programmer, that's a straightforward failure of execution; it's another thing altogether to get beat to market by the very programmer that you hired to beat the competitors to market. That makes you a victim of fraud, and I have a lot of sympathy for that.
bermanoid 15y ago
The Zuck > Winklevoss thing here is out of control. Do you guys even understand what really happened? This is not a tale of "Rich assholes tell hacker about their idea, then sue him for building it without them." This is "Rich assholes come to hacker with mostly built site, he agrees to finish it up for an equity stake, and then lies to them for two months about progress to make sure that he can beat them to market." Do all of you Winklevoss-haters even realize that the site was almost done when Zuck joined up? That the guy that started building the site worked on it for four months and only stopped because he graduated to get a job at Google? That the next contractor specifically referred Zuck as a good person to get the job finished when he had to leave? That if Zuck had said "no" they would have found someone else to finish it, but he didn't say "no" because he realized how important it was to be first to market? It's not like this was some fucking pie-in-the-sky idea. There was code on the table (crafted by a guy that got a job at Google a few months later, so probably pretty decent code), and they were putting money behind getting it finished. The only reason that Facebook beat them to market is that Zuckerberg lied to them for four months about working on it. Specifically so that he could delay them, from the looks of it - his IMs indicate that within a couple weeks of first meeting with them, he'd already decided to string them along but had no intention of actually doing the work. Do I like the idea of non-technical founders getting hackers to work for equity? No, I don't. It's their right, and it's the hacker's right to foolishly say yes, but I don't think it's ideal. But I'm far more offended at the idea that a hacker agrees to take on the task of finishing a project, digests the confidential IP (including code) that they've agreed to flesh out, and then lies to the client to delay them and then crush them in the market. That's disgustingly unethical (not to mention fraudulent) behavior. If you question whether Zuck's motives were really that sinister, read some of his IMs, like the one he sent to Eduardo, in December (3 months before launch, as he was telling the twins that the site was "almost complete"): "Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out." (http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010... - there's more sinister stuff there, too) Shit like this? He should have lost 100% of the business, plain and simple, and (to their discredit) if the Winklevoss twins had played the legal dispute competently (they should have pushed harder, earlier, and they obviously should not taken the settlement offer when they did), he would have.
zeruch 15y ago
They are not VCs. They are opportunist/tech celebs with a pool of cash. I simply do not see the announcement of them "becoming VCs" as much more than PR. When they actually start investing and getting returns, THEN let's give them some attention.

48 points by dwynings 15y ago

that was painful

Tyler Winklevoss: "We were there at the beginning of web 2.0.." Yes, technically you were both alive on earth at the time. So was my Nana, my creepy uncle Hank, and about 6 billion other people.

rollypolly 15y ago

Would working for the Winklevoss'es be a black mark on someone's resume? For one thing, you'd never get hired at Facebook after that. Then again, Facebook isn't the only game in town.

kmfrk 15y ago
Facebook have people in many places, though. There's a Facebook mafia as there is a PayPal mafia.
fuzzythinker 15y ago
Mark officially worked for them before ;)
jonnathanson 15y ago
Honestly, I doubt they occupy more than a passing thought in Mark Zuckerberg's, or Facebook's, minds these days.

tdfx 15y ago

"Operational experience" == "litigation experience"?

untitledwiz 15y ago
I LOL-ed really hard when they claimed they had relevant/useful "operational experience".
- maaku 15y ago
  I don't know about you, but I remember ConnectU.com being an actual, usable website. Not that it at any point gained traction over Facebook, but they did at least execute the idea.

adaml_623 15y ago

So since I have only watched the Social Network I'm very uninformed about the Winklevoss brothers and facebook. Can someone throw up some links to give me some more datapoints on the issue. From my point of view they are the same as normal VCs

mkramlich 15y ago
I didn't downvote you but I wanted to respectfully point out that your question could have been more easily answered by taking a moment to Google about the Winklevoss brothers and the Social Network, rather than post your comment here. That kind of thing is all just a few clicks away at any time, on the web.
- adaml_623 14y ago
  Thanks for the reply, I was wondering why my HN points had dropped. I think my original post should have read, "The Winklevoss brothers seem to be fairly normal VCs with a short track record of backing good ideas. Why are people _here_ on HN dismissive of them." Live and learn I guess.
T_S_ 15y ago
Sure, just check their Facebook pages.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

joshmlewis 15y ago

I guess one good thing that came out of the Social Network is that they will never live down their parts in the movie. Especially being portrayed as "bad guys." Just the start of the interview the first 30 seconds must have been very awkward for them.

c250d07 15y ago
I only saw it once a while ago, but I don't think they were portrayed as 'bad guys' in the film. They even came out in support of how their story was told in the movie.
- corin_ 15y ago
  To me it portrayed them as money-grabbing, egotistical and a bit moronic. Is it possible that the film manages to re-inforce whatever views the watcher had before seeing the film, I wonder what somebody who had never heard of those twins before seeing the film would think of them.
  - hprhpr 15y ago
    I had never heard of them before I saw it, and had about the same interpretation as you.
  - intended 15y ago
    Is that because in the end we are rooting for Zuckerberg? I mean I could understand 'naive' and even understand dislike for kids who come from old money. Yet money-grabbig/egotistical is a bit weird to parse. Heck if it was a kid from lesser beginnings and he fought back, he would have been the hero of the movie.
    - corin_ 15y ago
      I'm not a huge fan of Zuckerberg in real life - I admire what he's done, but not his personality. But in the movie, he's written to be the hero, a hero with flaws certainly but hero none-the-less. So yes that's certainly part of it, but just as he was written to be the hero, so too were the twins written to be the bad guys, even if they weren't as bad as we might expect hollywood villains to be. I don't think egos is weird to parse, they didn't just come from money (incidentally I come from money, to a lesser extent, so that doesn't set me automatically against people), they were the type of people that think their coming from money makes them superior in more ways that just their bank account balance. As to money-grabbing, it's my opinion both from the actual story and also the movie, that they frankly didn't deserve the money they got from Facebook, so yeah they were money-grabbing in their legal pursuits.

eli_gottlieb 15y ago

Who?

cheebla 15y ago

Money is the great equalizer. I don't imagine they'll have any trouble getting start-ups to take their money. Then again, 65 million seems like a lot of money but if these guys don't know what they're doing it won't last them very long.

wallawe 15y ago
That initial 65 million in equity is worth easily 3x that much now, even more post-IPO
tlrobinson 15y ago
I'm sure they can get their dad and his buddies to invest in their fund.

SkyMarshal 15y ago

They didn't seem to have much original to say. Everything they discussed could have been gleaned from Techcrunch, Mashable, etc. I wonder if their money and network will be enough to compensate for lack of (real) operational experience when they court top tier startup teams. Reading PG or Thiel, or watching Andreesen's presentations at http://ecorner.stanford.edu http://ecorner.stanford.edu, there's a world of value beyond money that they bring to table.

ojbyrne 15y ago

I didn't watch the video, but the first question I had was - wouldn't they have become VCs anyway? Harvard Business School, upper class background (right schools, right clubs, etc), probably a massive rolodex (Larry Summers at the very least), and one startup that failed because they didn't hire good lawyers to make sure their programmer didn't get uppity. This seems to fit the profile of thousands of people in the valley.

yequalsx 15y ago
I don't think they have Summers' info on their rolodex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJgUlme1XQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjJgUlme1XQ

spitfire 15y ago

They actually come across fairly well. They mention the history of timesharing. Which is an important indicator that they pay attention to history. This is key, we've had "social networks" since the 80's. We called them BBSes. We dialled them up to chat, play online games, etc. Bring some historical perspective to the party and you can short circuit a lot of work - or just pass off something old as new again. Their focus on enterprise tech is probably a good one too.

joelrunyon 15y ago

"We focus on early stage disruptive startups." Does this scare anyone else? Just feels like people with money are throwing it around and making it look pretty with buzz words.

wallawe 15y ago
I was thinking the same thing. I wonder how far they have delved into learning about the technology that they are so interested in becoming apart of?
- joelrunyon 15y ago
  The scary part to me was that they didn't have any criteria at all for the companies they were looking at besides "disruptive tech."
raverbashing 15y ago
"Just feels like people with money are throwing it around" Also, there is this quote: "One of the areas of focus for their fund is cloud computing" So, it looks like EXACTLY that. They will probably end up with lots of "Pets.com 2.0"
- joelrunyon 15y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the entire startup ecosystem doesn't end with a bunch of Pets.com clones.

nikcub 15y ago

"we think the cloud will be really big" mind. blown.

bborud 14y ago
followup question: "how big? can you show me?"

binarray2000 15y ago

Imagine they invest in your startup and later say "It was our idea!"... But on a serious note: I'm happy for them because they'll see now that business is more than suing someone for the mere idea.

bborud 15y ago

I think they should hire Aleksey Vayner as their spokesperson.

BadassFractal 15y ago
I wonder how many will get that. I still remember the guy, he's awesome.

IsaacL 15y ago

People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story. Does this warrant their eternal membership in the tech community's pantheon of evil? It seems to me like they're trying to put the Facebook thing behind them and use their wealth constructively. If you think startups are generally a net positive for the world, then more money going into startups has to be a good thing. And you have to admit they do have some ability to spot big ideas.

bermanoid 15y ago
People are being way too negative about this. So, they were a pair of "idea guys" who failed to execute and then managed to grab more than their fair share of the latest Valley success story. I'd be fine with the negativity if that was even what happened. But it's not. They didn't "fail to execute". They were fairly far along in the process of executing ("the previous HarvardConnection programmers had already made progress on a large chunk of the coding: front-end pages, the registration system, a database, back-end coding, and a way users could connect with each other", according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU), and would have finished up just fine with someone else if Zuck hadn't signed on and lied about progress specifically to delay them (that this was his intention came out pretty clearly in the IM conversations that were leaked a couple years ago, he basically lays out his plan to feign progress so that they don't look for someone else to finish ConnectU up before Facebook launches). It's one thing to get beat to market because you didn't hire the right programmer, that's a straightforward failure of execution; it's another thing altogether to get beat to market by the very programmer that you hired to beat the competitors to market. That makes you a victim of fraud, and I have a lot of sympathy for that.

bermanoid 15y ago

The Zuck > Winklevoss thing here is out of control. Do you guys even understand what really happened? This is not a tale of "Rich assholes tell hacker about their idea, then sue him for building it without them." This is "Rich assholes come to hacker with mostly built site, he agrees to finish it up for an equity stake, and then lies to them for two months about progress to make sure that he can beat them to market." Do all of you Winklevoss-haters even realize that the site was almost done when Zuck joined up? That the guy that started building the site worked on it for four months and only stopped because he graduated to get a job at Google? That the next contractor specifically referred Zuck as a good person to get the job finished when he had to leave? That if Zuck had said "no" they would have found someone else to finish it, but he didn't say "no" because he realized how important it was to be first to market? It's not like this was some fucking pie-in-the-sky idea. There was code on the table (crafted by a guy that got a job at Google a few months later, so probably pretty decent code), and they were putting money behind getting it finished. The only reason that Facebook beat them to market is that Zuckerberg lied to them for four months about working on it. Specifically so that he could delay them, from the looks of it - his IMs indicate that within a couple weeks of first meeting with them, he'd already decided to string them along but had no intention of actually doing the work. Do I like the idea of non-technical founders getting hackers to work for equity? No, I don't. It's their right, and it's the hacker's right to foolishly say yes, but I don't think it's ideal. But I'm far more offended at the idea that a hacker agrees to take on the task of finishing a project, digests the confidential IP (including code) that they've agreed to flesh out, and then lies to the client to delay them and then crush them in the market. That's disgustingly unethical (not to mention fraudulent) behavior. If you question whether Zuck's motives were really that sinister, read some of his IMs, like the one he sent to Eduardo, in December (3 months before launch, as he was telling the twins that the site was "almost complete"): "Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site. But they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them. So I'm like delaying it so it won't be ready until after the facebook thing comes out." (http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010... - there's more sinister stuff there, too) Shit like this? He should have lost 100% of the business, plain and simple, and (to their discredit) if the Winklevoss twins had played the legal dispute competently (they should have pushed harder, earlier, and they obviously should not taken the settlement offer when they did), he would have.

zeruch 15y ago

They are not VCs. They are opportunist/tech celebs with a pool of cash. I simply do not see the announcement of them "becoming VCs" as much more than PR. When they actually start investing and getting returns, THEN let's give them some attention.