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Right. So it sounds like rolling the dice with unknown numbers (both negatives and gigantic ones) on the faces as many times as the vallet bears in the hope of

Right. So it sounds like rolling the dice with unknown numbers (both negatives and gigantic ones) on the faces as many times as the vallet bears in the hope of a lucky jackpot kind of unsophisticated cluelessnes to me then. National lottery for the wealthy. Likely this is not their money, and not hard earn money then but some easy come easy go furtune perhaps? Otherwise I'd expect a bit more cautious sophistication arond wealth generated by an intelligent body of people rather than the '2-3 out of 50' kind of strategy those VC specialists represent. Success is a conscious journey for only those eventually succeed and always retrospectively - to serv as a sellable recipe then for the hungry aspirings seeking foolproof methods - so a lot of luck is involved in the birth of great things, any great things, but come on! This level of fortuitous attitude is a crime, huge distortion, misuse, and disrespect of the funds representing the value created by someone else elsewhere. Is this all there is about VC professionals? This apparently open secret of lavish games, seemingly by overgrown greedy children whose talent is in puffery?

fragmede 2y ago
There's a lot of due diligence and background checks and other things that happen, that this framing glosses over, but given due diligence let FTX and Theranos through, it's easy to see why some would choose to see it that way. Still, thats just how the numbers work out. If you have $1,000,000 to blow, and you invest $100,000 at a time, and one pays off 100x, you're up $9 million. But if they all fail you're down to zero. If they all hit 100x, you'd be up $100 million! So there is actually a lot of effort put in to try and only pick only the winners. It's just the fact of the matter is that there's just so much luck involved, on top of being good at business and sales and product development, that, as an investor, there's no such thing as a sure bet.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Theranos in particular didn't have many _proper_ VCs involved; it was a lot of, essentially, individual dumb rich people (and/or their family offices). IIRC a proper VC turned them down at some point because they couldn't produce audited accounts. At all. Not even from a dodgy auditor. It was a weirdly amateur fraud, when you look at it; an awful lot of it came down to "trust me, bro". FTX was a far more professional fraud, granted.

fragmede 2y ago

There's a lot of due diligence and background checks and other things that happen, that this framing glosses over, but given due diligence let FTX and Theranos through, it's easy to see why some would choose to see it that way. Still, thats just how the numbers work out. If you have $1,000,000 to blow, and you invest $100,000 at a time, and one pays off 100x, you're up $9 million. But if they all fail you're down to zero. If they all hit 100x, you'd be up $100 million! So there is actually a lot of effort put in to try and only pick only the winners. It's just the fact of the matter is that there's just so much luck involved, on top of being good at business and sales and product development, that, as an investor, there's no such thing as a sure bet.

rsynnott 2y ago
Theranos in particular didn't have many _proper_ VCs involved; it was a lot of, essentially, individual dumb rich people (and/or their family offices). IIRC a proper VC turned them down at some point because they couldn't produce audited accounts. At all. Not even from a dodgy auditor. It was a weirdly amateur fraud, when you look at it; an awful lot of it came down to "trust me, bro". FTX was a far more professional fraud, granted.