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There’s a lot of people I’ve talked to who didn’t like Lina Khan not because of the Figma thing but because they thought she was having a chilling effect on acq
by api 1y ago
There’s a lot of people I’ve talked to who didn’t like Lina Khan not because of the Figma thing but because they thought she was having a chilling effect on acquisitions broadly.
The vast majority of startups will never IPO. Acquisition is the only viable exit. That’s because the bar for IPO has risen so high that only massive already incumbent unicorns can reach it. IPO isn’t a way to raise capital to compete. It’s a victory lap if you’ve won already.
Don’t know if this is actually true, that she was having this chilling effect. I am relaying a sentiment I’ve encountered.
Of course the other reason is tech-right echo chamber brain rot. People need to get off Xhitter. (Not a fan of doomer left anti tech brain rot either. There’s more than one kind of brain rot around.)
- benreesman 1y agoYeah, I have heard that sentiment too. I've never heard so much as a second-hand anecdote that someone was on the track of an acquisition but got the vibe their 50 million dollar acquihire plus was going to just be too much trouble under an activist chairwoman though. It seems to me that the same weaponization of binary tribal thinking in red/blue social stuff has a corollary in "entrepeneur / commie" oversimplification with about as much nuance. Smart people get emotionally manipulated on every other kind of politics at the behest of the new oligarchs, why not this one?
- api 1y agoI agree except the part about the new oligarchs doing the manipulating. I think they are manipulating themselves, sucked into these brain rot machines as much as anyone. I heard a Thiel interview recently where he ranted about Greta Thunberg and the antichrist and used a bunch of very online Xhitter bubble terms like referring to low efficacy as “low-T” and I was like this guy needs to touch grass. It didn’t even make a lot of sense.
- benreesman 1y agoThat's funny in a dark way, especially it being Thiel given that this entire movement/era traces a clear intellectual and emotional lineage to his activism all the way back at least as far as his writing in the student libertarian rag at Stanford in like 94 (and apparently a childhood fixation with Quenta Silmarillien exceeding even my own). Trapped in his own Intellectual Dark Web one might say. Yeah, Greta Thurnburg is making the frogs "low-T". What a bunch of fucking losers.
- malfist 1y agoIt's never made sense for me (as a gay man) how a gay man could get sucked into the fringe alt right manosphere. That whole ecosystem is antithetical to you
- benreesman 1y agoI mean, these people aren't well my guy. It's not a huge stretch to imagine a bunch of repressed self-loathing around one's identity being at or near the core of it. Thiel grew up in the 90s. Whatever one deems the tolerance situation today, it was worse then.
- terminalshort 1y agoIt makes perfect sense if you think about it from Thiel's perspective. Other than legal technicalities like marriage, the consequences of being gay are mainly determined by societal attitudes and not electoral politics. No legal changes that the Republicans would make do anything to stop a powerful billionaire from being openly gay. So it makes perfect sense that he would favor his business interests when he takes sides in politics.
- scarface_74 1y agoIt just happened with Windsurf and Google.
- benreesman 1y agoWindsurf getting "bought" such that the employees got nothing is a great recent example of why you want Lina Khan seeing to it that a healthy and well-regulated M&A market is in effect. That's precisely the kind of lowbrow shit you can thank her bought and paid for successors for bringing you the next decade's worth of.
- JustExAWS 1y agoSo now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people? Isn’t that the sane thing we (rightfully) criticized Apple, Google, Adobe and a few other companies for doing in the Jobs era when they had an anti poaching agreement?
- Dylan16807 1y ago> So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people? What do you mean "now"? That's a major part of what it means to regulate acquisitions. So yes they should continue to regulate this extremely narrow slice of hiring. > Isn’t that the same thing Only if we oversimplify the scenario all the way down to "hiring". And if we do that, there's thousands of laws that prevent hiring people in all sorts of situations.
- JustExAWS 1y agoIt wasn’t an acquisition - Google offered the employees they wanted a shit ton of cash to leave. What laws keep companies from hiring people they want to hire who are legally allowed to work in the country? This is exactly what Google did, it hired employees.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
- mulmen 1y ago> The vast majority of startups will never IPO. Acquisition is the only viable exit. Or you could run the business profitably and not exit at all.
- edoceo 1y agoHard to raise money with that plan. The VC world wants the 10x. Difference between SME and Startup.