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by kibwen 6mo ago
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- jordanb 6mo agoListening to All In is a real eye opening experience. Especially when they have guests on and they're exactly like the regulars.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bix6 6mo agoI have zero respect for All In. It’s a shame people pay those guys any mind.
- indymike 6mo agoAn echo in the sounding chamber? Say it isn't so...
- next_xibalba 6mo agoI actually think this take is wrong... but the moment Travis Kalanick was a guest and claimed that he was on the verge of discovering new physics with the aid of ChatGPT was an eye opening moment.
- HoldOnAMinute 6mo ago"new-to-me" physics
- jordanb 6mo agoNot even that it was just a bunch of AI-psychosis nonsense: https://futurism.com/former-ceo-uber-ai https://futurism.com/former-ceo-uber-ai
- cmrdporcupine 6mo agoThe answer isn't that they're morons. It's that they aren't people who "invest" in "good businesses" to make money, but instead on the whole a class of individuals classed with gambling on high risk ventures that will have absolutely massive returns and they don't care if 90% of them fail and 9% flounder because the 1% that succeed bring in absolutely apeshit amounts of $$ when they are acquired by someone else. Using things like github stars is clearly stupid, but not in the way you're suggesting. They're using the GH stars as a proxy metric for "someone else will come along and give money bags to this person later, so I should get in early so I can take that money eventually." They're operating on metric of success which is about influence and charisma and connectedness, not revenue or technical excellence. Again, VCs don't care if you'll make a profitable business some day. They're just interested in if someone else will come along and pay out giant bags of cash for it later in a liquidity event. If they get even one of those successes, all the stupid GH star watching pays off. Here's another way of framing it: any harms from the false positives around "He has a lot of GH stars" or "He went to Stanford" or "I know his father at the country club" are more than mitigated by the one exit in 1000 that makes a bunch of people filthy rich. We shouldn't expect VCs to be something they're not. But we are missing something inbetween VCs and "self financing" and "bootstrapping"
- palmotea 6mo ago> Again, VCs don't care if you'll make a profitable business some day. They're just interested in if someone else will come along and pay out giant bags of cash for it later in a liquidity event. If they get even one of those successes, all the stupid GH star watching pays off. And if that's true, they should be slapped, hard. They're no longer performing a socially useful function, and and have degraded towards pure financialization. Some middleman between fools and their money. As much as I don't like Altman, VC should be pumping money into startups like Helios--companies pursuing cutting-edge technology that could totally fail (yes, that's an organic em-dash).
- cmrdporcupine 6mo agoI don't think there's ever been an argument that anybody in a free market capitalist economy has to perform a "socially useful function"? I do think that ZiRP distorted things extremely badly. There's an entire generation in this software industry that lives around the business-culture expectations set during that time which as far as I could see basically amounted to "I build Uber but for X" (where X is some new business domain). Perhaps after a bit of a painful interregnum things will be a bit different now that rates are higher and risk along with it. Also anybody can throw a SaaS together in a few days now. Separating the wheat from the chaff in the next few years will be... interesting.
- twic 6mo agoVCs are, traditionally, people who made a lot of money in a lottery and think that makes them experts. It's virtually guaranteed they're idiots.
- mghackerlady 6mo agohey shhh the ycomb gods might hear us
- rtaylorgarlock 6mo agoI got downvoted on another post mentioning VCs. Confirmed everything I already knew about the sheeple
- georgeecollins 6mo agotrue, but the way I would frame it is we are all morons in someone else's eyes. No one is as smart as they think they are. The mistake Americans make is thinking that rich people are so smart that everything they do is smart.
- zerkten 6mo agoI don't think this is always true, but it's true a lot. I think there are better descriptions than moronic as well. People use moronic when people are just as smart but have a different (and possibly better) direction. It's just the case that it defies the will of the other person. These people go to the extreme and feel they have to outdo each other in an arms race to win whatever category it is today. You can have extreme ambitions without being a moron. It's possible for someone to be empathetic, but also really driven. The problem is that they are locked in a downward spiral and they can't possibly be vulnerable. It's only when they run out of money, or some other extreme event occurs that they change tack. That's moronic, especially when the outcomes are predictable. There is a lot to be said about SV culture and the people that surround these VCs. A lot of people love these environments and more than tolerate the environment these VC folks create. It's hardly a new phenomenon.
- kibwen 6mo agoYes, but while we're all born stupid, rich people are subject to forces that actually make them dumber than the average person. Normally people learn from failure because they experience tangible negative consequences as a result of failure. But money is a better insulator than a vacuum, and once you're sufficiently wealthy, failure no longer has any tangible negative effect on your quality of life. Lose ten billion dollars? Lose 90% of your net worth? You and your kin will still be living lives of ease and luxury for generations to come. They're destined to be morons because there's no pressure forcing them to learn from their mistakes.
- georgeecollins 6mo agoI don't really see any evidence that the poor are smarter than the rich. You can say that a wealthy person is more insulated from their mistakes, but I think poor and rich react very similarly to major financial setbacks. Yeah, a wealthy person can do something dumb all the time and not feel it, but then a poor person may be doing as proportionately badly with things like credit card fees or sports gambling. If you think you are smarter because you are a "normal person" then I think you need to consider that everyone is dumber then they realize.
- rib3ye 6mo agothis is compounded by young, newly rich tech workers (no kids, no mortgage, maybe not even a car) experimenting with being a VC because they've recently reached accredited investor status. and it's not just ZIRP. every recent IPO or liquidity event creates literally 500 more of these guys.
- LargeWu 6mo agoThey say Silicon Valley was more of a documentary than a comedy, and now we have one more way life imitates art: A growing army of Erlich Bachmann's.
- jasonmp85 6mo ago[dead]
- arealaccount 6mo agoJian-Yang's
- Esophagus4 6mo agoBig Heads
- adamkf 6mo ago> maybe not even a car Hold up — one can be mature without any of those things, but cars are especially optional.
- nradov 6mo agoWe're all morons outside of some very narrow areas of expertise. By most criteria James Mattis would be considered a smart guy: he earned a Master's degree, commanded troops effectively in combat, and served as Secretary of Defense. And yet he fell for the Theranos fraud. You have to know your limitations, and too many people think that because they're good at one thing they must be geniuses who are good at everything. Engineers are especially prone to this delusion.
- rvba 6mo agoWhat does a soldier / pollitical appointment know about finance?
- nradov 6mo agoExactly. That's the point.
- radiator 6mo ago> We're all morons outside of some very narrow areas of expertise speak for yourself, I guess? Some people know things in many areas. But even if they are not experts outside of their areas of expertise, they may recognize their limitations in other areas and thus avoid making costly mistakes. This may even be the rule for adults, rather than the exception.
- nradov 6mo agoSome people believe they know things in many areas. This is typically the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
- roarcher 6mo agoI used to be afflicted with the notion that wealth was correlated with a person's intelligence and work ethic. I was miraculously cured when I went to work for a startup that had to periodically impress VCs to raise capital.
- MASNeo 6mo agoVCs have no money and few have the money to manage the money entrusted in them. The people that give the money have the money because they ask people to do more with less. In that pinch, one might understand how VCs look to proxies, and often fail to find great ones but at least then it wasn’t expense. Ever tried to sell something to a VC except equity - it’s an educating experience?
- bloppe 6mo agoVCs mostly invest other peoples' money, not their own. The "rich people" are often pension funds, endowments, and other pools of capital rather than individual morons. VCs themselves probably suffer from chronic overestimation of their own intelligence, but there just aren't many good signals at the stage of companies they're looking at. No customers, no revenue; often just an idea and hopefully a prototype. GitHub stars are as good of a signal as letters of intent, which is to say: a bad signal, but at least a signal. Other than that, they have to just evaluate what the founders are telling them (generally unrealistically optimistic at best) and whatever market research they can do (which is hard enough for the founders to do for their own product; image doing this for a dozen different companies every day). Of course GitHub stars are a terrible signal, but the bar for signal quality is just really low.
- paulorlando 6mo ago> the bar for signal quality is just really low During the Covid-era when money was flowing more readily I worked with a series A startup founder on improving their unit economics. They were spending a lot on customer acquisition but after my analysis I realized that they were losing money on each customer. It didn't matter how long you ran the timeline, with churn they never broke even on new customers. When I recommended cutting marketing spend, they told me that they needed to show topline growth -- because that's what investors were looking for. And they knew from experience that the investors didn't dig into the numbers enough to realize they were growing themselves broke.
- bloppe 6mo agoFunny anecdote, but that's a bit of a different issue. Actual money moving around is a relatively strong signal. Those investors just aren't looking at the full picture.
- dang 6mo agoMaybe so, but please don't call names, fulminate, or post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. You can make your substantive points without these, and we're trying for something different here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Perhaps you don't owe morons, VCs, or rich people better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.