The End of My VC Career | Hacker News Reader

The End of My VC Career

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39 pointsilghiro43 comments

There's not much of interest in this story. Glaenzer was caught, by police witnesses, sexually assaulting a woman in a London train. He was convicted. He retained his role at the VC firm he cofounded for several years, but discovered that institutional investors --- the people who fund VC funds --- were unwilling to allocate capital to a firm that included Glaenzer. He left the firm.

The job of a VC partner is about trust, judgement, and persuasion. Flagrant violations by partners redound to the reputation of the whole firm. When you understand just what it is a VC firm is, how they're essentially middlemen simultaneously pitching themselves to operators and to capital, it becomes clear how important reputation is. Really, it's all there is. Without it, you can't do the job.

Indeed. Seems like a pretty clear-cut case to me.

This is a complex topic, but it seems like there are a couple of questions about the character of people who work in executive roles which should fundamentally matter in due diligence discussions.

Do they implicitly respect the agency of others? Do they see people as individuals with their own goals and the fundamental right to decide what those goals are?

These people make a lot of decisions on behalf of others, and I believe that asking those questions isn't that far off from asking: can you trust them to act in the interests of their employees, clients, and customers? Or at the very least, are they likely to have some sense of fiduciary duty towards the people who they agree to perform work for?

So, from my perspective, "a private mistake which we all agree was not business-related" sounds...well I don't know the right word, but who is 'we' in that phrase?

And I don't know which institutional investor balked at the fund based on the perceived character of its decision-makers, but I appreciate that they considered that angle in their process.

I thought "private mistake" was an extremely weird argument, too. It can't possibly be right; any of us can think of "private" crimes that would preclude someone's continued involvement with a VC firm. So, really, the implied argument he's making is that sexual assault is some kind of lesser crime.

I read it as drawing a distinction between sexual assault committed against someone with whom the firm has an actual or potential business relationship (e.g. hitting on a founder when she pitches you) vs. one committed against someone with no such connection. Certainly the law would not distinguish these two — I didn't read him as suggesting that — but one's business associates might.

> I suggest that by remaining in his position he took very few consequences, and that in almost any other walk of life a person with less privilege would automatically lose their job after being convicted of sexual assault.

Is this actually true? If, as a random example, a waiter in a restaurant were convicted of sexual assault on the subway (as in the story here), how would the owner of the restaurant even know about it to fire him?

I think things work exactly the opposite of how the author of this piece does. The person under question here had his career end because he was famous in his field. But 99% of people are not famous. Rather than "privilege" shielding him, being rich and famous was his downfall.

Through the increasingly popular (and unreliable, and hard-to-dispute) background check service that SV has created.

https://checkr.com/

Background checks have been around for a long time, and a new service has little to do with their availability to employers. The actual answer as to how an employer would know if their employee had gotten in legal trouble is the time they would miss as they got arrested, jailed, bailed, and then worked through the legal process.

Being jailed or otherwise detained for any amount of time, sure. But otherwise, working through the legal process wouldn't be something a regular employer knows about. You would have more errands to run than usual perhaps, that's about it.

Another example: as a programmer, if I run into legal trouble with the IRS and they sue me, or if my neighbor sues me for damage to their property, how would my employer know?

(I'm not saying it's good that employers might not know this. I'm just baffled by the article taking it as a given that practically all employers would.)

That kind of think really worries me. If you don't have a social media presence will it flag you as a problem? Or is it just using public records?

A waiter would miss work a few times for court proceedings and be fired without knowing the reason. He’d fail his background check when he next sought employment.

Shift workers lives can be hard, but you're exaggerating that first part. Yes, the person would need to work around court proceedings, but those are known well in advance. The much bigger risk for getting fired as a shift worker is unexpected stuff like your kid waking up sick that morning or your car breaking down.

The second part is valid, I agree - background check could be a problem in later jobs. But that wasn't the question here: the author claimed that "in almost any other walk of life" a person would lose their current job. That just seems totally false.

This is the kind of article that makes me want to go into the mountains for a week.

Ik this article was so poorly written, even the format for an interview was not there.

Actions have consequences.

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