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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

I hate it when, just because something becomes a big media story (I.e. Saudi Arabia killing a journalist) everyone comes out of the woodwork “oh dear! How can we not do business with these people?”

When in fact, it’s been going on for decades and nobody gave a shit... until now, when giving a shit can firm up your virtue signaling.

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So what are you suggesting or are you just complaining to no end?

Does it really matter, though? Sure, some people might earn some undeserved virtue points -- but why focus on that, when the alternative is for everyone to continue not giving a shit, and nothing to change.

Humans are often inconsistent, irrational, hypocritical, disproportionately sensitive to emotional immediacy vs. scale, and so on. We already know that.

Every successful, large-scale ethical movement is going to have a moment when a bunch of people jump on board the bandwagon for imperfect reasons. That might be annoying, but it's part of the mechanism by which change actually happens.

The image of a dead child on the turkish shores 3 years ago instantly changed the attitude of millions of people towards refugees . It seems certain events trigger gut reactions to people , and that may not be virtue signaling. I think it's fair to say there's a lot more than that here.

Except, Fred made the decision about his LPs over the last 15 years...

There's nothing in the article to suggest that this is due to virtue though. It may be just that USV has the luxury of raising from only top tier LPs given their relatively small fund size ($1bn across 6 funds).

You’re right. It is true that top quality LPs tend to be universities, foundations, and pension funds. And with a funds USV’s size it’s pretty easy to only fill it with those good guys. I was surprised they had any family offices.

Before the global growth fund, Sequoia claimed that all of their LPs were not-for-profits (although excluding pensions funds is usually for transparency reasons).

Having said that, I don’t think that every top quartile fund could make the same claim even if USV, Sequioa, and Benchmark could...

So you are suggesting people just keep doing business with them... or are you suggesting people don't try to make other people do that? Because you can call it "virtual signaling" or however you want but both are still pretty bad options.

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