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Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

What about scaling a VC organization ? With hundreds of managers, A lot of institutional knowledge, helpful infrastructure for said company, and deep ties between companies ?

Come to think of it, it has many similarities to Google X. But that's extremely hard to build.

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Where do you get the people to entrust millions or billions? The organization will be flooded with networks of people who will scam away all money.

Such an organization has to be grown slowly. But that takes too much time if you have the opportunity to manage huge amounts of money right away.

There has been disappointingly little success from all of Google X's many investment dollars. I think with the hundreds of managers, institutional knowledge and helpful infrastructure comes a bureaucracy that kills a lot of what it creates.

you're right that Google X is a money sink - one of the first things Ruth Porat did when she came in is take an axe to it as it had been a sore point with instutitional investors for a while

"lets do Google X but with $100 billion" is a laughable business model

>Google X is a money sink

Dunno. I'm not quite sure of the figures but in 2015 they put in $3.5bn for the year. Against that Waymo which came out of X was recently valued at $105bn (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/waymo-valuation-cut-40percen...)

Unless your goals are wealth redistribution and job creation and science...

You're describing Ycombinator.

Sure, though from what I found the Vision Fund is about 10x larger than Ycombinator, so doing the Ycon thing at a VF level would probably involve some scaling challenges. But fundamentally, it seems a better way to go about things than putting nearly all of your eggs into late-stage start ups with highly correlated business models & failure modes.

Since when did YC have hundreds of managers?

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