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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

From where I sit, it looks like, at least this time round, the general public is pretty well tuned into the flea-ridden dogs that VCs and other investment funds are trying to dump onto the public markets.

So a bunch of these SV darlings crash and burn. To a first approximation, no one cares and it seems a useful lesson at the end of the day.

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Exactly. The public is waking up and VCs are stuck holding the bags of shit. Good. Fuck them for trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public to get rich. They deserve what they are getting.

The Theory of the Greater Fool operates in most asset markets, not only publicly traded securities.

And "the public" wields it as often as any private asset manager.

It's not foolish to be an early investor in a promisingly marketed multilevel marketing scam. The greater fool is the very late investor, who is as far from quality information that would allow them to make a good decision about the buy as they could possibly be. So calling them fools is unfair; they're the target of a bunch of misinformation and hype which was the actual product that the initial investors were betting on.

Completely agree. In a just world, we would also name names. I want everyone to know exactly who is pulling the scams.

I don't get the acrimony.

Nobody is being fraudulent here. Everyone knows Uber is burning cash and is highly unprofitable. If that appeals to you, go ahead and invest, if not, don't.

Sure, I'm not shedding a tear for Softbank. But I'm also not pissed at them for... subsidizing my Uber rides using Saudi wealth for the past few years.

That's not quite true. There is very strong social pressure in the startup scene to never question the hype machine. Remember when the Wall Street Journal first broke the news that Theranos was a scam, how VC Twitter condemned it as media jealousy and got TechCrunch to write hagiographies of Elizabeth Holmes? And then there was David Palmer pointing out what went wrong with AltSchool and everyone in VC rushing to jump down his throat [0].

This all reeks of people with shaky investments trying to contain and destroy bad news so they can dump the bag on the public.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/style/oh-behave.html

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