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Comment by throwaway839246 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the advice. It's really good.

> Think about all the food stands that you have walked past in your life, within each stand is an immigrant family who slave away for decades hoping for a better life. Have you ever thought about them and gave them time/money for their suffering?

I know what you mean and know what you're getting at. But I feel compelled to point out this particular example isn't quite the same. I never sought the immigrant family out, then told them that my motivation is to support amazing cooks rooted in authentic traditions. I just bought the food.

VCs will lie, literally. They explicitly say they will act in a particular way in a specific situation, and then, protected by nuanced 300 page contracts, will do the exact opposite of what they said they'll do. Assuming you accept that lying to people is unethical, people act transactionally with immigrant vendors, but not unethically in the same way.

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Yeah the lying is really gross. It's an odd arrangement in this country where "shareholder value" can literally justify most things in the eyes of those with money. For a more personal anecdote, I have a friend who's been in the VC industry for 5+ years, and we had a very interesting conversation. He was closing a deal with a company and they asked for a higher valuation, and he thought objectively it's merited. But then he thought: "if I give you the higher valuation, then you would have more and I would have less, but I want more". And that's the root of it, human nature. Now assuming these VCs have been in the game for more than 5 years, I would imagine they would lie without a second thought.

Now see it from the VC's perspective, the game attracts all kinds of hustlers who'd lie to investors without a second thought as well. My friend and I were talking about what business culture is like in a certain area of the world, and he said: they oversell everything, so take everything they say and divide it by two, and start from there. So part of it is also a pre-emptive mechanism based on a history of such behaviors from others.

None of this make things "ok", but I'm just sharing an anecdote from the other side.

Divide it by two? He must be an optimist. I divide it by 10.

100M dollar unicorn!

> It's an odd arrangement in this country where "shareholder value" can literally justify most things in the eyes of those with money.

I think a lot of the problem is not necessarily what the VC's do when it comes to situations, but that they lie, to themselves, to others, or both, about what they will do and at a fundamental level who they are. There's a world of difference between telling someone you're their friend and will protect them and nothing will go wrong when you know there's a good chance it will, and telling (or being) a friend but being up front that your job means you will act a certain way in specific situations, and that may be against the interests of others.

This happens in business, and it happens in personal life. I respect people that are consistent and represent themselves accurately, even if I don't like them or agree with them. People that misrepresent themselves are relying on an information asymmetry that they're creating to give themselves an advantage. This clearly works in many instances, but it also a "burnt-bridges" strategy that only works because of the relative anonymity that modern society provides. In some ways, this could be solved by more information about these people and how they function (which is how the free market works, best with more and more accurate info), but that's hard to accomplish because of their relative power.

I have no love for VCs. But let's be real honest. Doesn't the vast majority of startup wealth come from lying? I'm not talking about VCs lying to founders, but founders lying to their customers (selling ads, giving them "free" services while pick-pocketing their data) or exploiting people on the bottom of the food chain (the "gig" economy)?

In other words, everyone should be looking in the mirror.

> You blame everyone but yourself for becoming "soulless". Your very use of this word reveals a great lack of soul. You misuse it to describe working like a machine, an automaton. The nurse who is working like a machine to save lives at great risk to her own has the most wonderful, beautiful soul. What makes you soulless is that you're only thinking about yourself and "new products" (ways to make money) without any hint of a conscience troubled by the decisions made and actions taken in pursuit of those profits, and what that says about who you are. Or maybe the depression was a conscience trying hard to speak out, but it got snuffed by drugs rather than getting heard.

From https://gist.github.com/mGBUfLn9/7cadffcf7c3c23b7376350165a6...

On the other side, VCs want founders who believe. Would YC fund a group that said they had a 10% chance of success, based on YC's own statistics?

How old are you?

Why would you be at all surprised that VCs lie?

I don't believe the parent was expressing surprise at this unethical behavior, they were instead pointing out one way the grandparent's example isn't quite equivalent to the situation the OP provided.

Projection? As a fairly honest person it took a long time to stop assuming other people were too. The alternative world view is disappointing but you get used to it.

People are generally honest of course but investing is an adversarial setting essentially by definition, where honesty is hard to come by. Sometimes being more honest than needed might even put you at an unfair disadvantage, and keeping some cards close to your chest is just expected.

And of course, it's not like you have to get VC involved in order to run a successful business. You can self-bootstrap, which lets you focus 110% on efficiency and doing more with less. No BS involved.

Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. And please don't cross-examine other users. That's not curious conversation, which is what we're here for.

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