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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

> just like gamblers in casinos they have no idea what they are doing

I follow all of the VCs on Twitter and it's very clear from their many, many tweets that they have a far superior intellect than the rest of us which allows them to divinely predict the future.

And between them and their diverse network of other 40 year old, white males they have a rich, deep understand of the customer's wants and needs. And from that they 'select' the startups that best aligns with this understanding.

I even believe that one day VCs will realise that they don't need founders and can just invest in each other. Keeping the prosperity moving.

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> And between them and their diverse network of other 40 year old, white males they have a rich, deep understand of the customer's wants and needs

As a 40yo white male, I resent this generalization.

You should have qualified that further with "...living in the Bay Area".

ಠ_ಠ

Not sure if this is sarcasm or not. I'm leaning towards sarcasm, but if there ever was a place where someone would say this with a straight face it would be HN.

> Not sure if this is sarcasm or not.

It almost certainly is.

> if there ever was a place where someone would say this with a straight face it would be HN.

This is not my impression of HN at all. It might have been true, what, a decade ago? but contemporary HN is pretty sceptical of VCs and VC culture.

It's a similar phenomenon to media celebrities who clearly have access to special information that makes them a good choice for Tv interviews on just about anything.

This is increasingly true in the Private Equity (PE) world...

A lot of recent exits have been sales to other PE funds rather than to the IPO market.

PE / VC have become an Assets under Management (AUM) game where the GPs only care about the fixed fee they get on the cash invested. With funds locked in for 10 years or more, that's a massive annuity - who needs outperformance?

And if you do need to show liquidity, let's exchange a few assets between the usual suspects...

You seem to be insinuating that a PE exit via a sale to another fund is somehow inherently bad. Many PE investors would argue the opposite - IPOs have lockups and price volatility that increase both certainty of exit and time to exit. A sale to another PE firm or corporate entity generally deliver a large onetime cash payment.

I think he is questioning if a company or IP is valuable if it is only changing hands between funds. As opposed to, let's say, the public.

A dual track (where you run an auction to both private and public buyers and simultaneously file an S-1 to IPO) maximizes the value to the seller. This sort of disproves the premise.

> And between them and their diverse network of other 40 year old, white males

Pretty ironic jab considering that the Bay Area VC crowd drinks the idpol kool aid so much.

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