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Comment by viscanti | Hacker News Reader

> He starts a VC fund. The fund has no "major" wins.

Box, Slack, Yammer, Palantir. I guess I don't know what the definition of "major" is, but those seem decent. The VC fund did eventually "burn down", but not because of bad investments but because he had some personal issues.

I don't have a strong opinion about him as a person. I just don't understand why a criticism was that he was a bad VC. It seems like he probably came out OK there.

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lol, that is nonsense. Palantir's success, for example, is entirely due to covid. It would still not have IPO'ed today without the insanity taking place today due to the fed buying corporate bonds and keeping insane/illogical interest rates in place. Time is valuable, unless you live in the fed's mind.

How due to COVID?

Retail buying frenzy. PLTR has become a meme stock.

Even before COVID he would have been an early investor. That means he invested in what IPO’ed as a 5 billion dollar company at basically the ground floor (the company is now 60 billion).

Yammer was bought by MSFT for more than it was worth (and likely more than it was valued at when he invested).

Palantir was obv the biggest win. By major I mean over 50 bil market cap. He was literally writing checks during the best founding period ever (2008-2013) and didn't get any of the huge companies (Stripe, Uber, Airbnb, etc.).

I like your previous point but I can't wrap my head around this one. There are 1000s of VCs and many 1000s of startups. You can't get em all

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