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Comment by numair | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely phenomenal. Naspers/Prosus are some of the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment — would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when? And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened.

This is much more interesting than a monopolist like Microsoft buying SO, and I’d be keen to see what the growth strategy is here. This might very well be one component of a larger suite they will assemble to create something very interesting and valuable for the developer community. They’ve got the money and the brainpower to put it together.

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> And remember, they were a bunch of nobodies based out of South Africa when that happened.

Hard disagree - they weren't nobodies, Naspers was already a media juggernaut by 2001 (print and TV). Naspers was founded in 1915 (as De Nasionale Pers Beperkt - National Press) to promote Afrikaner Nationalism in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war. One of Naspers founders was also the founding president of the National Party (you might know them from their hit - Apartheid) and the mutually-beneficial, cozy arrangement between the NP and Nasionale Pers lasted until the very end of the Apartheid government in 1992.

Ja true, but don't we Saffers all wish we bought more Naspers on the JSE before their gamble on Tencent.

A bit ironic that the “nationalists” made their money from a Chinese company though…

Nationalists always like each other, it's not like China is asking SA to marry a chinese girl for each yuan invested...

Especially not, since China suffers from disparity with much greater number of boys than girls.

>Apartheid

Sure, but it did gain significant market share and had a massive ROI for many decades for anyone on the profitable side of it. For raging racists & (white) sociopaths, it wasn't so bad.

Naspers might have made smart bets in past but I am not sure how this means they will run the community well.

I would have been more happy with a Microsoft acquisition (although that ends up making them even more powerful) as it ties into Microsoft's existing products well, so they don't need to necessarily change SO too much to make money from it.

It can tie to their dev tooling story with GitHub, VSCode etc on one end and from LinkedIn end, they could have tied SO's jobs platform to Linkedin one. This makes MS more powerful but it might have left SO largely untouched.

If I had access to their business network, data analysis, and knew in the end it wasn’t my money, society will just bail us out, sure why not make that choice?

You’re making it sound like they had real skin in the game. If it fails they walk away with enough to retire on anyway.

Let’s not make celebrities of the biggest grifters out there, emotionally coloring them in as possessed of magical insights. They’re people playing a game where the deck is stacked in their favor by that sort of fawning.

It’s an unverifiable claim to suggest they were uniquely gifted. Uniquely positioned is not the same thing.

It's crazy the kind of hero worship towards anyone who makes a ton of money. When you account for all the smart people hustling trying to make their startup work, you realize it boils down to luck. Which, of course, is not a great comfort to most people since we all want to believe we can achieve anything if we only work hard enough.

I think of hard work as being more of a necessary but not sufficient condition for most of these outcomes, so to some extent: "The harder I work, the luckier I get..."

You can't control your luck, but you can control how hard you work. Some will read that sentence and conclude that working hard is a fool's errand. Others will read it and conclude the opposite. Neither is entirely wrong.

If you really want to be rich, don't work hard; either inherit, or get other people to do hard work. Working hard is easy, hundreds of millions of people do it, the trick is getting the hard workers to give you a percentage of what they earn, and scale that model up.

Getting other people to do hard work in a coordinated fashion to create a valuable collective outcome is itself a form of hard work. On that point, we seem to agree.

Luck doesn't matter a whit if your product is crap. Sure connections and right place, right time matter as well but it's not everything.

Anything beyond leaving SO alone is going to go poorly. Your prediction is this, my prediction is this is going to push SO toward expertsexchange.com, pre-hyphen.

What is good for the company is not necessarily good for developers or community.

I don't see how giving money to Tencent has anything to do with the ability to steer SO.

The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years. This consolidation, while disputably better than Microsoft acquisition, is no worse than large companies buying out small ones usually guaranteing their demise.

If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.

I am not convinced that this is "absolutely phenomenal".

> The best thing would have been the status quo. SO has been running on its feet for many years

You forgot that there's a bunch of VC's who now want their investment back plus interest.

That's it, the VC money is strictly for a limited time - when the fund time ends, there must an "exit" - either IPO or sale.

(In case of success, of course; failures are just written off, the losses hopefully paid by the successful exits.)

> If anything else, Microsoft has left Github untouched so far.

Actually, I think it has gotten better. I don't like the consolidation of independents like GitHub to big corporations like Microsoft, but I can't deny that thus far, it actually worked out pretty well.

Stack Overflow is a difficult company/website to manage though; it's not "just a website with a SaaS product" and really requires a good understanding of the social dynamics and such to run well, much more than e.g. GitHub.

That's a good point. I wonder why SO is so political? As an outsider it is just like a bunch of people asking questions and getting answers.

What do you mean with "so political"?

The hard part is getting the social dynamics right. Askers want to ask any question, answerers want to answer interesting questions. Keeping both groups happy is a hard task.

People complain about questions being closed (technically: "on hold") and marked as duplicated, but it serves a real purpose as no one wants to answer the same question over and over again. How you do it matters a lot though.

I have a number of gripes with Stack Overflow, and there are quite a few things I would do different. But I see a lot of people complaining about it who probably don't realize just how hard of a problem it is.

And this is complicated even more by all the "soft" topic sites, each of which has its own culture.

It's just a very rigid structure, you have to put your square block in their square hole or you will be ripped a new one and tossed when asking a question. Also mods need to be in a good mood that day.

To me, it seems that Github has become more proactive (or hair-trigger) in pulling down content via DMCA in the recent years. This could be down to companies finally figuring out that you can DMCA code repos, but I can't help thinking that the Microsoft acquisition was a factor.

I heard that the deal got closed by the mods

They might have first class access to data that enables a powerful shift in integrated development.

can you substantiate more here.. it reads like they made one good bet on Tencent and you suddently regard them as "the savviest and most forward-thinking players in tech investment ". have you looked at their other bets?

They invested in takealot.com which is the goto online site for non-food in South Africa.

Revenue in 2020 was US$238-million up by 41% the previous year no doubt due to the lockdown.

> would you have been smart enough to give Tencent all that money, way back when?

Investing in China at the time seems like it would have been a valid strategy. They’re just incredibly lucky with the scale of their success.

Agreed, it's an interesting complement to Codecademy and SimilarWeb

Ever heard of survivorship bias?

Yeah but why do those who survive survive?

Mostly luck.

To quote Mazarin, "One must not ask of a general, 'Is he skillful?', but rather, 'Is he lucky?'". I think what Mazarin was probably getting at was that the best generals will always have others claiming that their success was due to luck.

Luck, usually.

Mostly it’s random chance. The reality of investing is that it’s mostly down to chance. Take an equally skilled set of investors and give them the same market access and some will do exceptionally well.

This does not stand up to scrutiny at all, for any kind of investing. There have not been so many VC/hedge/PE funds in history that the top ones would arise through chance.

I mean you can get ten thousand monkeys throwing darts at a board full of companies as an investment strategy, and a handful of those monkeys will be top performers with excellent returns.

How many vc/hedge/pe funds were there? How many funds around today were here 20 years ago.

Failures don’t typically advertise and it’s quite likely there ARE/WERE thousands or millions of small firms managing a few million each.

You know that old scammer trick? Pick 512 wealthy people, pick a stock, write half of the the people the stock will rise, the other half the stock will fall. Wait for the real development, dump the addresses of the losers, pick a new stock and start again. Write one half stock will rise, other half, stock will fall. Repeat until only one address is left. Now give him the opportunity of an large investment. You have shown your skills because you were right 10 times in a row.

And how does this apply to modern investment funds who have to regularly provide client reports and make disclosures?

Take 512 investment funds, in one year half of them make a profit, half of them will make losses. Drop the ones that had losses, the next year half will make profits, the other half will suffer losses. Repeat until one fund is left: "Invest in us - we are market experts who had no losses for the past 9 consecutive years!"

Well yes, I understand that. The point is that your model predicts the current landscape of funds as being about as likely as pigs flying.

Because people don't know the performance of dart throwing monkeys https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey...

That article explains that the outperformance was due to a broader economic trend of small cap companies outperforming weighted indices. They effectively baked in a known-to-win strategy from the start and then ran it in various slightly-randomised ways (and they're fully open about it!)

You can invest in Apple stock in the early 90s because you are a savvy investor who sees the massive potential, or you can invest in them because the stock shows up at the top of an alphabetical list. Either way you're rich, and get called a brilliant investor, while all the people who invested in ZZCO because they picked the bottom of the alphabetical list, or some other similarly random choice, are bankrupt.

Of course you can invest at random and it will sometimes work. But it does not explain the realities of the industry. Even just one of the top funds has an infinitesimally small chance of existing randomly, let alone a glut of them.

The impeccable track record of index funds suggests that "Even just one of the top funds has an infinitesimally small chance of existing randomly" is not actually correct.

Well index funds aren't 'the top funds', they're the benchmark against which the alpha of the top funds is measured. If we change the framing to over/underperforming the S&P500 I don't see how the argument changes. RenTec is up 66% per year since 1988, how could that possibly be random?

One big early hit can keep paying off. And some funds have long lock-ins.

In this case, they sold part of their tencent to buy this. Selling a little bit each year of a superstar early investment shows good earnings each year.

I don’t know this fund at all, so they could be awesome for all I know. But saying “they are super smart for buying tencent” is not useful without lots of other info.

Usually people who say that without extra evidence or mentioning survivor bias aren’t properly aware of what’s what.

Simple answer, it's impossible that all people choose the wrong investment even if you just choose by chance. It like playing the lottery, why do some people win? Because not all can lose all the time. And as soon you reach a certain wealth level it's easier to keep that level than to reach it in the first place, unless you are in idiot.

How many times can one person win the lottery? The large firms seem to successfully bet on winners quite a bit.

_Somebody_ wins it every week.

People lose money in lottery tickets, casinos, equity investments, etc all the time. If a VC is successful over a period of time with a history of investing in winners, then there is something more than simply randomness.

With enough VC firms, and enough small bets, that's not guaranteed to be true.

I hate when people bring up survivorship bias about something like this. It's such a negative outlook. It's like a "don't even try because it's just a fluke that happened to them" type of mindset. It doesn't help anyone.

I read this more as “make sure to account for survivor bias and don’t say stupid stuff.”

Survivor bias doesn’t mean that everything is a fluke. It just means that some things are flukes and it’s important to include that in our models so we don’t think something random is non-random.

This is very different than everything being 100% random.

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