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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

You are forgetting the iron law of real-life business stories: the better they seem, the worse they are.

People just want shiny stories and plausible deniability. It's pretty much subconscious risk management. Then you have people who play the next-level game of exploring this risk management heuristic, hence -- pretty young people with pedigree scamming the old money.

>the better they seem, the worse they are

Is this common knowledge? I've seen it empirically but I don't know how much is that a widespread feeling. (Not being snark or sarcastic).

I think it's a principle everyone knows but nobody can bring themselves to put in to practice.

I suspect the recent Elizabeth Holmes conviction of investor fraud at Theranos might contribute to the idea of flashy names propping up an unsustainable idea (e.g. with so many high-ranking names in the US military establishment previously supporting the company).

I'm not aware of other recent high-profile examples, though I would be interested in learning about them.

Every high-profile failure of the last century fits the bill, because bad business teams cannot get invested in, by definition, without looking good.

Good business teams tend to be good in the details, which leads to them struggling to find willing audiences.

Adam Neumann/WeWork, Doug Evans/Juicero; there's plenty of 'em.

A few more for real scam connoisseur's:

Stacy Spikes/MoviePass (70M+ for selling dollars at a penny; outstanding growth and metrics though, if only the "lose on every sale but make it up in volume" stance ever worked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Steve Newcomb/famo.us (30M+ seed funding for what was essentially a shitty JS library)

Bill Nguyen/Color (40m+ seed funding for a photo app with no extra features; you know, like the one that comes for free in your phone ..., but with ads, ... also a social network? no one really knew, not even them)

From what I have heard the CEO is not only worse than you imagine, he is worse than you can imagine. But it's all scuttlebutt and hearsay for now. Rich aging VC got to reach for those stars...

http://www.cafepharma.com/boards/threads/hal-barron-racks-up...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/banks-ready-34-billion-financ...

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